We’ve seen the emergence of an archetypal moral panic: young people, hoodies, anarchy, single parents, PC brigade, thieving, arson, gangs, MODERN COMMUNICATIONS TECHNOLOGY, Grand Theft Auto, water cannons, SEND IN THE TROOPS… the list goes on. Fortunately for us, in this time of grave national crisis, help is at hand. A grouping of selfless celebrities, led by Wayne and Coleen Rooney and backed up by a supporting cast including Max Clifford, Simon Cowell and Peter Andre, alongside Big Brother winners, some twat from Kasabian, David Cameron and ‘stars’ of the The Only Way Is Essex, have come together in their noble fight to make Britain be back British, free of the rioting ‘scum and thugs’ that have brought shame on our once great nation. The celeb crusade to ‘Reclaim Our Streets’ was hailed on the frontpage of two national “newspapers” on Saturday, the Daily Star and the Express.

Britain's moral compass: The Star & Express

Readers of both papers, and other participating media outlets including OK! Magazine and Channel Five, are invited to donate whatever they can towards this cause – via mysteriously monikered charity the ‘RD Crusaders Foundation’ – which has already seen contributions pouring in from the above celebrity figures.  It’s been orchestrated by none other than moral crusader, millionaire pornographer, mad fascist and media baron Richard Desmond, owner of the participating media outlets.

Taken in isolation, the campaign and fundraising drive – apparently for the benefit of families and businesses affected by the riots – seems fairly standard fare for a populist tabloid newspaper. But within the context of the Star and Express’s persistent and vociferous racist populism, Islamophobia, anti-immigrant hysteria and open support for the English Defence League, it’s a worrying development. Indeed, it was the EDL who were out on the streets of north London last week, attempting to put the rhetoric of ‘reclaiming our streets’ into action (even if they did end up just bottling the police)

The language employed in the Star’s campaign is particularly telling. Much in the same way that the Express Group have sought to dehumanise and demonise Muslims and asylum seekers, the same tactics are now being used against a perceived criminal underclass who exist as non-citizens, apart from ‘the nation’. Hey kids, it’s fascism-lite, this time with some smily celebrity faces behind it! A similar discourse has been created with the social media led ‘riot clean up’, which this article analyses in depth.

Richard Desmond’s states that his fundraising drive is to help the “families burned out of their homes and shopkeepers left penniless”.  But the end result is a bizarre crossover of celeb culture, tabloid populism, patriotism and quasi-fascism that sets a scary precedent as we head into a period of serious struggle against austerity and spending cuts.

STOP PRESS: Finish writing this. Have a look at tomorrow’s front pages. The Sunday Express – banner headline: BRING BACK NATIONAL SERVICE: Riot yobs should be forced to join the army to combat thuggery. Too predictable.

However, to say that the lack of any riots in Scotland has left the polis sitting around twiddling their thumbs would be vastly underestimating their own resourcefulness. No, so eager were they for some of the action, they actually went out and invented some imaginary riots. And so it is that now a number of teenagers across Scotland are sitting in prison – remanded in custody for naively making Facebook pages  for “riots” in their hometown – with, in all likelihood, no intention of ever actually rioting, looting or doing anything more than pissing about on Facebook.

Few would dispute that making a Facebook page calling for a riot on your local high street is, in the current political climate, a pretty stupid thing to do. However, it’s also true that creating something that most people with any vague sense of how online social media works would construe as no more than a prank is not a crime worthy of potentially weeks of imprisonment.

But this clampdown – hailed in typically self-aggrandising fashion on the Tayside Police website – comes part of wider steps to control and legislate over social media and the internet, particularly in light of recent hysteria over encrypted Blackberry messages being used to co-ordinate disorder in English cities. This culminated in an announcement from David Cameron today that the government may seek to disrupt and disable social media networks including Blackberry messaging and Twitter during periods of civil unrest – on par with moves taken by faltering dictatorships in the Middle East over recent months. Of course, attempts to censor the internet are doomed to fail – if people are unable to communicate using one website, they’ll simply move elsewhere, and short of shutting down the entire internet and mobile networks, the authorities will struggle to stifle communications.

