It’s “Freedom of Expression day”, organised by Reporters without borders.
To my shame, I don’t even understand how to take part in the cyber-demonstration, so I can’t really do that. But I’ll post a link to the Handbook for bloggers and cyber-dissidents..
Are teenagers really just lab rats to be exposed to whatever crackpot experiments politicians want to try? Last week, we learned that they were the intended guinea pigs for the “benefits” of ID. Now, there’s yet another dubious initiative targetting youth – maybe because it
would get laughed out of existence by the adult population. There’s a plan for UK schoolchildren to swear an oath of allegiance.
This strikes a particular chord with me, as I remember being a rebellious uprooted-Brit 7 year-old who hissed “Oh Canada, our home and hated land” under her breath when we had to do the incomprehensible “singing the Canadian national anthem and saluting-the-flag” stuff.
So from my own experience, I know that – despite what religious leaders and heads of state seem to assume – making people mouth adherence doesn’t actually make them believe what they have to say. It may just give them another reason for disliking and distrusting you. It certainly makes a mockery of the concept of sincerity.
The BBC says:
School-leavers should be encouraged to swear an oath of allegiance to Queen and country, says a report commissioned by Gordon Brown on British citizenship.
Report author, ex-attorney general Lord Goldsmith, says it would give teenagers a sense of belonging.
Council tax and student fee rebates are suggested for people who volunteer – as well as a “Britishness” public holiday.
Point by point, in a pointless refutation:
A loyalty oath is already being made by new British citizens. At least, these people have volunteered for UK citizenship, so it’s reasonable to expect them not to choose to engage in treason. But, imagine you are hellbent on the violent destruction of British society. If you are the sort of person who thinks human life is less important than whatever your religious/political goals are, are you going to balk at mouthing a few words that you don’t mean?
There is an incredible naivety in assuming that people cannot mouth words expressing loyalty and still be disloyal. Most of us know from our own lives that the people who speak the most flatteringly are the most likely to stab you in the back. Are politicians and Lord Goldsmith actually that much stupider than the average person on the bus? Don’t bother to answer that.
Rapture-enthusiasts are using Google Ads. (I will, of course, be too polite to mention the irony that people who think everything true was written down a couple of thousand years ago will happily use the fruits of godless Science to spread their ideas.)
I found this ad link idly googling rapture. As you do. Well, you may do if you want a cheap laugh, anyway.
2008 is the big year now. Wow. It’s March already. There’s barely 9 months left. Don’t say you haven’t been warned. First, the “demise” of the United States is going to take place, according to Ronald Weinland, who “has been sent by God as His end-time prophet.” (It says so right there on the page.)
So, how does a country die? I am briefly distracted by this idea from the rapture talk. The US is huge. Maybe the US will just break up into 50 separate states. Or decide to join Canada or Mexico. It would take some serious Godly smiting to even do noticeable physical damage. A monster collection of tsunamis and few major earthquakes couldn’t do much more than dent the US landmass. An asteroid strike, maybe? Well that could do it, but I fear I’m putting ideas into Ronald Weinland’s mouth here.
I admit that despite the site’s offering a free download of this insightful work, I am completely unwilling to download and actually read it. So I can only go on the spoiler bit. This shows the book isn’t meant for me anyway.
This book is primarily directed to the people of the three major religions of the world (Islam, Judaism and Christianity), whose roots are in the God of Abraham. Ronald Weinland has been sent to all three.
The message is – US destroyed, last world war, over religion.
Billions will die! This time will far exceed even the very worst times in all human history.
Is there a hint of unseemly relish in that exclamation mark?
Well, I’m actually going to give this man the benefit of the doubt to some extent. There will certainly be wars over the next years. Religion will certainly feature in them. So far, so Dawkins.
