Today has been a rather disappointing day in which the universe did not end as the LHC began slowly spinning up. Nobody apart from the Daily Mail readers and the minority in the US who actually voted for the Republicans would have believed that the world would end today and it’s been well publicised that the particle smashing does not start for a little while but I did hold some hope in my heart that today would be the end of the Universe and we would not have to wait longer.
Today does appear to be the end of the Universe for park goers in Telford though. The council have made a spectacular leap of causality by assuming that as kids play in parks and pedophiles like kids (but often don’t have kids) then anyone who does not have kids and is in the park must be a pedophile. This is a bit like saying that the nazis had smart uniforms and the people at Telford council have smart uniforms so they must in fact be nazis. OK, that’s a bad example of flawed logic. Maybe it means all bus drivers are nazis? The police? OK, this logic actually seems to work, forget I said anything about uniforms.
The “I’m doing it for the kiddies” excuse for stupidity is not an old one, it’s the same reason why I can’t video my own kids at their school play and why I can’t take a picture of them on the winners podium at the swimming gala. Normally the data protection act is waved around as the legal basis for these rules however even the office of the information commissioner has tried to clarify the jobsworthian stupidity of these claims.
The solution is of course is for a whole bunch of single men without children to go and sit in parks across the land and read their books and munch their sandwiches and when challenged recite the legal premise of public ‘common’ lands and their rights to be there.
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