Bicycle sex

After careful consideration I have come to the conclusion that, if we wish to live in a civilised society, we ought to defend the right of cyclists to have sexual relations with their bicycle behind a locked bedroom door.

When I first saw the headline a week ago, about a Scotsman being convicted of simulating sex with a bike, it just raised a wry smile. Only later, when sent the full news story (such tales always linger on the BBC's "most e-mailed" chart) did I realise it was the legal case, not the crime, that should be seen as outraging public decency.

The 51-year-old (let us save him from further exposure), was convicted of "a sexually aggravated breach of the peace by conducting himself in a disorderly manner and simulating sex". Police were called to an Ayr hostel after two cleaners discovered him, wearing only a T-shirt, holding his bike and moving his hips back and forth. The Sheriff's Court gave him three years' probation - and placed him on the sex offenders register.

What "sexually aggravated breach of the peace"? Those upset cleaning ladies only saw it because they used a master key to open his locked door. It seems that such is our obsession with sex crimes today that even the old adage about "not caring what people do in their own bedrooms" no longer applies.

And what exactly did they hope to achieve by putting him on the sex offenders register? Will it make the anxious bicycle owners of Scotland feel safer at night? Should we all demand the right to know if our neighbours worry their bikes? Perhaps the vacuum cleaner community will also demand protection against uninvited advances. What such bizarre cases do achieve is to lengthen that worse-than-useless register further still, reinforcing the false impression of us being besieged by an army of sexual predators.

I might not like to share a room with a bike-sexual. And I suspect that some other cyclists may harbour unhealthy thoughts about their machines, as they parade about on their "trophy bikes" to show that they are better men than us. But wheeling out the law to say one who "saddles up" in private should be padlocked to the same list as rapists and paedophiles? On your bike.

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New British Slang

"Pikey"?

"You rarely hear abuse like "n*gger" or "queer" shouted at Premier League [soccer] players any more, for fear of crossing the line. (At least one manager is often slandered as a paedophile, but that's another matter.) However, Arsenal fans near me had no compunction about loudly branding Wayne Rooney a "fat pikey" throughout - now a non-playful but apparently acceptable term for white working-class.

Source

Wikipedia has more details. In Australian slang, a "piker" is someone who does not keep his promises or honor his obligations.





Stupid NHS pay deal

Reminiscent of how Nye Bevan proposed to shut the doctors up when he introduced the NHS: "I will stuff their mouths with gold"

New NHS contracts that boosted hospital consultants' [senior doctors] pay by more than a quarter have led to a fall in productivity and the number of hours worked, a report by MPs has found. Lauded as a "something for something" deal when it was introduced in 2003, the contract was closer to something for nothing, said Edward Leigh, the chairman of the Public Accounts Committee. Consultants' pay had risen by an average of 27 per cent, but their working hours had fallen and there had been no measurable increases in productivity.

The Department of Health underestimated the cost of the contract by at least 150 million pounds over three years, and rushed its implementation, the committee found. Consultants' work plans, which were supposed to be more tightly controlled, were drafted too quickly and often consisted of no more than what the consultant already did, or planned to do. The contract did improve recruitment and retention, however, and enabled consultants to catch up with the earnings of other similarly qualified professionals.

The growth in the amount of private work undertaken by consultants had been halted, and patients were now more likely to be seen by a consultant than they were a decade ago.

The committee concluded that the increased pay would be justified only if it also led to improvements in productivity. Despite ministers' expectations that the change would result in a 1.5 per cent annual gain in productivity, the department's own figures suggested that productivity fell by 0.5 per cent in 2004, the first full year of the contract, the report concluded. Figures for 2005 and 2006 are not yet available.

Mr Leigh said: "Anyone who is puzzled how large quantities of money can be poured into the NHS to so little effect should examine the example of the new contract for consultants. "The basic aims of the new pay deal were commendable: to make NHS work more attractive to consultants and private practice less so, to give NHS managers more control over the consultants' working week, and to increase the amount of time they spend on directly caring for patients. "In the event, the introduction of the deal was rushed, with NHS managers left in the dark by the Department of Health over what it wanted from the contract. The department pushed to get the contract in place at all costs and many managers agreed hours of work with their consultants which the trusts could not afford." While the numbers of consultants rose by 13 per cent, total consultant activity increased by only 9 per cent and the number of patients treated per consultant fell year on year until 2005-06. There was "little evidence" that hoped-for changes - such as provision of weekend and evening clinics - had materialised, and the average consultant's NHS work fell from 51.6 to 50.2 hours a week.

