Posted by antonvowl
May 14th, 2009
This is an expanded post from my other blog. Honestly, I’d been having such a lovely morning and then I happened across the Mail’s website. I don’t know what it was that made me do it, but there I was, and suddenly, well, you can’t look away, can you? It’s like when you drive past a dead badger with its guts hanging out by the side of the road. You don’t want to see the awfulness of it all, but something makes you look. Do you know what I mean? Anyway, this is what I saw: 
It seems simple enough, in Mail land. If you complain about people’s attitudes towards homosexuality, then you are a ‘Nazi’. A ‘Nazi’ in the Littlejohn/Gaunt mould, that is, ie someone who has views that you don’t can be called a Nazi. As the man who led to the end of Gaunt’s career in radio pointed out, though, you need to put something in front of ‘Nazi’ to be able to get away with it – the Mail has chosen ‘adoption’ this time. Because the Nazis were so fond of homosexual people, weren’t they? So fond of them they gave them nice pink triangles to wear in the concentration camps. It’s a really good analogy, Mr Mail.
(Interestingly enough, Littlejohn, as an example, has been given credence in recent years by pretending claiming that it is in fact the Left, rather than the Right, who are the real anti-Semites. I don’t know how much good he really does that particular cause by then going and slapping the label Nazi onto anyone he doesn’t like, as Angry Mob noted in the 2008 Littlejohn audit. Isn’t that, you know, a teensy-weensy bit disrespectful to those who really suffered at the hands of the real Nazis, to imagine that some bloke who’s made up a rule you don’t like can be called one?) Anyway, what have people done to deserve being called ‘Nazis’ in this instance? Well, here is the story behind the emotive headline, and here’s the quote that the Mail have cherry-picked out of an adoption pamphlet aimed at single-sex couples:
‘Children need good parents much more than retarded homophobes need an excuse to whinge, so don’t let your worries about society’s reaction hinder your desire and ability to give a child a loving caring home.’
I think it is indeed a bit harsh to call people ‘retarded’ when you don’t agree with their point of view – but the overreaction from Mail Towers is ridiculously out of proportion. Incidentally, talking about the offensiveness of the term ‘retard’, guess who it was who called Gordon Brown ‘an accident-prone retard’ and got away with it long before Jeremy Clarkson got in hot water for calling him a ‘one-eyed Scottish idiot’? Go on, guess. Go on. Who do you think it was? You guessed Littlejohn, didn’t you? Of course it was! And it was in the Daily Mail as well. Call a homophobe a retard – find yourself attacked by the Mail. Call a politician a retard – find yourself paid hundreds of thousands of pounds by the Mail.
But Gaunt, during the ‘Nazi’ exchange that got him booted out by TalkSport, was making a point against adoption services too, calling them Nazis for not allowing smokers to adopt. Anyone who’s been watching the recent series of documentaries on Channel 4 about adoption (and I’m guessing that excludes the entirety of the Mail workforce) will have seen just how hard it is to adopt a child, even if you *do* pass all the criteria and tests, and even if you’ve done all the training – and yes, especially if you happen to be a same-sex couple.
People like the Mail and Gaunt ignore all the evidence. In their minds, adoption agencies hand over children like sweets to gay couples and ignore nice middle-class folk. There’s no evidence for this, but this is what they think, so this is what they describe as being the truth.
And there’s another point worth making. The Mail described people who complain about homophobia as ‘Nazis’ in one story, but guess what? When the ‘homophobia’ in question comes from their nemesis, then it’s perfectly acceptable to be offended on behalf of the gay community:
Those folk who complained about Ross aren’t ‘Nazis’ at all, of course. They’re perfectly acceptable individuals. And look at the irony:
Ross was involved in a light-hearted discussion about prizes in a competition themed around the fictional teen pop star when he joked: ‘If your son asks for a Hannah Montana MP3 player, you might want to already think about putting him down for adoption before he brings his…erm…partner home.
Up for adoption, Wossy? But as we already know, adoption agencies are infiltrated by evil forces designed to make children gay and favour gay couples over nice straight ones. And the people who enforce this are NAZIS.
