No More Page 3 and the Tabloid Monstering of Lucy Meadows

Oh, I used to have a passion for blogging. I used to churn out writings all hours of the day on all topics that bubbled up, from the state of my jobbies, to the vagaries of the UK jobs market. I used to think it all meant something, that it was gently prodding my readers and society in some positive direction.

But as I've grown older, and faced the trauma of unemployment and just plain getting on with life, its all faded away. I no longer have the passion to write.

Other people do.

I still read blogs, I still click on links on twitter, but its all like a sheet of tracing paper has been placed over it all, its all opaque. Its less meaningful. Its just plain wrong.

Moments ago the member of parliament for West Bromwich East, Tom Watson re-tweeted a link to the No More Page 3 campaign's blog.

At this point I should point out that I don't buy The Sun newspaper, and when it is the only newspaper lying around in the canteen at work, I skip past page 3. Although, I fully appreciate that it is the most popular newspaper in the UK and that it arguably represents a centrist political viewpoint.

Anyhoo, the thrust of the No More Page 3 campaign blogpost seems to be that if only The Sun newspaper stopped publishing photos of topless women on page three then 13 to 16 year old girls wouldn't have their skirts lifted by teenage boys in the queue at the school canteen.

I think this is foolish. There's plenty of nudity and objectifying women in every other newspaper and magazine. The are plenty of websites that offer nudity for free.

Stopping page three will do nothing to stop teenage boys lifting girl's skirts.

Why are schools tolerating sexual abuse in their canteens? Why aren't teachers and headmasters disciplining teenage boys and educating them in the acceptable ways to behave in polite society.

What makes a 16 year old girl think that banning a page in a newspaper will change the behaviour of teenage boys? Its just so tenuous that it astounds me.

Does the member of parliament for West Bromwich East actually agree and believe that if The Sun newspaper stopped printing titties in their newspaper then it would affect the behaviour of teenage boys? Does he actually think this?
Does he really think that cause and effect work like this?
Is this really the sort of belief that the residents of West Bromwich East want in their representative in parliament?

I spent most of this morning investigating the tabloid monstering of Lucy Meadows. There's a variety of petitions out at the moment lobbying for the Daily Mail to sack their columnist Richard LittleJohn.

At this point I should point out that I don't buy the Daily Mail newspaper, and on the rare occasions where I have the opportunity and inclination to read it, I usually skip past the columnist pages. Although I do appreciate that its the second most popular newspaper in the UK.

I'm still unclear as to what degree Richard Littlejohn monstered Lucy Meadows. He wrote a column about her, but the press intrusion that she complained about wasn't about opinion pieces, it was closer to home. She wrote a series of emails to a friend as follows (source):

I was lucky to have a supportive head, but I think I’d have done it here regardless as I couldn’t put it off any longer and I have family and financial commitments as well. The guidance I’ve had from the trans community has been generally sound and very much appreciated, and I’d like to be able to say I’ve given something back. I suppose the best way for me to do this would be to educate the people around me and children at school – I am a teacher after all!
[...]
I know the press offered parents money if they could get a picture of me.
[...]
I became pretty good at avoiding the press before Christmas. I live about a three-minute walk from school so they were parked outside my house as well as school. I’m just glad they didn’t realise I also have a back door. I was usually in school before the press arrived and stayed until late so I could avoid them going home.
[...]
[M]any parents have been quite annoyed with the press, too, especially those that were trying to give positive comments but were turned away.

Richard Littlejohn isn't a reporter, the sort of intrusion that Lucy was talking about seems to be the work of people like:-

• Lisa Woodhouse from The Lancashire Telegraph
• Stuart Pike of the Accrington Observer / Manchester Evening News
• James Tozer and Nazia Parveen the Daily Mail's northwest correspondants.

I see no petitions calling for these people to be sacked.

Even if Littlejohn's career did meet an untimely demise, then Lisa Woodhouse, Stuart Pike, James Tozer and Nazia Parveen would still camp on people's doorsteps, and wait outside their places of work, and hassle parents for photos and juicy details. At no point in their line of work would they think, "I better not do this, remember what happened to Littlejohn". That isn't going to cross their mind, ever.