How prophetic is the book of Revelations if it can be used to predict wars happening? Answers to that question are both “100% accurate” and “not very predictive.” I can’t believe there’s been more than a couple of years since the rise of the Abrahamic religions, in which there hasn’t been a war somewhere in which religion was involved. Other Horsemen of the Apocalypse? Famine, Plague, Death? They have been ever-present in human history too.
I follow the links to the Church of God PKG . That’s Preparing for the Kingdom of God, by the way, in case you thought it was short for Peking airport. (It’s Beijing now, anyway. I know.) The Ronald Weinman chap is its divinely appointed leader, of course.
Ronald Weinland, who is the pastor of God’s Church on earth, has also been appointed by the God of Abraham to be His end-time prophet to the world, preceding the return of Jesus Christ.
(I am distracted again, by the guy’s name. Even my rusty knowledge of German makes that definitely “Wine Country”. He’s pissed, isn’t he?)
Appointed by the God of Abraham? Did Yahweh advertise in the Times, pore over a pile of resumes, run some pseudo-psychological tests and hold a few gruelling interviews, then come up with this dude? Well, what’s the salary? So far, every book I can see for sale on this site is free. So, the income doesn’t come from book sales.
But, I read Ronald’s personal blog and he seems to be doing very nicely out of the enterprise, in terms of travel, at least.
Laura and I are about to return from a very successful trip to Europe. Last Sabbath we were in the Netherlands, and at that time I had to cut my sermon a little short as I was pretty worn out from the pace of activities I have been keeping ever since we returned from the New Zealand/Australia trip. As a result of pushing my voice in the Netherlands on Sabbath, I developed laryngitis and completely lost my voice for a couple of days. By Sabbath yesterday here in the United Kingdom, I was doing much better, but not well enough to give a sermon, so Wayne Matthews in Australia was able to fill in for me at the last minute.
Blimey, most Americans don’t even have passports. The Upcoming Trips aren’t as exotic but still barely a week goes by when he’s not off somewhere. You could probably cut half of the carbon emissions from flights just by keeping this man in one place.
Most of the areas my wife and I will be visiting will be in the U.S., but some will be in Canada and Europe as well. New areas will be posted when the scheduling has been fully set.
(Look, Ronald, I want your job. I can spout all the millenarian rubbish you want. Just give me the plane tickets and hotel reservations.)
He’s got to do this frenetic world-travelling, though, because:
“…. the 1335 days before the actual day Jesus Christ returns began on February 2, 2008.”
What a baffling way to express a period of time. Who measures time in 1335 day segments? Maybe that’s how Yahweh’s calendar works. It’s hard to translate into human. However, by the grace of Microsoft Excel, I can reveal to you that that makes the ACTUAL date of Jesus’s return …… 29/09/2011.
I am tempted to see if Weinamn has any US dates scheduled for 2009 -which would be a bit of problem as the US wlll apparently no longer exist then – but the schedule only goes ahead a few months.
I am now getting seriously interested in how much money they take. All this travelling must need some seriously big financial resources. I trawl the sites looking for instructions to send cash but it’s all about things like how to get your high-tech sermons on the Sabbath, if you are unlucky enough to live in Europe or far away from a church group.
All the same, there must be big money in there somewhere, but, worry not, Ronald is making sure it’s not misused… Look at his track record.:
Candidly, the largest scattered group, which is the United Church of God, is one that Ronald Weinland joined from its beginning and continued for nearly two years. But after exposing the misappropriation of $4.5 million by its leadership, the political practices of much of the leadership, and doctrinal laxity, he chose to resign.
More blogs on barefoot bum’s list. Have nearly posted them all now. I may have to start on a list of my own….
Australian Atheist
Author of Confusion
Axis of Jared
Aye!
Ayrshire Blog
Babble, bullshit, blasphemy and being.