But it’s worrying the extent to which the Scottish judiciary have vastly overreacted to these cases, in their successful attempts to deny bail to, so far, two teenagers accused of inciting riots on Facebook. A further three – aged 14, 16 and 18 – will appear in Dundee Sheriff Court on Friday morning. Where perhaps some friendly guidance or a few stern words would’ve been appropriate, the police have instead opted to pin heavy charges on several young people who, we’re being led to believe, are criminal masterminds organising mass disorder from their bedrooms. If that seems fantastical, it’s because it is.

A moral panic has set in among the political and legal establishment across the UK, with any sense of leniency thrown out of the window amid a clamouring for dehumanised “looters” and “rioters” to be locked up, have access to welfare cut off and be evicted from their homes. This failure to even acknowledge that there are reasons for the riots beyond “criminality pure and simple”, as David Cameron put it, will only serve to increase antagonisms that whole layers of alienated young people feel towards the authorities and society at large.

The Facebook sweep this week does, however, reinforce the need for everyone – political activist, wannabe rioter or internet prankster alike – to be vigilant in what they post on all social networks. In the current climate, even an unauthorised demonstration could be viewed as inciting disorder, and in another classic case of old people not getting the internets, weeks in jail could await.

The super-cool mega-amazing singer that is Rihanna released the video for her new (and fucking awesome) single Man Down just the other day. As well as being visually stunning, it tells a compelling story. Shot in Jamaica, the first scene shows Rihanna shooting a man in a train station. A day earlier, the viewers are prompted; Rihanna visited a club and danced with a man. Things became more heated, but she firmly pushed him away, telling him “no”. She left the club sometime later, only for the same man to approach her from behind. After a struggle, it is implied that he raped her. Following the attack, she flees home, where she takes a gun and seeks the ultimate Thelma-&-Louise-style revenge.

The video can be viewed below. Some people may find it upsetting and potentially triggering so viewer discretion is advised.

The video has sparked controversy, mainly for its depiction of violence. I find it unsettling that people are shelving the rape and instead choosing to protest at the shooting; “How dare she condone murder?”; “Promoting violence as a solution to violence is wrong”; “Won’t somebody PLEASE think of the children?”.  I find these analyses quite weak and hysterical. People who watch this video aren’t going to go on to shoot rapists (not that that would be a terrible loss), and it’s not going to increase someone’s capacity for rapist-killing. People won’t take this video literally as no-one is that suggestible. Rihanna is merely cinematising one of the many reactions a rape victim is wholly entitled to feel following their attack.

Some victims will have feelings of revenge and anger, just as some will have feelings of shame or guilt or shock. I sure as hell would not dispute a rape victim being allowed to have payback fantasies, and wanting to cause their rapist the same harm he’s brought upon them. To go through something so dehumanising as rape is something those of us lucky enough not to be victims of will ever be able to comprehend, and we have no right to tell a rape victim that they are morally deranged or wicked for wanting to see their rapist dead.

The controversy also has underlying racist motives. The media is always quick to demonise music primarily performed by black people (for instance rap, hip-hop, r’n’b and dancehall) for its moral shortcomings, whilst smiling approvingly upon the white musicians who perpetuate the same message. Critics are quick to penalise Odd Future for their misogynistic lyrics (and rightly so), but will turn a blind eye to the rampant sexism in, say, rock music; where groupie culture thrives, and women are categorised in lyrics as either sexy devilish ‘sluts’ or pure and helpless maidens. The same trend applies to violence in lyrics. Was the media up-in-arms following Johnny Cash’s Folsom Prison Blues, where he sings about how he ‘shot a man in Reno, just to watch him die’? Was there nationwide outrage following Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody (‘mama, just killed a man, put a gun against his head, pulled my trigger, now he’s dead’)? No, there was not, despite the facts these lyrics glorify gun culture just as much as any rap song can. Kenny Rogers’ country ballad Coward of the County tells a story almost identical to Rihanna’s; a young boy finds out the girl he loves has been gang-raped, and shoots the perpetrators in an act of vengeance. Yet this song is regarded as a classic, and is not subject to petty complaints from parent councils and reactionary censorship boards. Why? Because the music industry is inherently racist.