Here's a picture of Stuart Pike, and presumably his wife Alia Pike, that I grabbed from his Facebook page. How much guilt does his feel for the death of Lucy Meadows? Is he wondering if he'd done something different, Lucy would still be alive, the pupils of St Mary Magdalen's School in Accrington wouldn't be mourning the loss of a popular teacher.

This is Lisa Woodhouse from the Lancashire Telegraph, I ripped her photo from her twitter account, although for a journalist, she doesn't tweet much. I can't find her on Facebook, so I'm guessing she's got something to hide.

This is 30 year old Nazia Parveen from The Daily Mail, I ripped her photo from twitter. She was named Young Journalist of the year in 2011, when she worked at the Lancashire Telegraph. Her prize for being a young journalist was £500 and a week's work experience at The Daily Mail, presumably they liked her work.

Anyhoo, my point is, that rather than tenuously going for trophy heads on spikes to change behaviour and society, people should be going for the people who commit the offences.

If 16 year old boys are abusing 16 year old girls, then discipline the specific 16 year old boys rather than signing a petition about a page in a newspaper.

If tabloid reporters are hassling someone to the point of suicide, then have a go at the tabloid reporters who are doing the hassling, rather than signing a petition about a page in a newspaper.

*** UPDATE1 *** 24/03/2013 13:44
Just to be sure, I used twitter:-

Eagerly awaiting a response.

*** UPDATE2 *** 24/03/2013 15:17
Looking through other tabloids for reporters who may have monstered Lucy Meadows, I find that in The Mirror, reporter Steve White reports Lucy Meadows's death with the headline "Nathan Upton: Sex-change teacher found dead at 32".

Its a little unclear why Steve White is referring to Lucy as Nathan, when the main thrust of the story, of both the sex change and the suicide, is that Lucy wished to be referred to as Lucy, not Nathan.

The Future of Blogging: A means to an end

I went to a London Bloggers Meetup last night. It was at the Fishburn Hedges offices on Kingsway, and was to have speeches about "The Future of Blogging".

It was the first meetup I've been to since August last year. It was a lively and busy affair, a fair few familiar faces but great crowds of new people I guess. It was good to catch up with Aref-Adib and Anthony Fresh Plastic.

I had an interesting conversation with a chap from The Narrow Leaf olive oil. It made in a village in northern Greece, the unique microclimate give the oil a distinctive taste, and depending on when in the season the olives are harvested you get a grassy or fruity taste, it a cool thing to know.

The various presentations on the Future of Blogging were interesting, but I think I was the wrong target for them. There was one phrase that I heard which kind of struck a jarring chord "Blogs are a means to an end".

Months ago I decided to reduce my immorality by getting a load of morals wholesale from classic philosophers, I've been reading up on Stoicism from Epictetus, Seneca, and Kant's Metaphysic of Morals. Whilst Kant's Categorical Imperitive is a fine way of life, I was intrigued by his account that men are ends to themselves rather than a means to an end. To get my head round this I guess a man's profession can be a means to an end, but the man himself is an end.

So back on blogging, I disagree that blogs are a means to an end, wordpress and blogger are a means, but a blog is an end unto itself. That's not a universal thing, marketing blogs or corporate blogs or travel blogs can be means, but for me and to a fair proportion of bloggers, blogs are ends unto themselves.

I don't blog because I'm trying to sell a product, or promote something, I blog because of an insatiable need to write and chart and graph and share interesting things.

Its what I find difficult when people ask me what I blog about. I used to have a few specific blogs that each dealt with a specific niche, live music, politicking, pigeons, sketches of nekkit wimmin, but now I just have one blog where the last two posts were about Glasgow City Council, and then before that were a load of posts about BT phone boxes which had been turn into libraries, and before that there were infographics about phone hacking and London rioters. Yeah, that's exactly what I blog about.*

My attention wandered from the presentations, so I engaged with bloggers, each with their own angles and interesting things to talk about.