Bay of Fundie
Beaman’s World
Being Human
Ben’s Place
Berto: Philosophy Monkey
Bert’s Blog
Beyond Belief
BHA Science Group
Bible Study for Atheists
biblioblography
bits of starstuff
Bjorn & Jeannette’s Blog
Black Sun Journal
Bligbi
Blog of the Big E
Blogue de Mathieu Demers
blurp
Bob Kowalski
bore me to tears
Born Again Atheist
brainstorms
Breaking Spells
Buridan’s Ass
By The Book Comics
cabhara’s zeitgeist
Can’t make a difference
CaroLINES
CHADMAC Speaks
Choosing Atheism
CHRISTIAN PWNAGE 101
Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
Circular Reasoning
Cogita Tute – Think For Yourself
Coming Out Godless
Confessions of an Anonymous Coward
We have a new winner. Not just one winner but several. Plus, an introduction to the most enticing product you have ever seen: The Playmobil Security Checkpoint.
If you’ve never seen them, Playmobil are sort of like cuter and better-designed bendy Lego figures. They are usually dressed for work, directing traffic, on construction sites or fighting fires. At the more esoteric reaches of the Playmobil world, you can find them doing more interesting jobs as knights and pirates. Now you can find their busy plastic bodies scanning your luggage….
This new set of toddler role models was first spotted in the Register, from which we’ve borrowed this picture:
The comments are on Amazon, The product sadly isn’t available. (Well, yes, pedants, they are reviews rather than comments, but I reserve the right to define “comments” as whatever I choose the word to mean, in an Alice in Wonderland style way. It’s my ceremony.) There are a few and they are all brilliant.
Snips from Amazon’s featured pro and anti reviews are:
Educational and Fun!
Thank you Playmobil for allowing me to teach my 5-year old the importance of recognizing what a failing bureaucracy in a ever growing fascist state looks like. Sometimes it’s a hard lesson for kids to learn because not all pigs carry billy clubs and wear body armor. I applaud the people who created this toy for finally being hip to our changing times….. (By zampano)
Great lesson for the kids!
I was a little disappointed when I first bought this item, because the functionality is limited. My 5 year old son pointed out that the passenger’s shoes cannot be removed. Then, we placed a deadly fingernail file underneath the passenger’s scarf, and neither the detector doorway nor the security wand picked it up…. (by loosenut)
Read the rest on Amazon, plus the other comments, most of which will have you giggling helplessly and/or will restore your faith in human nature.
No fancy icons for today’s winners, just another picture, taken from the Playmobil site.
Well done, all round.
The BBC is running adverts for a series of programmes on white people, specifically white working-class British people. These adverts (and the programmes I will definitely not watch) might score low on my personal exponential scale of media-generated rage, when compared to the ID cards news item, but they still make me really angry.
The television adverts show a homely white male, whose face is gradually overwritten with phrases in other languages, such as Urdu, until his face becomes well nigh invisible. There’s an image on the website. Someone from the BBC was (ineptly) justifying this, on BBC Breakfast, against a reasonable complaint that it was using images designed to promote the idea that allowing non-white people to express themselves was wiping out white British people.
My problems with the way this image is used include:
It seems that the spirit of the execrable Powell is indeed alive and well at the BBC. The web page presents the results of a poll that is supposed to show the “despair and fear among white Britons.”
IMAO, if anything has caused “despair and fear” among the white working class, it is not “immigration” – which seems to be the underlying message of this BBC nonsense – it is a combination of the following circumstances :
Marginalising “whiteness”, my arse.
In pursuit of its dubious sensationalist ends, the BBC ran a blog post on the Whitest Place in Britain. Well, this is apparently the whitest place in Britain because it was destroyed when the British coal industry was destroyed, in the 1980s (under Tony Blair’s apparent role model, Margaret Thatcher.) Nothing took its place. So, unsurprisingly, it didn’t prove a big draw for immigrants or Britsih people of any “race”.
If you want to find out what the English white working classes think, then this area of the country is a pretty good place to start.
Well, no. It isn’t. It might be a good place to look at the social impact of shutting down the industrial capacity of a town. But that’s about it. These people aren’t marginalised because they are white. They are no more white than working people who live in more prosperous parts of the country. Indeed they are about equally as white as the great majority of the people in the House of Commons, for example.