Categories: Politics, Sex & Sexuality |
Tags: agendas, homophobia, Littlejohn | 18 Comments
Posted by Tim Ireland
April 7th, 2009
[Note - the website now featured at technicaladvisoryboard.org.uk is NSFW]
Let’s set aside the Mail’s repeated attempts to use this new non-story to breathe new live into an old non-story, and focus instead on the main deception in this article:
Daily Mail – Home Office’s new ’sex scandal’ after hackers link website to Japanese pornography
Now, the Guardian is reporting via a PA item that the Home Office originally thought/claimed this to be the work of ‘hackers’, but as early as 5pm yesterday, the BBC were reporting that; “The Home Office said that the site it was linking to had become defunct and been bought by a different company”… but the peeps at the Mail appear to be disregarding this new information entirely. For some reason.
Let’s have a peek at key moments within this article, last updated at 12:14 AM on 07th April 2009:
But it was a computer hacker rather than Miss Smith’s husband who was up to no good with pornography yesterday. – (source)
No it wasn’t. It was an opportunist, and nothing more.
The cyber-intruder managed to hijack a link which had been placed on the Home Office’s website to an information page run by the Government’s Technical Advisory Board, to provide information about the Office for Security and Counter Terrorism. – (source)
No, they didn’t. They ‘hijacked’ a website that the Home Office linked to, but at no stage did they fiddle with the link on the Home Office website or any other part of the Home Office website…
CAPTION: Not so safe: A link on the Office of Security and Counter Terrorism sent a user to a Japanese porn site – (source)
… not that this stops the Mail from suggesting otherwise.
Instead of information about new EU surveillance powers, visitors were greeted with some hardcore Japanese pornography. The Home Office has removed the link, and ordered an investigation. The pornographic hack comes during a sleazier-than-usual week for the government… – (source)
It’s not a hack. No-one was hacked. The security of the Home Office website was not compromised at any stage, and the website of the Technical Advisory Board wasn’t ‘hacked’, either. Website ‘hacks’ are rarely so thorough that they impact on the registration of the domain name:
| Domain name:
| technicaladvisoryboard.org.uk
|
| Registrant’s address:
| chuou-ku matuyamati 9-20 None
| oosaka-shi
| oosaka-fu
| 542-0067
| JP
|
| Registrar:
| Key-Systems GmbH [Tag = KEY-SYSTEMS-DE]
| URL: http://www.Key-Systems.net
|
| Relevant dates:
| Registered on: 07-Feb-2009
| Renewal date: 07-Feb-2011
The domain name was not renewed for some reason, an opportunist swooped in and bought it, and it was used (along with a whole bunch of other lapsed domain names) to promote pornography when other parties (including the Home Office) were still linking to the now-outdated URL in good faith.
A Home Office spokesman stressed that the site infiltrated by hackers was external and not hosted by the government. He said: ‘There was a link on the page that said Technical Advisory Board website, but when you clicked on the link it took you to the porn. ‘We were notified this morning and removed the link immediately.’ – (source)
“Infiltrated by hackers”…? There was no infiltration. And for the last time; there were no hackers! And at no stage did anyone have private sexy-time with the Home Office website. But for some reason that’s not the impression that many Mail readers get from this article; fully half of the comments deemed fit for publication by the Mail (18 of 36 at present) are based mainly if not entirely on the false claim that the Home Office site was ‘hacked’, making this a perfect example of the reinforcing nature of these little fibs the Mail insists on:
If the Government and Security Services can’t put simple constraints in place to prevent hackers entering the Home Secretary’s website, what hope do we have in regard to their management of our data? Thankfully although embarrassing, the only damage was to the lady’s ego. Interesting that the IT department had to be made aware by the vigilant media – nice to know someone’s actually awake! – Alison, Cardiff, 6/4/2009 20:31
Can someone ask Ms Whiplash who, in the Liebour Government, has the keys to Britains Nuclear Deterent!! – tim, UK, 6/4/2009 20:32
Office for SECURITY and COUNTER TERRORISM Welcome to the SECURITY website Hahahaha. This must be the most incompetent government in the history of Britian. – Peter Hastings, Folkestone Kent, 6/4/2009 20:32
I couldn’t stop laughing……just how incompetant and amateurish this ‘government’ really is. And these idiots want to set up an ID card data base…….lol. – Mickey V, Manchester UK, 6/4/2009 20:54