So I'm wondering would it be awesome to have a London Bloggers Meetup where the format is more like an Ignite event where bloggers talk about their own thing for five minutes with presentation slides going on behind them changing every 20 seconds. It wouldn't necessarily sell anything, but it would be fun, interesting and engaging.

My attention was brought bacng back to the speakers when a lady said something along the lines of how she hoped that as more people took up blogging, they would learn how to blog better and the general quality of output would improve. That strikes me as a logic fail, a human nature fail and a gross violation of Sturgeon's Law, "Ninety percent of everything is crud" with more bloggers there would be a lot more good stuff, but even more crud out there to wade through. Speaking as a crudmonger myself, I know this to be true.

Anyhoo, as usual here's a chart showing how much engagement I had with people at the London Blogger's Meetup this time.

About the same as usual, I guess its my comfort zone.

*Actually, now I think about it, I've got a handful of blogs on the go right now, on blogger, posterous and wordpress. I might copy and paste all the posts into one new blog and backdate them to when I first posted them. That might cock up google's page ranking thing, but on reflection, if google can't keep up with me, that's google's weakness, what do I care? The blog is an end not a means.

Stocks, shares, morals and ethics

I have given some thought to my own morality and how this corresponds with how I would buy stocks and shares, I shall try to share these thoughts with you, but its around 4am when I'm writing this, so it could be a bit woo.

I used to have morals and stuff, or I thought I did, within my own smartie tube. Moral justification for my actions even when I was being a bit of cunt. But some time around 2003 it all got a bit blurry and I didn't give much thought to such things. But now I'm grasping around for some moral framework. Kropotkin and his mutual aid seems to be a bit unjudgemental, too evolutionary to be a moral framework. I feel more at home with Epictetus and his stoicism, "Men are disturbed not by things, but by the views which they take of them”, by not giving a shit, a shit is not given, or something.

Right now I'm reading Kant, his categorial imperitive sounds cool "Act only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law.".

I'm not sure how it corresponds but I'm quite ambivalent about tax avoidance, its legal but certain quarters frown on it. Tax evasion is illegal, down with that sort of thing. One of UKUncut's things about tax avoidance is that whilst its okay for individuals to have ISA to avoid paying personal taxes, when multi-national corporations do it for hundreds of millions of pounds, then its not okay. The categorical imperitive dictates that this is invalid, tax avoidance is either univerally okay or universally not okay. Maybe its a continuum fallacy, I dunno, I don't care either.

So just to err on the side of caution, I'm going to give the tax avoiding benefits of ISAs a miss and pay full tax on any savings, and be damned. Its the sort of thing that The Man Who Hates Fun would do.

However, that still leaves me trying find something to do with the great piles of wealth I have accumulating around me. So on to stocks and shares.

After reading some Guardian artical on ethical investing, I don't think I trust other people's judgement on what's an ethical investment or not. Is investing in guns and nuclear power bad, but investing in tax avoiding companies good? Is investing in human trafficing bad, but in RyanAir good? I'm not sure.

However, whilst I'm uncertain about investing ethically, I'm absolutely certain that in terms of spending my ethics are the greatest, I know how to spend my money better than anyone else, the more money I have to spend, the better the world will be, on my terms, by my own morals whatever they be. Other people could disagree with that, but then, that's just them saying their morality is superior to mine.

Anyhoo, given that ethically the more money I have to spend, the better, then the return on investment of my investments is more important than the morality of the companies I invest in.

For example, if I buy shares in British American Tobacco, who've been steadily delivering 25% year on year for the past ten years then that is a morally good investment. BATS make their money from willing customers willingly buying their tobacco products, they don't make money out of me buying their shares, I make money out of them. Other people could own their shares, but then other people would be getting that 25% year on year and then possibly spending it in ways that aren't as ethical as me.

On the other hand, shares in QinetiQ, the global defence company, who make weapons that kill people, have given a relatively crap return on investment over the past five years, in fact their price is 40% down over five years. Regardless of whether they sell weapons, they are a morally bad investment.

Of course, all of this is hopelessly naive. I know little about morals, or the difference between morals and ethics. And also, I'm not too good at stocks and shares.