So, discussing them as if they are badly off BECAUSE they are white is nonsense. Seriously irresponsible and dangerous nonsense.
The Cambridge Online Dictionary has a monthly Top 40 words list.
Don’t assume that it’s the editor’s favourite words. Sadly, it isn’t. It’s the words people have searched for most. Which seem a bit odd. I could count down from 40, like the way they do Music Charts on the radio or all those TV programmes called things like “100 best movies about stale bread” I’ll spare you that agony of expectation.
The top 5, with last month’s placings in brackets are:
1 advice (1)
2 regard (2)
3 comply (3)
4 effect (5)
5 assess (4)
What! What! Are many people looking up these words? Why? Can you think of any reason why a native English speaker would look up the meaning of “advice”? It can’t even be a spelling check thing, surely. These words aren’t exactly spelling bee material. This suggests that there may be only a handful of people using the resource and/or getting counted. A word could probably make the top ten with half a dozen hits.
Hence, a co-worker and I hatched a demonic and pointless plan to juke the stats (phrase courtesy of the Wire) and boost our own current favourite words to star status. We picked “discombobulate” and “swarf.” The plan was to search for them, in the Cambridge Online Dictionary whenever we found ourselves near anyone’s PC, so there would be a reasonable spread of IP addresses, just in case the supporters of “advice” questioned the legitimacy of their boy losing top spot.
Bah. The plan failed at the first hurdle. Neither word is actually in the Cambridge Online Dictionary, so neither word can get boosted into the top ten, no matter how cunning the click pattern.
(There would be no pleasure in playing this game at the boring level of feloniously shifting “aware” February’s (highest unplaced mover) from its current 36 placing to, say, 31. Where’s the challenge in that?)
An old-style hardback copy of the Concise Oxford Dictionarycontained both words and provided definitions. (Concise, it isn’t. It’s only “concise” when considered next to the full versions of the OED, which seems capable of giving a definition for almost any imaginable combination of letters) Sadly, there is no word league table in the Concise Oxford. Just a staid list of words.
What’s going to happen to the words that are too eccentric to fit into online dictionaries? I hope they don’t die out because no one can be sure what they mean.
(Just in case you too are equally bored at work and/or nerdy (which possibly means you too spent a fair time today reading tributes to Gary Gygax,) you probably also need to know if there are online definitions of discombobulate and swarf. Yes and yes.
The Free Online Dictionary came top in Google search for a swarf definition and a discombobulate definition)
Here’s another pile of blogs borrowed from Barefoot Bum’s list. Some of them are very good.
Cosmic Variance
Crazy Christian Chain Emails
Culture for all
Culture War Foot Soldier
Daily Atheist
DAILY BBG
Dark Christianity
Dark Matter, USA
Dark Side of Mars
darwinian remiix
Darwin’s Dagger
Daylight Atheism
Debunking Christianity
Deep Thoughts
Deeply Blasphemous
Desperately Seeking Ethics and Reason
Deutschland Uber Elvis
DEVOUT Atheist Godless Grief
Diary of a Teenage Atheist
Did a guy named Phil start Philosophy?
Die Eigenheit
Dikkii’s Diatribe
Dime a dozen
Disaffected and it Feels So Good
discernible chaos
Discussions in Existence
Disgusted Beyond Belief
Dispatches from the Culture Wars
do not read this blog
Dorset Humanists blog
DOUBTING FAITH?