If our governments chosen IT staff and departments can’t even protect their own website how can we expect them to safe guard our personal data. Bunch of inept fools yet again – jack, cheshire, 6/4/2009 21:20
And yet, we place so much emphasis on the internet, internet, internet banking, and the digital revolution, even though we have no control over any of it. – Dave K, Leeds, YUK, 6/4/2009 21:31
THis just goes to prove how useless the government are with technology! It is scary to think they want to hold information about us all in a data base, we will all be stolen and be replaced by crooks, or has that already happened with the government? Makes you wonder. – Nigel, Somerset, 6/4/2009 22:20
right so if hackers can get into the home office website …just how safe will all the NHS petient records be…or their ID card mega computer. – john, leicester, 6/4/2009 22:42
Try assuring us now that child databases, ID cards, e-borders and all the other government databases will be secure from hackers! Somehow it will have a very hollow ring to it when they can’t even protect their own websites. Truth is we can’t trust this government with anything at all as they demonstrate incompetence on a daily basis. – Bewarned, Monmouth, UK, 6/4/2009 23:19
And this is the same department that wants to keep all our personal information on its secure files, i think not at this rate our government computer systems seem to be the most user friendly for anyone wanting to hack into – chico, hinckley, 6/4/2009 23:41
What a laugh! The hacker has excellent sense of humour! – Mike, Scotland, 7/4/2009 0:12
Yet more proof (like we needed more) that our Gov can’t manage an IT project. But still they expect us to trust them with our personal info in their illegal databases – Barry, woking, 7/4/2009 0:28
The Home Office can’t prevent Hackers getting into their Web Site, yet they want to collect all our DNA, Fingerprints and Personal details of every man, woman & child in the country and put it on a National Identity Data Base and issue us with an ID Card, their logic here, supposed to be to protect us from Identity Fraud. Aye, right – Lizzie M., Alexandria, UK., 7/4/2009 1:42
It would seem that the whole department is unfit for purpose. Another Inquiry will do little to make the good people of Britain feel any safer. The whole system needs to be taken back to how it was when this bunch of incompetents took over and start again. The country would be better served without any Home Office at all at the moment.At least then we would have no illusions to shatter. A Spring clean of draconian proportions is needed right now. Not another tax payer funded whitewash and business as usual. Jacqui Smith must be dropped onto her sword it would seem before she will resign.So be it. – Michael Henry, Dalian,China, 7/4/2009 2:01
This highlights an astounding weakness in security that must alarm all UK nationals. If the UK government cannot prevent a simple hacking such as this, then to what extent may we depend on the value and effectiveness of ANY of our defence activities? This is shocking to the nth degree, requires immediate action and an explanation to the UK public re HOW it happened. – Billie Carmichael, Lancs., 7/4/2009 4:05
And if government websites aren’t secure, just how secure will the data they want to hold on the national database be? – Mark R, Coventry UK, 7/4/2009 4:59
And these idiots want us all to have ID cards on which all the data will be safe. – james, brighton uk, 7/4/2009 6:58
it has been seen that anything this so called government touches and this woman in particular, that has anything to do with technology/data and the internet goes very badly wrong, there is no way they can be trusted with our details either in respect of medical records or id cards, brown and her need to go but quickly. – Bryan Caffyn ex pat, Mazarron, Spain, 7/4/2009 7:35
The security of everything from personal data to the security codes for our nuclear missiles is called into question on the basis of the Home Office linking to a URL that now points to a new location. There’ll be riots in the streets when they find out that Ofcom and Parliament websites link to the same URL.
Meanwhile, it my sad duty to inform all Daily Mail readers that the Daily Mail website has been hacked, and the Daily Mail and General Trust can no longer be trusted to offer you hyperlinks or handle your sensitive data.
Categories: Sex & Sexuality |
Tags: agendas, pornography, The Internet | 12 Comments
Posted by antonvowl
March 26th, 2009
Many Mail readers work in the public sector, and are diligent tax-paying citizens – decent professionals doing good for the community and earning an honest crust.