The media outrage over the shooting is also distracting people from what should be the real issue in the video, and that is the rape itself. Why are people so quick to scold Rihanna for the shooting, and not the man who rapes her for being a rapist? The shooting is obviously an exaggerated reaction, primarily for theatrical purposes (it’s not as if many rapes end in the rape victim shooting her rapist), but this does not deter from the fact that rape is critically under-punished in society, with conviction rates under 5% in most countries. This is what Rihanna has honourably tried to raise awareness of.

Rihanna - actual feminist icon

Sadly, a lot of the public reaction echoes the media’s out-of-touch attitude. The YouTube comments on the video, for example, are absolutely soul-destroying. There are people trying to make a petty geographical issue out of it; claiming the Jamaican setting is offensive and that Barbados (Rihanna’s home country) sees much more sexual crime. This fickle game of “my country is safer than your country” sorely misses the point. What these people are failing to understand is that rape is endemic in any society and in any culture, and I think this is what Rihanna is trying to say, especially if her Tweets regarding the video are anything to go by:

“Thank you for the amazing response on ManDownVideo I love you guys, and I love that u GOT IT!!! Young girls/women all over the world…we are a lot of things! We’re strong innocent fun flirtatious vulnerable, and sometimes our innocence can cause us to be naïve! We always think it could NEVER be us, but in reality, it can happen to ANY of us! So ladies be careful and #listentoyomama! I love you and I care!”

If you continue amongst the comments, you then arrive at the absolute gutter of victim-blaming; commenters who insist that since Rihanna was “dressed like a slut” and “dancing like a whore”, she has no right to complain when he “merely reacts on impulse” and rapes her. The level of misogyny is really quite outstanding. It makes for a distressing read, and sadly these attitudes are microcosmic of society’s general attitude to rape; blame the victim for getting raped, not the rapist for committing the rape.

Rihanna stuck to her guns, Tweeting: “I’m a 23 year old singer who doesn’t have kids. What’s up with everybody wanting me to be a parent. I’m just a girl, I can only be our voice. We all know it’s difficult and embarrassing to communicate touchy subject matters to anyone, especially our parents. The music industry isn’t “Parent’s ‘R Us.” We have the freedom to make art, let us! It’s your job to make sure your children don’t turn out like us. You can’t hide your kids from society, or they’ll never learn how to adapt. This is the real world!”

When controversy like this arises, it reminds us of why women have far from achieved equality. It reminds us that plenty of people have appalling views regarding rape, and will mock arguments to the contrary because they’re men and they know better. It reminds us why events like Slutwalk and Reclaim the Night are so important to the feminist movement; that attitudes need to be challenged and we cannot suffer in silence any longer. I’d encourage anyone who wants to stand against sexist and apologist bile (like the feedback to this video) to attend a Slutwalk event over the coming months. To find the nearest one to you, check here: http://www.slutwalktoronto.com/satellite.

With that, all I have to say is that Rihanna is a fucking rockstar, and I for one salute her for trying to raise awareness about the nature of rape and sexual violence. Bollocks to the haters.

Recently SSY has noticed another candidate for this award – a story circulating the press that the trade union ASLEF is planning a strike on the day of the royal wedding, jeopardising the newlywed’s celebration. Even though it’s unlikely Kate and Prince William will be getting the tube on their special day, this story has managed to tick several boxes for Daily Mail readers – Trade Unions = evil, Royal Family = national treasures.

London’s Mayor Boris Johnson called for members of the public to bombard the union wi messages asking them to cancel their strike on the big day. New Labour leader “Red” Ed Miliband said he was “appalled” at the thought of a wedding day strike – so much for his “trade union paymasters”.

The reality behind the cleverly orchestrated anti-trade union and royalist spin was that ASLEF’s executive hadn’t even discussed the possibility of striking on the Royal Wedding. Given that the Wedding day is a national holiday it makes little sense for drivers to strike – there’s a lot less disruption than if they struck on a working day.

The smears that were directed against ASLEF were made for three reasons – the first was to divert public anger from the Tories capitulation to the bankers on the issue of their outrageous bonuses. Boris Johnson and David Cameron wrote in the Sun about how unions were holding the country to ransom – aren’t they getting unions confused with bankers?