The new contracts were agreed in 2003 after two years of negotiation between the department and its counterparts in the devolved assemblies, NHS employers and consultants' representatives in the British Medical Association (BMA). The department budgeted an extra 565 million for the first three years of the contract, but in the event it had to pay out 715 million. Much of the additional cost was due to higher-than-expected payments for consultants being on call outside regular hours.

The BMA said that hospital consultants were worth every penny of their new salaries and that criticism of their pay was unjust and unwarranted. Jonathan Fielden, the chairman of the BMA consultants committee, said: "The chairman of the PAC shows a complete lack of understanding about how consultants work. "He ignores the vast efforts that consultants have made to reduce waiting times and improve patient care and fails to appreciate the enormous pressure that hospital trusts have been under to meet government targets."

Norman Lamb, the Liberal Democrat health spokesman, said: "You can't blame consultants for accepting this generous contract, but why did ministers sign off this settlement when it was clearly such a bad deal for taxpayers and patients?"

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DECISION TIME FOR THE WEST: PAY CLIMATE BILL OR STAY COMPETITIVE

Isn't politics wonderful? Within days of Gordon Brown's address to the conservation group WWF, in which he pledged eye-wateringly tough reductions in British emissions of Co2, the Government has announced its support for the construction of a third runway at Heathrow Airport. "This time he really gets it," Greenpeace's executive director had enthused after the Prime Minister's "Let's save the polar bear" speech. Yesterday, following the Transport Secretary's endorsement of BAA's expansion plans, Greenpeace was back to its default position, spitting ecological tacks.

You might think this is a case of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing (or possibly the left hand not knowing what the left hand is doing) especially given the Government's growing reputation for administrative chaos. In fact it is entirely deliberate. The Government both wants to claim "leadership in the fight against climate change" while at the same time it - quite understandably- does not want to do anything which might reduce this country's international competitiveness. It knows that these two objectives are incompatible - very well, then: it will contradict itself.

Gordon Brown's commitment to the most stringent reductions in C02 emissions yet announced by a British Prime Minister follows exactly the path set by his predecessor. Mr Blair would, with a great moral fanfare, pledge this nation to achieve some carbon emission target. Then, when it became completely clear that we were not on track to meet it, he would announce - with equal confidence and certainty - not an easier target but an even tougher one than that which we were failing to achieve.

The civil servants who live in the real world of facts and actually have to devise the practical policies to meet these political flourishes have become increasingly panicky. A month ago there was a leak of an especially desperate memo in which officials warned that the previous Prime Minister's commitment to produce 20 per cent of our energy from renewable sources by 2020 was facing "severe practical difficulties".

As we know, that is senior civil servant speak for "this will be absolutely impossible." One of the memos rather plaintively pointed out that if we admitted this publicly and tried to advocate a general lowering of such targets internationally, there would be "a potentially significant cost in terms of reduced climate change leadership".

Here we see the absurd grandiosity of our global ambitions, partly a legacy of Tony Blair's messianic approach, but which is to some extent a characteristic of the British political class as a whole. More than half a century since the collapse of the British Empire, our leaders still seem to think that what we do or say is as important in the eyes of the rest of the world as it was when we really did rule the waves. It is a grotesque vanity, economically as well as politically.

It has been written often enough that any likely reduction in Co2 emissions from our own generation of electricity is not just sub-microscopic in terms of any measurable effect on the climate: the People's Republic of China is now opening two new coal-fired power stations every week. Real "climate change leadership" would be developing "clean coal" technology and selling it to the Chinese - but for some reason that does not fascinate politicians in the way that targets do. It is insufficiently heroic.

We can see the same national self-obsession in the debate over the environmental consequences of opening a third runway at Heathrow: last year China announced plans to expand 73 of its airports and build 42 new ones. Yes, the British government could demonstrate "increased climate change leadership" by blocking BAA's plans to build another runway at Heathrow. Does anyone seriously imagine that the consequence of further congestion and delays will be something other than a transfer of traffic from that airport to others in the immediate vicinity, such as Charles de Gaulle, which already has much more capacity?