Dr. Joan Bushwell’s Chimpanzee Refuge
Dragged From the Bottom
Drunken Tune
Dubito Ergo Sum
Duplicitous Primates
Dwindling In Unbelief
More atheist AND/OR progressive blogs filched from Barefoot Bum’s list:
(
)
Easy to be Entreated
Ecstathy
Edward T. Babinski
Elaine Vigneault
Elliptica
EnoNomi
EonBlue
evanescent
Everyday Atheism
Everyday Humanist
Everything Is Pointless
Evolution
Evolutionary Middleman
EvolutionBlog
Evolved and Rational
exapologist
ExChristian.Net
Excursions into the mundane and the revealing…
Exercise in Futility
Expletive Deleted
Explicit Atheist
f think
faith in honest doubt
Fear No Atheist
Feersum Endjinn
Fish Wars on Cars
Five Public Opinions
Fleeing Nergal, Seeking Stars
Flex Your Head
Flumadiddle
Free Infidel
Free Mind Joe
FreeThought by a FreeThinker
Freethought Weekly
FreThink
Some Jewish girls, plainly prevented by the nature of their social values from asserting their religious and cultural identities by just wearing a veil or a promise ring or whatever, have achieved this seemingly fashionable goal by boycotting Shakespeare in their GCSE exams.
Because of his anti-semitism, it appears…..
I assume they are thinking about the Merchant of Venice. Even if you choose to ignore the fact that Shakespeare actually gave Shylock some of the most stirring anti-bigotry speeches ever written, Shakespeare’s views on any topic (if you can deduce what they might have been) were the views of a sixteenth century playwright.
Should we only read or listen to or look at works of art if we agree 100% with the worldview of their creator? In that case, we had better get really brilliant at writing and painting and making music, because, for each of us, there is only one person that we will ever agree with completely. Even then, we must be careful not to change our minds as a result of experience, because we won’t be able to use even our own creations then.
Why stop at works of art? Can I live in a house built by people who are on the other side of the political spectrum? Wear clothes when the person who made them might not agree that we are heading straight towards ecological disaster? My Freya, I suspect that the person who made the cup I’m drinking from didn’t believe the Wire was the best TV series ever made.
Discussing the school students’ absurdity in the Guardian, Seth Freedman argued that this sort of religiously-inspired intervention in education is inherently dangerous.
Policy makers should be joining the dots and realising that they have a tough choice to make when it comes to appeasing religious minorities on the one hand, and making Britain a country that opposes fundamentalism and extremism on the other……
The reluctance of religious institutions to pay heed to secular teaching methods can be found right across the spectrum of faiths in the UK, as well as abroad. Devout Christians are just as unlikely to force their children to learn how man descended from monkeys as ultra-orthodox Jewish parents are, and so too is the case with strict adherents of Islam.
See, it’s a pun on “bum”? (See last post) Geddit? Hmm. I can’t say I blame you.
As promised, here are the last 70 blogs on the atheist blogroll.
Friendly Atheist
Fundy Post
Geeks And Technology
Geoff Arnold
Ghastly’s Ghastly Journal
Gideonse Bible
God is for Suckers!
goldbricker
Greta Christina’s Blog
HogBlog
Hot Dogs, Pretzels, and Perplexing Questions
Hullabaloo
Ideas
Indigent A-hole
Informed Comment
Inscription
Instaputz
James Randi Educational Foundation
Joel on Software
Jon Swift
LAist
Largest Minority
Made By Monkeys
MakeUseOf.com
micah.cowan.name
Mike the Mad Biologist
Nation
NonSequitur
occRadio
Often Right, Rarely Correct
Old New Thing
Only In America (Himself)
Open Reading Frame
Opinions of Doron Zeilberger
Orcinus
Osterley Times
Pandagon
Pat Condell
Pharyngula
PhysioProf
Planet Atheism
Planet Humanism
Plognark
Political Crank
PSoTD
Ramblings (Ron Murphy)
Richard Dawkins
Rosabelle
ROTUS
Rude Pundit
Saint Gasoline
Scientia Natura
Secular Coalition for America
Secular Thoughts
Shakespeare’s Sister
Skeptico
skippy the bush kangaroo
SlowpokeBlog
Snapshots from an Ordinary Life
Stephen Law
Talking Philosophy
Talking Points Memo
Techdirt.