The second reason was to justify a tightening of the UK’s already restrictive trade union laws. Thatcherite laws have made the UK the hardest place in the EU to be a trade unionist, but the CBI and the Tories think it’s not hard enough. They want to make strikes illegal unless over 50% of union members take part in the vote and vote to strike.

As it stands now, for a strike to be legal all it needs is a majority of members who vote – so you can have strikes where only 50% of the unions members vote, and of that 50% a majority are in favour of strike action. The bottom line is that when a trade union calls a strike it does so based on whether or not it thinks it will have enough support among the membership – if very few members take part in a ballot it’s not a good omen for a strike, but ultimately it should be up to the union if it wants to call a strike even if it’s members don’t seem enthusiastic about it.

If the Tories introduced the principle that a majority of the electorate have to vote in Westminster elections for MP’s to be considered legitimate there would be almost no MP’s elected. It’s the same con as the first devolution referendum in 1979 – a majority of those who voted did so in favour of setting up a Scottish Parliament, but their vote was ignored because the turnout wasn’t high enough.

The third reason the strikes have been slandered is one that there’s not been as much coverage of in the press – it’s because of the sickening idea that the Royals are somehow better than us, and everyone in the UK should join in celebration at how fantastic their lifestyle is, as if they’re some kind of impartial national ambassadors who only want what’s best for us.

When one guy wrote to his MP making the legitimate point about how much these benefit junkies are taking from the taxpayer for his wedding, his MP told him to “get a life” – when it comes to the Royals MP’s clearly just throw their artificial, sterile, pre-packaged nicey nicey responses out the window and just hit back wi rudeness and spite. Maybe it’s because the Royals themselves are basically MP’s on a massive scale – unaccountable wi an expenses cheque and second (and third and fourth) homes dotted all over the country.

expect lots more Royal tat like this

And like MP’s, the Royals are very reluctant to let the plebs see what they get up to – they’ve been granted special exemption from the freedom of information act, so we know even less about what they do wi our money. The Independent covered some of the things they didn’t want us to know,

*In 2004 the Queen asked ministers for a poverty handout to help heat her palaces but was rebuffed because they feared it would be a public relations disaster. Royal aides were told that the £60m worth of energy-saving grants were aimed at families on low incomes and if the money was given to Buckingham Palace instead of housing associations or hospitals it could lead to “adverse publicity” for the Queen and the government.

*A “financial memorandum” formalising the relationship between the sovereign and ministers set out tough terms on how the Queen can spend the £38.2m handed over by Parliament each year to pay for her staff and occupied palaces.

*The Queen requested more public money to pay for the upkeep of her crumbling palaces while allowing minor royals and courtiers to live in rent-free accommodation.

*As early as 2004 Sir Alan Reid, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, had unsuccessfully put the case to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport for a substantial increase in the £15m-a-year grant to maintain royal buildings.

*The Palace planned to go ahead with refurbishing and renting the apartment of Diana, Princess of Wales at Kensington Palace after it had lain empty since her death in 1997.

*A letter exchange revealed a tussle over who has control of £2.5m gained from the sale of Kensington Palace land. Ministers said it belonged to the state, while Buckingham Palace said it belonged to the Queen.

Whilst the rest of society is facing cuts, there’s no such demand placed on the monarchy – while they will face a cut in civil list payments for their upkeep, in return they will be funded from the Crown Estate, which is worth £6 billion. This will make Prince Charles the richest King in the history of the UK when he takes on the job.

The Royal Family are a bunch of overpaid parasites who only exist because their Crown Powers make it very handy for various British Governments to bypass parliament. Enough parts of society are tailored for their own private interests – ie Freedom of Information exemptions and the handover of the Crown Estates. Even though the story was a sham, trade unions shouldn’t be bullied or made to feel ashamed for discussing strike action on the Royal Wedding – we aren’t all in it together with the Tory Cabinet and we’re certainly not all in it together with the monarchy.