For those on the provisional wing of the British environmental movement, arguments about a loss of business to other countries are irrelevant. They would insist that this complaint makes no more sense than saying that it's necessary to sell arms to unpleasant dictatorships because if we don't, other countries will, to the benefit of their own economies.

If, like George Monbiot, you regard flying as morally equivalent to "child abuse", then, yes, the executives of BAA should be thrown in jail ( after a fair show trial, of course) and never be let out. As for any recession deriving from a closing down of Heathrow - pah! A recession would be a good thing, since it would lead to further reductions in Co2 emissions.

I accept that there will be many sensible people living in the area around the Heathrow Terminals who will not welcome the increase in planes taking off and landing. On the other hand, there has been an aerodrome at Heathrow since the 1930s and the first Terminal was opened by the Queen in 1955: that is to say, there are unlikely to be many home-owners living in the Heathrow area who bought under the impression that he or she would enjoy peace and quiet. Doubtless the property prices there reflect that fact.

Anyway, why worry about airports when we are going to ban the plastic bag? That, you will recall, was the "eye-catching initiative" within Mr Brown's WWF speech. It was artfully designed to capture the headlines in the popular press, and duly did so. The Prime Minister declared that we should "eliminate single-use plastic bags altogether in favour of more sustainable alternatives." Perhaps, since Mr Brown argued that fighting climate change was the political challenge for the younger generation, students should already have been marching on Whitehall with placards declaring "Ban the Bag."

The only problem with that is that plastic bags, though undeniably irritating when left lying around, are essentially the by-product, rather than the cause, of fossil fuel generation. Approximately 98 per cent of every barrel of oil, once refined, is consumed as petrol or diesel. If the remaining two per cent of naphtha was not used for packaging, it would almost certainly be flared off - which is pure waste.

Paper bags have the reputation of being environmentally sounder, but I don't see how this can be justified. They require significantly more space in landfill, being much less compressible - and don't they come from trees, which we are meant to be preserving as capturers of Co2? Besides, if the plastic bag is to be banned, what are we going to use to line our rubbish bins? We need to know the answer to such important questions, Prime Minister, before we allow you to put us forward as the saviours of the planet.

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LEFTIST BRITAIN FULFILS ORWELL

AN UNEXPECTED TWIST TO ORWELL

Hardly a week goes by without a British columnist having recourse to mention George Orwell. Whether the subject is compulsory ID cards, the growing Nanny State or a surveillance system to rival that of any communist country, the words "Orwell warned us" remains the recurring theme.[1]

While 21st century Britain may be doing its best to turn Orwell into a prophet, there is one point where, for all his genius, George left us manifestly unprepared. Although it is an aspect overlooked in contemporary discussion, it is also the key to understanding the current situation.

The point is simply this: the reign of Big Brother is being introduced to Britain from the liberalism of the far left, a tradition that has historically championed Orwell's defence of civil liberties and free expression.

This observation is particularly germane when considering the new corpus of offences restricting speech, religion, public debate and, in some cases, even thought itself, to that cluster of ideas which the liberals have designated `politically correct.'[2] The State's eagerness to function as Guardian, not simply of law and order, but also of the ideologies of its citizenry[3], was made patently obvious last year when New Labour tried to push through legislation as part of the Religious Hatred Bill which would have made it an offence to criticise different religious truth-claims.

Even without the impetus of such a law, UK police currently operate under `guidance' that defines a `hate incident' so broadly that it can include debating another person about their lifestyle.[4] Although this guidance has no statutory force, and has been called `pseudo-law' by one distinguished constitutional lawyer, it can influence the policy of police constabularies provided it does not lead to an actual charge being issued.[5] The effect is that simply to express certain viewpoints is at least treated as criminal.[6]

It was this tendency to police beliefs that Dr. N. T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham, lambasted in an address to the House of Lords on 9 February, 2006. Dr. Wright referred to a new class of crimes which "have to do, not with actions but with ideas and beliefs." He said:

"People in my diocese have told me that they are now afraid to speak their minds in the pub on some major contemporary issues for fear of being reported, investigated, and perhaps charged. My Lords, I did not think I would see such a thing in this country in my lifetime.. The word for such a state of affairs is `tyranny': sudden moral climate change, enforced by thought police."[7]

From religious organisations that must now navigate the increasingly complex labyrinth of gay rights laws[8] to Christian Unions that are being forced to admit atheists into their ranks[9], it is clear that today's liberals are making sure Big Brother does more than merely watch us: he's checking out our credo.[10] Chesterton was surely prophetic when he conjectured that, "We may eventually be bound not to disturb a man's mind even by argument; not to disturb the sleep of birds even by coughing."[11]