Thalesian Fools
Think Progress
Thinker’s Podium
This Modern World
Thoughts from a Sandwich
Tiny Revolution
TomDispatch
tonypierce.com + busblog
TPM Online
Truth, Justice & Peace
Truthdig
Unabashed Atheist
virtual philosopher
Welcome to Pottersville
Wetmachine
Whore in the Temple of Reason
Wolcott’s Blog
You Made Me Say It
ywut
Bum has a different meaning here in the UK but the barefoot one is obviously not an ass because he posted the Atheist Blogroll and the Progressive Blogroll in an optimist attempt to even up the technorati ranks again.
We’ve done this once. I think it might work better if we cut the blogrolls up into chunks and post a few a day, or, as some of Barefoot’s commenters say, they may get ignored anyway.
The Internet is broken. That’s what it feels like from my egocentric perspective.
This blog has become as slow as slow thing that has to be routed via one of Saturn’s moons before it even contemplates loading on my pc. I was already annoyed at not being able to see the content of a fair number of real comments, while being inundated with ever more subtly- Akismet-dodging spam comments. Add the irritation of not being able to comment on other blog’s posts – any comments I make are apparently sent but disappear into the ether(net) unless they are so short and irrelevant that they might as well be spam.
TW assumed that the blog had to upgrade to the latest WordPress. Unfortunately he now has a connection that will stay on-line for about 2 minutes before it drops packets, and/or throws him offline, making my tortoise seem like a comparative gazelle with a rocket in its butt.
He upgraded. The blog promptly broke.
He fixed it. The blog dropped all its UTW tags for the past week. In fairness, the tag cloud had become well a mushroom cloud rather than a modest cumulonimbus. There were getting on for 3 thousand tags, with hundreds of semi-duplicates.
I culled them by about a hundred, insofar as it was possible, because it takes about a minute to delete one. (You have to wait while the page refreshes after each deletion. Think about that while you blithely tag everything to within an inch of its life…)
I recklessly reimported the tags using the UTW compatibility upgrade. I didn’t do any of the procedures that claimed to be “scary.” (I am a coward.) It now seems that I’ve lost the tags off a few more posts. And there is definitely no sign of the tag list that used to let us (at least try to) assign existing tags rather can carry on creating misspelled version and plurals of perfectly serviceable tags.
Bah.
So, sorry if this blog seems to be acting unpredictable. It will get sorted soon… … … …
Moderately cheering news on Ruth Gledhill’s Times blog of 28th February. Apparently the US population is becoming more sceptical.
However God is defined, fewer Americans are believing. The Pew Forum’s groundbreaking report, which we cover today, shows a surprising decline in religious affiliation in this most God-fearing nation of all. (From Ruth Gledhill’s blog)
I said “moderately cheering” because the Pew report (whatever that is) has only 1.6% of the US population declaring itself atheist, 2.4 % agnostic and a fair number of people who don’t care, making 16.1% of the population who don’t define themselves as religious. OK, it’s not a huge proportion but it’s an impressive show of rationality, all the same.
It still brings home quite clearly why American atheists sometimes seem to feel part of a beleaguered minority. Posts on the trials and tribulations of being an atheist can seem hard to understand if you live on a more godless continent.
Less cheering, Evangelical Protestants are the largest group at 26.3%, (greatly outnumbering traditional Protestants at a mere 18.1%) followed by Catholics at 23.9%. This explains why candidates are falling over themselves to woo the votes of the congregations. Grab the support of fundies and the Catholic Church and you’d be guaranteed a win.
Interesting that there are more Jehovah’s Witnesses than Muslims in the US, according to this report. Although that may be undercounting the “secret” Muslims, of which there might be a fair number, if US levels of fear of any Muslims are anything to go by.