One possible candidate for the new ACMD

As previously reported by SSY, the government isn’t generally too keen on scientific advice when it comes to formulating drug policy. When the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, and independent body advising the government on drugs legislation, recommended against Cannabis being reclassified as a class B drug, the Labour government went ahead and done it anyway. When the same body said that Ecstasy, a class A drug, should be downgraded, they ignored that advice too. The former chair of the ACMD and SSY hero Professor David Nutt was even sacked after a pamphlet he produced said that alcohol and tobacco were more harmful than cannabis, LSD and Ecstasy. Now we have a new government, and they’ve finally come up with a solution to the fact that none of their drug policies agree with the scientific evidence – get rid of the scientists all together!

That’s right – if a proposed amendment to the Misuse of Drugs law passes, it will remove the requirement for scientists to be included in the committee. After years of ignoring all the evidence when it comes to drugs anyway, this policy looks like it could be signed into law. It’s a well known fact that policy on drugs is driven by the tabloid newspapers more than what is useful – this year’s mephedrone ban was brought in after a series of deaths reported in the media attributed to the drug. The most famous of these cases, the deaths of Louis Wainwright and Nicholas Smith, put huge pressure on the government to ban the drug – it was later discovered that they had not been taking mephedrone at all. By removing the need for scientists on the ACMD, the government is making an admission that they don’t care about science when they make decisions that criminalise thousands of people – only about pandering to the media lies and propaganda about drugs.

As SSY has always argued, legalisation and regulation, based on scientific evidence of harms, is the only sensible drug policy. Drugs would be purer and safer, production would be taken out of the hands of criminal gangs, and people could be given information about each drug’s harm that isn’t based on scare stories. Removing scientists from the ACMD further reduces its importance and relevance, and means the government can carry on doing whatever it likes about drugs without scrutiny from people who actually know what they are talking about. Whilst not all the scientists on the ACMD support legalisation, they support an evidence-based drugs policy – something that it’s obvious the government couldn’t care less about.

You heard it here first kids; drugs are bad. It may come as a surprise that Alcohol comes on top of this list of harmful drugs composed by the former governmental adviser David Nutt’s new outfit; but what is more surprising is that some of the drugs on this list are actually considered illegal by our society. In this short series we will cover the benefits of some of the above offending substances that have been recently discovered by the scientific community and also have a chat about how this list would look if we adopted a sane drug policy.

In this instalment we’ll go with the biggies, and by any definition these are all addictive drugs that harm their users as well as the rest of us: Alcohol and Heroin.

Statistically you are far more likely to be hurt by getting on a horse.

Alcohol is legal, meaning that:

a) The tax on booze pays for the hospital/polis time that ensues.

b) The harm it does is significantly less than if it were prohibited.

(America found this out the hard way in the Noble experiment from 1920-1933. In this time criminals became rich selling largely contaminated alcohol across the length and breadth of society, whilst this did almost nothing to the amount that Americans drank, it turned John Doe into a criminal and it turned the law into a standing joke. Useful graphs illustrating the point courtesy of the University of Albany here.)

The title of this article is a quote from John Marks, a radical GP who after the prohibition of heroin decided to prescribe it in the early 90s to addicts around his surgery in Liverpool. Addicts in this trial didn’t need to steal or bring new customers to their dealers in order to feed their addiction and so committed 93% less theft, burglary, and property crimes. The number of new addicts also saw a huge drop as drug dealers stayed away from the area, knowing there was no point in being there. Marks allowed addicts to escape the cycle of criminalisation and instead live normal lives with jobs and kids and matching luggage and all the rest.

The headline is from a paper where Marks slammed our drugs policy as ‘harm maximisation’ and ‘inhuman’, and that our laws are basically a carbon copy of the American Christian-fundamentalist inspired policy of prohibition. Most retired police officers will admit that prohibition has been a gigantic waste of time, and indeed leading doctors have ceded that prohibition of the most dangerous drugs has done more harm than good.

The Scottish Socialist Party stands for the prescription of Heroin; a move that would topple powerful criminal enterprises, protect our citizens from addiction and allow us to divert resources away from expensive and ineffectual policing and towards saving our public services from spending cuts.

Tune in next time when we look at how scientists have found that 30-hour trips can break addiction, X can blast away shell-shock and how even middle-aged, middle class Christians can after a year agree that an afternoon in a drug experiment gave them ‘the most meaningful experience of their lives’.