ILLIBERAL LIBERALISM

It is instructive to note that this dogmatic intolerance of dissent, while putting public debate into a state of paralysis, has come to Britain in the package of `tolerance', `equality', `human rights' and even - heaven help us - `freedom'. These were, of course, the values of classical liberalism championed by the humanists of the Enlightenment.[12] But while the contemporary liberal still likes to think of himself as operating within the ideological legacy framed by such men as Hume, Locke, Diderot, Voltaire, Rousseau and Mill, the totalitarian utopia towards which he strives would presumably be anathema to these defenders of freedom in so far as it is the ultimate betrayal of genuine liberal values.

This is a point that has not been missed on the old fashion liberals who still remain among us. For example, in his book The Retreat of Reason, Anthony Browne argues that the dogmatic, bullying posture of the contemporary liberal is a betrayal of the true liberalism and rationalism of the Enlightenment.[13] We find a similar theme in the work of the lesbian and self-proclaimed leftist Tammy Bruce, former president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organisation of Woman, and author of The New Thought Police: Inside the Left's Assault on Free Speech and Free Minds[14] and The Death of Right and Wrong: Exposing the Left's Assault on Our Culture and Values.[15] In these works, Bruce uses a liberal platform to critique left-wing anti-intellectualism, thought totalitarianism and inverted racism, being careful to insist that she is not a conservative. Similarly, the British commentator Melanie Phillips is careful to tell us that, though "styled a conservative by her opponents"[16], she is really defending the liberal values of the Enlightenment. ".liberalism," said Phillips at a recent conference, ".has so badly undermined itself and departed from its own core concepts that it is now paralysed by moral and intellectual muddle.. What we are living through in the west is nothing short of a repudiation of the Enlightenment, a repudiation of reason; and its substitution by irrationality, obscurantism, bigotry and clerical totalitarianism - all facilitated by our so-called `liberal' society, and all in the name of `human rights.'[17]

Nor is it merely a handful of liberal intellectuals on the fringe who have been challenging the encroachment of left-wing totalitarianism. When Tony Blair's New Labour government began to be perceived as a threat to Britain's ancient civil liberties, it was the nation's mainline liberal newspapers, notably the Independent, the Guardian and the Observer, who unleashed the harshest criticisms of his `Orwellian' assault on `liberal values.'[18]

The liberal community is, therefore, divided between two kinds of ideologues: those, on the one hand, for whom the appellation `liberal' is, strictly speaking, an anachronism since they would deny freedom using the rhetoric of liberal values. These I will refer to pejoratively, but also descriptively, as `illiberals.' On the other hand, there are old fashion liberals who keep crying out, "What has happened to the values of the Enlightenment? Aren't we supposed to be liberals?" Rather confusingly, the later group - which I will refer to as classic liberalism - is often now associated with conservatism, as they seek to conserve the genuine liberalism of our pluralist humanist society.

In this essay I will attempt to chart why liberalism has fractured into this matrix. I will propose that the totalitarian agenda of the postmodern illiberal, while on the surface at complete odds with the values of classical liberalism, is also the logical corollary of the man-centred ethics of the Enlightenment. While agreeing with classical liberals like Browne and Bruce that the emerging totalitarian thought-control represents an anti-intellectualism significantly contrary to the rationalism of 18th century liberalism, I will also suggest that these developments are simply the fulfilment of where the Enlightenment project had to enivitably lead......

A TERMINAL PHILOSOPHY

We have seen that the Enlightenment's approach to epistemology, aesthetics and ethics is, at best, a terminal philosophy, containing in itself the seeds of its own self-destruction. Having established this principle, we are now in a position to better understand the continuity and discontinuity that exists between today's illiberals and their Enlightenment forebears. Just as there is continuity and discontinuity between the rationalistic empiricism of Locke and the radical scepticism of Hume or Postmodernism, and just as there is continuity and discontinuity between the aesthetic values of the Enlightenment and the nihilistic decadence of postmodern art, and just as there is continuity and discontinuity between Rousseau's doctrine of the Noble Savage and the Reign of Terror's brute savagery, so there is both continuity and discontinuity between the classical liberalism of the Enlightenment and the tyranny of today's illiberalism. Put simply, those who wanted to champion human rights and liberty as free-standing values unhinged from any transcendent ethical framework, necessarily planted a self-destruct mechanism on the very values they sought to uphold.

