That's fucking stupid

Posts Tagged ‘think of the children’

From today’s news headlines:

OMG KIDS TAKING MORE DRUGS. EVERYBODY IS ALARMED!!!

Let’s take a look at that a bit more closely, shall we? Here’s the text from the actual report:

Police recorded drug offences increased by six per cent compared with 2007/08, following an increase of 18 per cent between 2006/07 and 2007/08. Increases in recent years have been largely attributable to increases in the recording of possession of cannabis offences… In 2008/09 possession of cannabis increased by six per cent compared with 2007/08. This increase continues an upward trend in recent years, with possession of cannabis offences recorded by the police rising by 90 per cent since 2004/05. This rise has been largely associated with the increased use of powers to issue cannabis warnings.

and

The [British Crime Survey] is also used to monitor trends in drug use and the figures are published annually. The BCS shows that overall illicit drug use among 16 to 59 year olds decreased from 11.1 per cent in 1996 to 9.3 per cent in 2007/08 and it is now at its lowest level since the BCS started measurement. This decrease is mainly due to successive declines in use of cannabis since 2003/04… This suggests the increase seen in recent years in police recorded drug offences is likely to be due to increase in police activity rather than in drug use.

Just thought I should highlight that. Once again: usage hasn’t risen: police have just been reporting it more.

BBC Radio 1 has been taking a detour from playing mediocre music and has begun another round of tedious social engineering on the youth of Britain. Gone are the days when the BBC used its power to inspire a generation of engineers, programmers and maths geeks; today it’s all about raising self esteem in kids who have no reason to have high self esteem. Now I know that someone is going to post about how I am a bully myself, which is cute, but high self esteem should be earned, you don’t get to feel good about what you’ve done unless you’ve done something worth being proud of and heaping praise on the losers just devalues those who decided to man the fuck up and do something worthwhile.

At this point I could get side tracked into how we have become an anti-competitive society, something probably led by the losers who were not good enough to make it in private enterprise and ended up as pen pushers in the public sector; teachers who, by the very nature of their profession, are failures in life are unlikely to encourage kids to succeed at the expense of the thick kids that make up an average of 50% of the class.

No, I shall not get sidetracked because the purpose of the rant is to point out a stunning bit of advice given by Chris Moyles’ tea boy, Aled Haydn Jones. This extremely qualified life coach summed up his advice for making yourself ‘bullyproof’* by telling people to “just be themselves” and of course to “believe in themselves”.

What the former bullying victim turned adviser on practically everything, despite not being even remotely able to do so in any meaningful manner, is telling kids to do is to stand out from the crowd and to be their own unique special self. Now far be it for me to contradict Mr Jones in his extremely well researched position, but I’m going to anyway.

Do you remember the kid who was an individual at school? The one that got the shit kicked out of him on a regular basis? If you don’t then that’s probably because that kid was you. Do you remember all the names and faces of all the kids that weren’t bullied? Of course you don’t, they blended in because they conformed to the expected social norms of that school. Remind me again, which one got bullied?

Now I’m not saying that we should all be clones but kids are like herd pack animals that pick on the one that is different, which makes logical sense really because if they picked on kids because of common characteristics then they would struggle to find support. While the one eyed man may be king of the land of the blind, in the school of the blind he would have the shit kicked out of him and be called Cyclops until he cried. Kids don’t pick on specific characteristics, they pick on uncommon ones. Normal targets when I was a lad were the thickies, the gingers, the asthmatics and those who were not good at rugby. In modern schools my 14 year old informant tells me that the bullied are the boffins, anyone who doesn’t care about football, and those with two parents and a shared surname. I once observed two schools where the peer pressure towards smoking differed dramatically: in one there were no smokers and new kids to the school who smoked were teased until they stopped; and in the other practically all the kids smoked and those who were teased were the minority of non smokers.

That’s not the half of it though: Dr Joe Allen has done quite a bit of research on peer pressure; he’s followed a bunch of kids from age 13 for the last decade and seen that those who felt more peer pressure as teens went on to be more socially capable in later life, while those who were able to ‘be themselves’ were far more likely in later life to be less able to form long term relationships. Kids who are prone to peer pressure and the sometimes negative influence of their peers in school are far more capable of the ‘give and take’ needed in long term adult relationships and are also more likely to behave within the social norms of adult life (getting a job and a partner rather than spending all the time on World of Warcraft masturbating furiously over pictures of Felicia Day).