***SSY in no way encourages young people to experiment with illegal drugs. This piece aims to illustrate the insanity of our drug policies only.***

?

Shock answer: no.

Carmen Marie Moulton

Carmen Marie Moulton from Penrith died in April just after the government imposed a ban on mephedrone, due to media scare stories with no scientific basis. These stories, as we all now know, revolved around picking up on the death of virtually any young person around the country and pinning the blame on mephedrone. Many of these false stories have now been exposed as bollocks, but long after the fact.

Papers said police were probing whether Carmen had taken the “deadly party drug”, but yet again toxicology reports have pronounced her’s a non-mephedrone related death. While there’s little news as of yet as to what did cause her tragic death, expect to see more and more of these so-called M-Cat casualties turning out to actually have died of other drugs or natural causes.

This dangerous champagne drug is associated with some of the worst criminals in the world – Saddam Hussein, Robert Mugabe, George Bush, Tony Blair, Maggie Thatcher and Tim Westwood are all known to have taken champagne at various times in their life. The effects of this drug have been disastrous – many former Eton pupils are known to have taken champagne regularly throughout their schooldays and then moved on to erratic and destructive behaviour resulting in millions of British people being made unemployed, in the coal and steel industries.

Alan Duncan gets high before launcing a vicious attack on the poor.

Champagne also inspired hostile, aggressive and unreasonable behaviour towards the people of Scotland, as many regular champagne users in the Tory cabinet continually denied the right for Scotland to have it’s own Parliament. This violent behaviour reached it’s worst when the Tories champagne induced madness led them to inflict the poll tax in Scotland. Regular champagne junkie Maggie Thatcher was so poisoned by the drug that she had to be dragged kicking and screaming from power by her own party members, desperate to put the clean living moderate John Major in her place.

SSY thinks if the tabloids are going to blame mephedrone baselessly for the tragic suicide of a young girl then we should take action against champagne, whose drug fuelled madness has allowed Tories to cause massive harm to some of the poorest communities in the UK.

BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW.

SICK SOUND-DRUGS MAKE CHILDS HEAD EXPLODE

“OH GOD OH GOD STOP I CAN SEE SATAN HE’S LOOKING RIGHT AT ME!” – this is not a common response to listening to most music, with the exception of Green Day or Daniel O’Donnell. However the world’s finest newspaper has found another TERRIFYING threat to your children – noiseodrugs. Just when you thought your weans were safe from mephedrone – or “meow meow” as no-one under 40 calls it – sick bastards have concocted a new method to terrify your kids, and this time all they need is a pair of headphones and (surprise surprise) the internet to overdose.

The “drug” is called idoser and works by playing a series of binaural beats which affect certain parts of the brain to simulate being high. Some users claim to experience a high similar to being on cannabis or ecstasy, depending on what they listen to. Other tunes – called “Idoses” – are designed to be more extreme, almost like a bad trip and are called scary names like “Gates of Hades”. One user allegedly clawed his own eyes out with his fingers so he could jam a pencil into his brains whilst listening to “Gates of Hades” – it later was revealed he was in fact listening to S-Club 7 “Ain’t no party like an S-Club Party”, which is still legal and unregulated.

It remains to be seen if the Government will try and ban idoses. Right now it seems very unlikely – no one has died or been seriously harmed from idoses, and the nature of the internet makes it almost impossible to ban someone from listening to a piece of music. There’s also understandable disbelief about someone being able to get high off of listening to something (though amazingly binaural beats can affect brain waves).

Listening to this man is 23% more dangerous than crack.

I wouldn’t underestimate the power of media hysteria combined with Government opportunism though – the fact people won’t understand how you can get high off of sounds may disturb and scare them more than getting high off of something you can understand like pills or grass. And under the ridiculous and draconian Criminal Justice Act “repetitive beats” which may be associated with drug use are technically illegal – someone tell the Orange Order ASAP. Thankfully the tuneful symphony of most Irish rebel songs keeps them clearly on the side of British law.