There may be little resemblance between a body newly dead and the rotting corpse a month later, yet the latter is what the former will inevitably become if it is left unburied.

SECULAR THEOCRACY TODAY

Of course, the contemporary illiberal will not admit that the inevitable rot has set in. Like the characters in Orwell's Animal Farm, he continues to use the principled rhetoric of his predecessors even when the substance has been sucked dry. As Rose noted:

"The Liberal still speaks, at least on formal occasions, of `eternal verities,' of `faith,' of `human dignity,' of man's `high calling' or his `unquenchable spirit,' even of `Christian civilization'; but it is quite clear that these words no longer mean what they once meant. No Liberal takes them with entire seriousness; they are in fact metaphors, ornaments of language that are meant to evoke an emotional, not an intellectual, response - a response largely conditioned by long usage, with the attendant memory of a time when such words actually had a positive and serious meaning."[43]

Like Orwell's animals, who brought slavery under the banner of equality and liberty, the contemporary illiberal is all too happy to welcome any and every erosion of freedom provided it is done in the name of one of his ethical axioms and, more importantly, as long as it does not remove any of his own cherished freedoms.

To their credit, the advocates of today's secular theocracy are more nuanced than those of the French Revolution. Instead of the guillotine they have political correctness; instead of the reign of terror they have mass media at their disposal. They have also added to the pantheon of secular virtues new axioms, which are even more notorious for their entropy. Look how quickly the virtue of multiculturalism degenerated into competition for group power.[44] Look how quickly diversity became a charter for uniformity.[45] Look how quickly the rhetoric of victimhood gave rise to the tyranny of the minority.[46] Unlike the Christian ethical system, which remains ever fixed in the solidity of the transcendent unchanging God, the liberal's ethical base is characterised by a constant ethical flux.

We live in a world where the ethical entropy has all but run its course. The humanitarian liberalism of the Enlightenment has warped into the inhuman illiberalism of today, with results that would do even Orwell proud.

As the laissez faire liberalism becomes the new orthodoxy and permeates our institutions of power, it can no longer rage against the establishment, yet because its orientation is intrinsically revolutionary, the only option is to revolt against those beneath its power structures - those, for example, who still dissent from the grinding uniformity it demands. As illiberalism begins venting its revolutionary zeal on those who refuse to be squeezed into the status quo, the stage is set for a conservative counter movement. That is the point at which secular liberalism becomes unstable, for all totalitarian regimes must eventually end in mass discontent and therefore revolt.

This presents the advocates of sanity with a tremendous opportunity, but it also carries with it an enormous danger. The opponents of illiberalism are all too willing to arm themselves with the principles of classical liberalism and fight against symptoms rather than causes. Thus, many conservative apologists are now urging their liberal opponents to simply be better liberals, more consistent with the Enlightenment values they claim to cherish. If the liberals are ever convinced by such an argument, all that would happen would be to simply wind up the clock three hundred years and then watch the whole cycle unwind again. This is because liberal values can never be sustained without first going back and re-establishing a pre-Enlightenment epistemic base. The Biblical terminology for that process is called repentance, and therein lies the difference between freedom under God or enslavement under man disguised as liberty.

Much more here





The Church of homosexuality: "The openly homosexual bishop whose ordination sparked the split in the Anglican Communion has claimed that the Church of England would come close to shutting down if it was forced to manage without gay clergy. The Bishop of New Hampshire in the US, the Right Rev Gene Robinson, who is divorced and lives openly in partnership with a gay man, said that he found it mystifying that the mother Church of the Anglican Communion was unable to be honest about the number of gay clergy in its ranks."


British officers quit army in record numbers: "The army has suffered an unprecedented exodus of more than 1,300 officers in the past six months amid anger about government cost-cutting and equipment shortages. The number quitting is more than double the rate in the previous 12 months and will add to pressure on Gordon Brown about the way his government is funding the armed services. Many of those who have resigned their commissions are from frontline units. Most are captains or majors with invaluable experience of battle. "The loss of a whole swathe of middle-ranking officers will leave us struggling to find the top quality generals of the future," said one senior officer. "But it is clear the government does not care and would be happy to see the army reduced to a token force."