So here’s the thing, well here’s two things:

1. Aled, shut the fuck up. No wonder you were bullied at school. Twat.
2. If you love your kids then don’t doom them to a life as a social outcast. Teach them to accept peer pressure and conform to the group norm as that way they will blend in under the radar of the bullies who will find some other kid to steal lunch money from. When your kid is a faceless corporate whore earning a shitload of money with a lovely family they will thank you for not teaching them to be a pierced but unemployed social clusterfuck.

* The bullyproof campaign is a corker in its cynical insistence on being ‘down with the kids’ and using social media. Kids have been encouraged to put a ‘bullyproof’ brand on their twatter, shitspace and facerape profile pictures to show that they are bullyproof, thereby marking themselves out for a good honest shitkicking by any bully with any dignity. Of course, no matter how many E list celebs they persuade to put a banner on their profile, the kids aren’t going to do the e-bullying equivalent of dramatically and camply dropping the soap in front of the big guy with a tattoo of a spider web on his face.

It’s no big deal, it’s natures way.

Some twat in Scotland has proposed that a tax should be levied on chocolate; the BBC HYS forum is currently red hot. It’s not a bad idea to do something about obesity but we are attacking it from the wrong angle, the current thinking is to tax everyone in order to waste money telling fatties that they should eat less and exercise more, all the while the fatty food companies are spending more money getting the fatties through the door and plying them with lard. We are now considering taxing everyone for eating crap in the same way that we tax smokers and drinkers, something which the tobacco industry fought by making smokes a luxury and desirable product and something the booze industry fought by lowering production costs, lowering margins and increasing volume.

So if we know that these things don’t work why are we doing them? We tax booze and fags not to lower demand but to line the coffers of the treasury so that they can offset the cost of booze and smoke related illnesses. So why not attack the costs head on rather than trying to scrabble around for the cash to pay for it? Why not just withdraw free NHS treatment for smokers, drinkers and fatties. Not only does it provide a real incentive for people to stop smoking, drinking or cramming junk down the gullets, it means that those who don’t can continue to make that choice without impacting on the rest of society. Sure a few fatties will die but they are going to die anyway and prolonging their lives is a pointles waste of time. Parents who allow their kids to become fatties can of course be prosecuted for child abuse and the kids rehomed with parents who are actually going to take care of them.

The BBC is currently running articles about the stillbirth rate in the UK and how as many as 6500 children die each year before they are 4 weeks old. I understand that losing a child in this way must be truely horrific but with child mortality rates dropping, life expectancy increasing and a global population of around seven billion I have to ask: do we need another 6500 kids every year?

Guest post from ‘Sensibly Ginger’
The Independent, on Thursday 26th Feb said:

“Health officials have been forced to withdraw 21,000 doses of the meningitis C vaccine from GP clinics around the UK after it emerged that some doses may have been contaminated with a blood-poisoning bacterium.
“More than 60,000 doses of the vaccine, which is offered to all four-month-old babies, could be contaminated with the hospital-acquired infection – the Staphylococcus aureus bacterium – and a third of these had already been sent to vaccination clinics before officials became aware of the problem.
“Officials within the Department of Health and the vaccine’s manufacturers are believed to have known of the problem since Tuesday but only issued an emergency recall last night after being contacted about the potential contamination by The Independent. “

Maybe that’s because ALL of the vaccines in the UK were safe, as the Independent evidently knew:

“In a statement, the Department of Health denied that any contaminated samples had entered the UK market. Two batches have been identified and are being recalled as a purely precautionary measure. These two batches passed all routine quality testing, including a sterility test.”

What has happened, as the BBC reported, is:

“The recalled batches of the Menjugate Kit, which were manufactured in Italy, had passed safety checks before leaving the factory to be transported by road to the UK.
“But a small number of samples were sent overseas by aeroplane to test whether the sample would remain secure under different air pressures.
“At the destination, these were found to be contaminated with staphylococcus aureus bacteria, but never entered the supply chain.”

So really, what it should have said is:

Novartis bend over backwards to make sure your kids are safe, and don’t die from meningitis. 

But that wouldn’t sell adverts, if all they did was inform you of the important news you need to know.

The media have fueled the fire, yet again, and are helping the public misunderstanding of science. Vaccines are safe, they really, really are. Children are now dying because parents aren’t getting their children vaccinated.

Raising worries over safe vaccines is not only a fucking stupid thing to do, it is a public health risk.