Soap misrepresents Australian Law

I have a guilty pleasure- an addiction to Australian soaps. I know that this blog is usually much too serious a place to discuss such meaningless subjects, but this is a very serious post, I promise.

On Thursday’s episode of one of my favourite Australian soaps, Out of The Blue, screened on BBC2, a happily pregnant couple at what they thought was a routine scan were told that their baby had such a serious genetic abnormality that there was no choice but to terminate the pregnancy. My instant reaction was a cry of “Surely that isn’t legal!”

Personally, I am strongly against any abortion. However, being disabled, I am particularly against the abortion of any pregnancy that, if continued, would lead to the birth of a disabled child. continue reading… »

Burnham on Basic Principles

Culture Secretary Andy Burnham calls for regulation of the Internet to protect the “vulnerable, the poor, and the weak.” From the title of the article, “In a Lawless zone, we must protect the vulnerable” one would think he is talking about paedophiles in chat-rooms, or the 180% rise in phishing, but in fact he is talking about copyright theft.

It is also contentious that the poor are being disadvantaged by the ‘lawless’ internet - One great advantage of the medium is that it reduces the financial barriers of entry into any given business. Putting online regulation in place will surely restore those barriers. Indeed, the proposals to introduce some kind of licence fee to download music looks like a revenue generator for record companies, rather than a measure to help young and creative people who are just starting out, and giving away their music free on MySpace.

But for entirely different reasons, it was the following quote hat caught my eye:

Nothing can be accepted as inevitable. Though technology moves quickly, we can’t abandon basic principles that have stood society in good stead for centuries.

Wasn’t this the precise argument against 42 days detention!?

Casting the Net and bringing in LJ-shaped Fishies

Aaron is leeeeeaaaaving onna Jet Plane this morning, so I’m afraid you’re stuck with me. Tips to the usual address if’n you’m got any, and away we go:

Anna Jane Clare meant to post about Henry James, but ended up devoting most of her post to how the feral underclass is created (NSFW warning: may contain swearing).

Lynne Featherstone has been on t’wireless.

Love and Garbage has less a post and more a treatise bemoaning the MSM’s failure to examine Cameron, especially his speeches to the CBI.

Nicholas Whyte has decided who he’s going to support in the race for Lib Dem party president, and reveals that it won’t be the same person he voted for last time. Despite my detesting the slogan, I’m 4 Ros too (see sidebar). Huzzah for the Blogging Baroness!

Matt Wardman has a challenge for Unity and other bloggers who like to dig for obscure things. His post comparing webstats for newspaper websites and blogs is worth looking at too.

Lizbee has discovered an early Fandom Wank and relates a Tom Baker anecdote. I link to these for those of you who still labour under the delusion that Doctor Who fans, like bloggers, are (and always have been) male.

And finally, those philistines of you who still don’t read Livejournal blogs? Have a look at Livejournal Aqua. The post titles float past as they are posted, hover over them and you get an excerpt; click and the post will open in a new tab (assuming that you’re using Firefox like all sensible persons)

Can the British left learn from Americans?

Imagine a left-of-centre political party without much electoral support, chided for not having enough bold ideas, facing a grumbling bunch of institutional backers that accuse it of betraying its ideological roots. Sound like New Labour? You may not be surprised to hear the same being said of the Democratic Party in the United States.

This is the picture painted by New York Times journalist Matt Bai in The Argument. Away from the day-to-day concerns of most Democrat politicians and voters, Bai delves into three tightly-knit and politically-charged worlds seeking to influence the Party and its agenda: billionaire donors, radical bloggers and activist groups such as MoveOn.
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Hypocrite Green asks for goodwill from those he sued

This brightens my day. Fundamentalist campaigner may have to declare bankruptcy as a result of the court case I covered last December. He has apparently asked us licence payers to cover the costs:

in the interests of goodwill and justice

Seriously. This petty little fundamentalist bigot who misused a long outdated law as part of his personal crusade against freedom of expression now wants to be let off the costs of the case in the name of “goodwill”.
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From Total Politics to Total Burnout

