Doing two things at once

Mr Eugenides reminded me of this:

"Road warriors face picking up penalty points on their driving licences if they are caught using their mobile phones at the wheel from next month. From February 27, the penalty for using a handheld phone while driving will increase from £30 to £60 plus three points.

Announcing the change this week, Douglas Alexander said: "Research shows that talking on a mobile phone while driving affects your concentration and ability to react to dangerous situations. It's quite simple - it's impossible to do two things at once and do them well."

Douglas Alexander is Transport Secretary.

And Scottish Secretary.

Also, as regular readers of this blog will know - I have revealed in the past that he also used to dress up in women's clothes and pass himself off as Wendy Alexander MSP. Sceptics dismiss this, claiming Wendy is in fact Douglas's sister but since making my original allegation, to date no-one has come forward with evidence to refute this.

The silence speaks volumes.

Thinking about thought crime

The Scottish Catholic Church clearly hasn't been:

"This is UK-wide regulation that will impact on anyone who provides goods and services, from the priest who refuses to hire the parish hall to a same-sex couple, to the editor of a Catholic newspaper who refuses to carry a Gay Pride advert, or a printer who refuses to print those adverts - they will all be criminalised by this Draconian measure. This is as close as you can get to a thought crime."

It's not really. You can get much closer than that. By making, for example, expressions of thought - like heresy - punishable by death. At the stake, replete with the kindling wood and the firelighters and shit.

Don't get me wrong - I wouldn't put it past our Tone to put a White Paper on 'Curbing Incorrect and Non-Progressive Thinking' before Parliament if he thought he could get away with it but this isn't what's happening here. It has nothing much to do with what the Catholic Church thinks, more what it does now but will no longer be allowed to do. Which is to discriminate against gay people with regards to the whole business of childcare. Unless they happen to be in the priesthood, that is.

Flying Rodent is altogether more blunt. Which is good.

People losing their damn minds #19

Charlie Brooker , we learn from his CiF profile, is a 'Guardian columnist'. That's all we are told. But what is also clear is that whoever he is the internal evidence from this article is that he's went done gone lost his mind - but in a way that's quite sweet:

"I need a wife. Strangers keep advising me to get one. Three times in the past fortnight, women unfamiliar to me have broached the subject with a blend of amusement and pity."

This sort of thing never happens to me. There are a number of possible reasons for this but I suspect that near the top of the list is the collective understanding that it would quite possibly be doing womankind a disservice to encourage me in this sort of quest. But I digress... This state of affairs clearly upsets Mr Brooker:

"Well stop it, all of you. I don't want a wife. I can't imagine proposing marriage. Never. Not to a human. We're too unreliable.

Besides, marriage inevitably leads to kids, and that's just weird. I don't want to stand in a delivery room, watching someone I'm supposed to love blasting a baby through her hips in an orgy of mucus, gore and screaming. My mind couldn't stand the horror. I would probably grab a rake and start thrashing at it like a farmhand startled by a rat."

Having then drifted on to other strange areas of the human psyche, Mr Brooker secures his damn mind loss status by being the first to comment on his own article:

"Oh good. First comment. Hello, I am Charlie Brooker, and I wrote this rubbish."

He's feeling insecure about his state, which he really shouldn't. The alternatives to damn mind loss induced by singledom and the accompanying surplus time on your hands are:

a) Having a a good relationship - such as being happily married, or whatever. This is some boring-ass shit and makes you put on weight. Or...

b) Having a bad relationship - which makes one svelte, if not gaunt, and is exciting, although not necessarily in a good way.

So c) losing one's damn mind behind a keyboard seems a reasonable option, particularly if one gets paid for it. Which is a bugbear - because I'm quite capable of sustaining a relationship and saying mental stuff that invites not remuneration but questions like, "Do you think that's appropriate, Mr _____ ?" I hate that. Would it kill them to simply say they don't approve?

The pursuit of happiness

Maddy's back - and is she annoying? It's a rhetorical question - she is. Take this, for example:

"Increasingly, the stridency with which the non-religious attack the religious belies their own profound insecurity - that the progress they like to attribute to western or enlightenment values is a much-compromised property. It is challenged by almost everything we see around us: climate change, rising levels of mental ill-health, growing economic inequality fuelled by debt and hyper-consumerism. As Oliver James's new book, Affluenza, makes clear, the nostrums of the west's "good life" - success, fame, wealth - mask an extraordinary vacuity of purpose, a desperate, restless discontent.

Even on a more prosaic level, Jade Goody and Branscombe beach have been such absorbing spectacles because they echo our fear that the "progress" of rationality and freedom has done nothing to enlarge the human spirit. Indeed, the "larger freedoms of mind and action" of secular Europe cited by Grayling have proved just as much a licence for egotism as for noble achievement."

Where to begin? How can we possibly know whether levels of mental illness were lower in traditional societies than now when the aforementioned condition was routinely diagnosed as demon possession? Goddamit all, even in the post-Enlightenment situation, those suffering from mental illness during WWI were diagnosed as suffering from cowardice and promptly shot.

But there's a more substantive point and it's to take issue with the notion that the purpose of a liberal society is to produce 'enlarged spirits'. Only someone who thinks it is the proper function of a polity to be an enterprise association could say such a thing. But the point of liberalism, which depends utterly on a distinction being made between what is a crime and what is a sin, is to allow people to pursue their own salvation. Or not, as the case may be. To allow the pursuit of happiness - not guarantee this as an outcome, whether this is seen as lying in the possession of an 'enlarged spirit' or not.

"Indeed, the "larger freedoms of mind and action" of secular Europe cited by Grayling have proved just as much a licence for egotism as for noble achievement."

Indeed. And what of it? A Europe with Jade Goody as a celebrity is a price well worth paying for one without the Spanish Inquisition. Those with a sense of history say yes and amen - those without suffer from the crisis of confidence that Maddy describes. It's a wee shame for them but I can offer only sympathy, not empathy.

As if work wasn't hard enough...

You get confronted with signs like this one:

Which makes the day just a little more shit than it was already. I mean, "make choices you can count on"! What the fuck is that supposed to mean? Who says to themselves, "I would make that decision, were it not for the fact that I'm not sure I'll be able to count on it in the future"? No-one. Exactly.

Then there's this rather strained acronym. It's really getting on my tits:

This one is true to the 'ethos' of the school. Those without any discernible talent or intellect, whether staff or pupils, are indeed valued highly - as are those who might be unfortunate enough to have no skin. Absolutely no discrimination against the skinless goes on here, let me tell you - regardless of what year it is.

However this business of celebrating the gorgeous mosaic of our diversity has limits, y'know. This life is fine but should you happen to have that disease that is euphemistically designated "non-RC", I'm afraid you're going to hell where your worm will not die, nor will your fire be quenched. Sounds a bit harsh maybe, but there it is. I'll see you there.