There is a bizarre God-o-meter chart at Beliefnet. It’s hard to work out the logic behind it but, apparently, getting falsely characterised as a Muslim gets you high points. Scoring low on it seems to mean that you are obviously not a presidential front-runner. I’m European, ffs, I am barely familiar with the names of Clinton, Obama and McCain. and could only pick out two of these in a line-up. And my recognition failure is pretty well an exact replica of their lack of religious identification.
(If the Republican at the bottom of the chart wasn’t from Lawn Order and if I wasn’t an avid TV crime drama viewer, I wouldn’t recognise any of the others at all. )
People outside the UK may not have seen the unfolding stories about the Jersey Hammer Children’s Home of Horror. You probably don’t want to know about it, if you are a sentient being, but I’m going to bring it to your attention anyway.
Over decades, any number of staff committed horrific abuse of children they were supposed to be caring for. At least one child’s body has been found. Who can even guess how many more supposed “runaways’ ” bodies will turn up.
Every day, a more disturbing detail is released. The dungeons in which the kids were kept for really heavy abuse are being unbricked. Repellent items, such as shackles, that speak volumes by their very nature, have been found in them.
Over the years, many children went to seek help from the police and had all been ignored. One man was interviewed on television sobbing about what had happened to him there decades ago.
There are 40 suspects. 40, ffs.
These &&&&&&s – the English language doesn’t have words strong enough for me to use – got away with it because their victims were disposable. Nobody missed them. They could disappear and no one cared.
They were already damaged kids and everyone finds damaged kids too hard to deal with. The &&&&&s were presumably perceived to be doing a public service, by coralling lots of kids that people were afraid of (in the weird way that kids are now seen by many people as so intrinsically dangerous that it’s acceptable to use subsonic weapons to keep them at bay.)
People who’ve been through the child “care” systems almost always seem to bear horrific mental scars. Luckily (if you can say that) most are just scarred by being dumped in an environment in which the people who look after you are only doing it for the pay. But a disturbingly large proportion are scarred by physical and sexual abuse.
My point here is how do you stop this sort of thing happening? Some lessons that seem blatantly obvious.
(1) Stop putting “care homes” for vulnerable people in the middle of nowhere. The worst events seem to be in institutions that are miles away from the rest of society.
(2) Reward staff who speak against any practices. The newest, most inexperienced member of staff may be the only one with any residual humanity.
(3) No one paid attention to the kids who tried to speak up, in the Jersey case. So, lets start actually listening.
(4) Make the job of looking after kids more attractive – pay, conditions, status. Only recruit people who can convince a good selection of children and child advocates that they are trustworthy. Over a reasonable time. Keep them on probation for a couple of years.
(5) Teach kids that they have rights. Teach them to stand up for themselves and to tell lots of people when they are harmed by anyone. Include self-advocacy in the national curriculum.
Children need anonymous forums where they can tell the truth. I don’t just mean the Internet or phonelines. I mean providing real-life, physically present, advocates for “looked after” children, with no other role but to listen to what they say, find out what they need and take it seriously. Make them available in schools, community centres and, above all, in bloody “care” homes.
Let’s learn to recognise how children express rage and reward them for expressing justified rage in words.
The media keeps stressing that this particular care home was closed 20 years ago, as if the years between the 1940s and mid -1980s were in some long-forgotten medieval era, in which such behaviour was possible. No such luck.
If anything, things are getting progressively worse for kids in the 21st century. As UNESCO observed, British children are the most miserable in Europe. Compared to Dutch kids, who can discuss things with their parents and aren’t pressured at school (but who somehow manage to grow up speaking half a dozen languages and being able to argue rationally…) British kids are miserable.
Just take the standard baseline level of misery of so many children and multiply that by a factor of 100 and you might just approach the misery level of a “looked after” child. I can’t even match this guesstimate with any realistic figure for the extra level of misery that a kid that ends up as prey for these monsters feels.
And yes, I know this is a humourless diatribe. I apologise but have no excuses. If our society can’t even begin to protect its most vulnerable members, we really should just give up all pretence of being human.