What would those Mail readers think, then, when after years of below-inflation pay rises, they are vilified for finally getting something that at first glance appears to be a good deal? When the salaries for their profession are crudely exaggerated? Is there any reason why the Mail wants to target the public sector – or pay rises in general?
And then the pesky public sector, which doesn’t make any profit at all, is allowed to give its staff pay rises!
The Mail makes it clear which side you’re supposed to take with this story:
A series of inflation busting pay rises for millions of public sector workers was given the green light yesterday – at a time when private firms are freezing wages and cutting jobs.
Private firms like the Mail. You can almost sense the seething bitterness coming off the keyboard when that was typed.
There’s another reason why this story got wheeled out when it did. It was neatly timed to coincide with an expected negative RPI inflation figure – you’ll note that RPI is all of a sudden being used as the measure of inflation by the media, now that it’s lower than the CPI figure - although as it turned out, that didn’t quite happen. It would have been a better story, though, wouldn’t it? “INFLATION’S GOING DOWN BUT PUBLIC SECTOR PAY IS GOING UP!”. Sadly not, for the Mail, but they can still claim second prize.
The implication, by the way, in that first paragraph, is that it’s only the private sector which is cutting jobs. Is it?
There appear to be
more people employed by the NHS, though that figure is of course a total number of employees, and may represent more part-time staff being taken on, with bank or agency workers being cut back, so it’s not the whole picture. There are reshuffles in the public sector going on across the country, with Sheffield Council, for example,
technically making all its staff redundant and making sure it’s not all gravy for those who remain.
Under the pay and grading review, although some staff would receive a pay rise, others in low-paid positions such as teaching assistants would be forced to take pay cuts of up to 25 per cent.
So that’s up to 25 per cent pay cut for some teaching staff. Right, I’m sure the Mail will mention this information when it looks at the big picture. It won’t, you say?
It’s not hard to find evidence of the public sector struggling through this recession. You can find stories about
teachers being under threat of redundancy and quite
recently too but then that’s only if you’re looking for it (or want to see it), isn’t it? And such matters do tend to detract if you want to creative a narrative of a lumbering, bloated public sector bleeding tax payers dry at a time when the private sector is being forced to make cutbacks.
Back to the Mail:
In a sign that Labour is unwilling to take on the unions, the Government has agreed to honour increases of more than 2 per cent a year until 2011.
How does the Mail know it’s a sign Labour is unwilling to take on the unions? This isn’t journalism; this is just someone’s opinion. Which is fine in an opinion column. But it’s not attributed to anyone and just presented as fact. There could be any number of reasons why the Government (rebranded here as “Labour” for the purposes of implying a shadowy leftist pact between unions and politicians) might think public sector workers should get more money – for example, they could think that workers deserve it after years of below-inflation pay settlements. No…? No.
Mail reporter Michael Lea could very easily have done some basic research, looked through his own archive and seen evidence of this. He could have looked, for example, at
last year’s police pay settlement which the Mail described thus:
Yesterday police leaders accepted an offer which will see pay for 140,000 officers in England and Wales rise by an average 2.6 per cent per year between now and 2010.
The rise is well below the latest inflation figure of 5.2 per cent. But Police Federation chairman Paul McKeever said officers were ‘content’ with the deal which he said took account of pressures on Government spending.
The package unveiled by ministers yesterday offers nurses and other healthcare staff a 2.75 per cent increase this year, followed by smaller increases in 2009 and 2010.
Ministers hoped it would head off the threat of industrial action in the NHS following widespread anger last year over below-inflation pay rises.
You’ll notice how public-sector pay rises come about, according to the Mail, because of the spectral unions lurking in the shadows threatening strike action, and not because, you know, people might actually deserve to keep up with the cost of living (or not, as was clear). But ‘widespread anger at below-inflation pay rises’? You could be forgiven for thinking this had never happened from reading this week’s Mail article:
The three-year deals, which caused outrage yesterday among business leaders, were struck well before the recession took hold and there are mounting calls for them to be ripped up as a result of the economic meltdown.