Is there a blog we should be reading, or a post that you think we should link to? Email us your tips to tips@liberalconspiracy.org

Iain Dale’s Total Politics site has launched, and revealed its editorial team. It’s actually quite interesting, and appears to be very well funded too… Why no, these grapes are sweet and tasty, why’d you ask? (Hat tip, Mark Pack at LDV). Oddly they don’t appear to have linked to us from their political blogs directory, but then, as a top ten political blog we’re hard to miss, and the blog directory is so badly-constructed, it’s possible they have linked to us and I just haven’t found the link

Andrew Rilstone writes about how a writer’s writings are distinct from and yet linked to the writer as a person and that person’s political views. Brilliant post (and not just because he says The Shadow Over Innsmouth is better than The Call of Cthulhu), but does contain rude words: proceed with caution.

PC Bloggs turns her ever-acerbic eye onto government in the latest of her occasional series on 21st Century Policing. If I could make PC Bloggs a Home Office advisor…

Political Betting are wondering if the Labour Party will lose their deposit in Henley.

Lynne Featherstone is a big blubbing girly - and this entry is so lovely it turned me into one too. Get your tissues out, and I won’t tell anyone that you needed them.

BluJay posts in the cheerfully-named So Very Doomed group blog about the difficulties that we in the developed world will have obtaining food if things don’t change drastically and soon.

Slightly Warped posts pictures of a fire in a cave in Uzbekistan that’s been burning for 5 years (so far) and is known as the Door to Hell. (Hat tip: Neil Gaiman)

Your Mom Had Groupies

Michelle Schwartz was incensed by some very sexist adverts for Canadian Club Whiskey. She did a parody of the advert from a feminist perspective, and then lots of other people joined in. This link is graphics-heavy, but brilliant. I think I like Your mom was a pilot best…
Lib Dem Jo has been listening to Hazel Blears on the radio. She’s a braver woman than me. I can’t listen to Blears for more than a few seconds without falling into a frothing rage, but Jo managed it for a whole phone in!
Snuffleupagus, an inner city teacher, talks about her incredulity that one of her colleagues is blithely indifferent to her daughter going to a school in Special Measures.
Stephen Glenn has news for the Northern Irish health minister: the “treatment” that she advocates to “cure” gay people doesn’t work. He knows, because he’s been through it. Three times.
Brad Hicks is a big ball of hope and fear when he listens to Obama speak, and thinks that people calling it a “cult of personality” dismissively are missing the depth of his generation’s feelings on the matter.
Cobalt warns American women not to be seduced by the siren song of McCain, with reams of reasons.
And finally, Charlie Stross has posted a “how to behave” guide for commenters on his blog. It’s good general advice for how to behave on the internet.

See her for what she was

Mary Whitehouse has always been a peripheral idea in my life — one of those puppets on Spitting Image I never really recognised as a child, but laughed at anyway, because if I didn’t seem to be paying attention, my parents might revoke the ‘being allowed up late to watch Spitting Image’ licence they had so generously granted.

Later, in my smart-arsed adolescence, came the Mary Whitehouse Experience, the apotheosis of smart-arsed comedy. I don’t think I really knew where the name came from, save from the notion of some batty old woman.

That batty old woman turned up again last night, in the BBC’s Filth: The Mary Whitehouse Story.
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What good did funding the arts ever do?

So, who wants to hear a joke?

Q: What’s the difference between libertarianism and anarchism?

A: Under anarchism, the poor people get to shoot back.

Boom, boom. I guess that’s more a caricature than a joke, as such. Anyway, I’m not here for the standup. What I want to address is the arts, partly by way of reply to Chris’s post here last week, specifically the estimable libertarian objection to arts funding. In libertopia, arts funding is for private individuals. “There is no such thing as society” (some of them really write stuff like that, non-ironically), so spending on the collective is wasted. Immoral. Theft. In any case, the Dead Hand of the State (10,300 Google hits for a phrase I’ve never heard anyone actually speak) can only have a pernicious impact on private interaction, and what could be more private than art?

Let’s look at some evidence. continue reading… »