A couple of points here. What relevance is a ‘business leader’ to public sector pay? I don’t mind if the Mail interview a teacher, a nurse or a police officer every time private sector pay rises go flying through the roof; but I have a feeling they don’t. (It would be nice, even, to have an ordinary Mail journalist comment about Paul Dacre’s £1.4million salary.) Also, as the Mail itself said at the time, those deals were struck at a time when they were considerably disadvantageous to the workers, who suffered. Did the Mail ask business leaders what they thought of the pay deals then? No. And who, exactly, is making the ‘calls’ for these deals to be ‘ripped up’? We’re never told. But apparently there are ‘calls’. I guess we’ll just have to take the Mail’s word for it, then.
John Philpott, chief economist at the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, said: ‘The public sector is at present an entirely recession-free zone.
Apart from those people being made redundant in the public sector, John, yes, but do go on.
‘Cash-strapped private businesses are asking staff to make sacrifices to save jobs. The Government should put a clamp on public sector pay rises.’
Cash-strapped’ private businesses like Associated Newspapers (£73million profit last year), lest we forget.
Public sector pay rose by 3.7 per cent in the year to January 2009. Private sector pay fell by 1.1 per cent in the same period.
But… last year private sector pay rose by a lot more than public sector pay. It would be nonsensical to take these figures in isolation (unless you’ve got an agenda to promote, of course). Last year the Income Data Services noted:
The median pay settlement for the whole economy in the three months to the end of June 2008 is 3.5 per cent. The private sector services median is in line with the whole economy at 3.5 per cent and is some way ahead of the public sector, where the median is 2.7 per cent. The whole economy median is being held at 3.5 per cent by lower deals in the public and voluntary sectors. The latest figures for the whole economy are based on 197 settlements covering over 3.5 million employees.
Details which the Mail didn’t find space for – and which would, of course, have once again made the narrative a little more complex than the Mail might have liked.
There’s also a table, which will set alarm bells ringing with you if you’re a nurse, teacher or police officer. It’s objectively entitled THE RISING WAGES:
NURSE 1997 £21,042 NOW £31,225 2009-10 £31,974
POLICE CONSTABLE 1997 £19,261 NOW £28,405 2009-10 £29,144
TEACHER 1997 £21,313 NOW £35,121 2008-9 £35,929
It’s also handily illustrated with a picture of an attractive blonde lady to enable you to understand what a nurse might be, but that’s beside the point. Do these figures really stack up? Cunningly, the Mail makes no claims as to where these figures have come from or what they represent. Are they average salaries? Median salaries? Or what? Do the figures for ‘nurse’ include nursing assistants, or figures for teachers include teaching assistants? Given that there’s no explanation for them, there’s no way of knowing – except they do seem perplexingly high.
You can see nursing bands
here and the actual pay
here along with add-ons for working in London, for example, which aren’t extra goodies but just a way of being able to afford to live – so that skews the figures upwards a little. You can see that the highest-paid nursing staff earn £64,118 while the lowest paid earn £12,922. How, then, do you get to £31,225? First, you exclude anyone under Band 5 (all the low earners, essentially, while keeping in the £60k+ employees), then you add on unsocial hours payments (which incidentally are set to decrease over the coming years), overtime and so on. You also don’t regard part-time employees as being part-time, so if they take home £10,000 a year and work 19 hours, you consider them to be earning £20,000. The figures are
here and show a 1.6 per cent pay rise for nurses last year, when inflation was 5 per cent.
The Mail, though, keeps failing to mention last year’s good times for the private sector – and the years preceding it. And it becomes clear what it wants. It wants people to suffer:
But British Chambers of Commerce chief David Frost said: ‘Across the country I am hearing of more and more businesses left with no choice but to freeze and cut wages.
‘It is unacceptable that the public sector should not share any of this pain.’
Yes, how dare public sector workers keep jobs and not take pay cuts. They should suffer. For some reason which isn’t very well explained. But they should. They didn’t share the good times, but they must share the bad. Because…? Just because, actually. And that’s the top and bottom of it.
You have to wonder what public sector workers who loyally read the Mail every day should think of all this. Are they pleased with being told they must ’share the pain’, having shared none of the pleasure?
You also have to wonder, by the way, what Mail hacks think about not getting a pay rise when Paul Dacre raked in £1.4million last year. But judging by this evidence, do they deserve one?
Categories: Politics |
Tags: agendas, public sector pay | 25 Comments