With mephedrone banned after a wave of hysteria and media exaggeration in the face of scientific evidence, it’s not impossible idoses could be banned if newspapers decide to run with it. All it would take is a couple of savvy editors picking up stories of folk dying within a couple of hours/same evening as listening to an idose to start a frenzy, regardless of how they actually died - the same way they did with mephedrone. The reality is stuff like idoses – like all things humans do to get high – has been around for hundreds of years, it’s just been called something different. Instead of listening through headphones to get high tribes used to listen to repetitive drumming beats. Fortunately it took British imperialism a few hundred years before they banned that kind of thing in the Criminal Justice Act.

SSY has already risked life and limb to bring you a few examples of terrifying idoses which we have outlined below. Listen at your own peril,

Behavioural psychology tells us that in the morning you’ll be 17.8% safer after listening to this Idose

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9quauTf7fY

Call the polis, I can hear repetitive beats

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rOSVuHxUuQU

OH GOD IT’S CALLED GATES OF HADES BAN THIS SICK FILTH NOW

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhOX1GKkxbg

The most dangerous of the lot

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mYV1AEej6y0

For those that can’t be bothered clicking the link, the article is a kind of hideous mash up of Countryside Alliance rhetoric and the Daily Mail’s own special brand of moral crusading; it would seem that, for them, foxes are the new terrorists. According to the ‘journalist’ who wrote this, Rory Knight Bruce, there’s a concerted PR campaign to give foxes a false cuddly image, which unites animal rights activists and Roald Dahl in a fiendish conspiracy to make children think foxes are their friends. Presumably the foxes made a generous contribution to Dahl’s estate so that it would be easy for them to find vulnerable children whose faces they can rip off.

A few years back, I was walking home and I saw a red fox just outside my house. I stopped downwind of it and crouched down to watch it a wee while, because I’ve always been an obsessive fan of animals. There was another girl coming from the opposite direction, and she had a pretty different reaction. She saw the fox, froze, and then ran screaming away from it. I laughed at the time, but apparently the mail considers that a measured reaction to these clearly evil and vicious little bastards.

They interview a completely unbiased trapper who makes his living shooting foxes, and surprisingly enough he says anyone who views them as essentially benign is “living in cloud cuckoo land” and then goes on to list a number of domestic animals that have supposedly been lost to fox attacks. Did anyone really need this wanker to give them the news that foxes like to eat small furry animals that have probably been left outside? He also totally overstates the incidence of foxes attacking dogs and cats. Foxes tend to be not much bigger than your average cat, and much smaller than the dogs most people have. Also, a lot of small dogs such as terriers have been bred for killing ‘vermin’ and would easily beat a fox in a fight. It would seem though that it’s the eating of a koi carp that cost £1500 that really offends Trapper Wank. Those damn foxes have no respect for private property! What are they, animals?! No doubt they raised the money to bribe Roald Dahl and the pro-fox sophists by selling the expensive koi meat down Brick Lane.

The mail then goes on to give us the shocking news that foxes mark their territory by pissing and shitting! You know, unlike nearly every other animal to walk the planet. What dirty wee bastards! See if you’re THAT bothered about foxes coming in your garden for a shit and your chickens are actually being taken by them, then there are a couple of things you can do.  You need to get a handy male friend and ask him to piss all over your garden instead. Oh, and dig your fucking coop fence in, you stupid noob.

A fox lets out a groan of satisfaction after taking a huge dump on the Daily Mail editor's head.

Of course, it’s not just that fox shit is clearly disgusting, oh no, we have to remember that these dangerous animals can give us diseases as well! The Daily Mail informs us that fox shit can carry Toxascaris, a variety of parasitic roundworm. We’re also given the scary statistic that there are around one hundred new cases of Toxascaris a year in humans! If you know anything about statistics, medicine or not being a chump, then you should be pissing yourself right now, because one hundred cases a year is nothing. It’s the same as the number of cases of the very rare Q Fever, an infection that usually turns up in people who work closely with animals. Of course, the mail doesn’t tell you that, and they also don’t tell you that domestic dogs and cats also carry Toxascaris.

Hillariously, the mail also mentions a few foxes who, in the course of their natural chewing behaviour, developed a taste for brake fluid and started biting through the cables on cars, and it’s almost like the writer thinks there was some kind of malicious intent behind it. However, this shouldn’t really surprise us given that he spends a couple of paragraphs whining about how nasty foxes have been to him and his family. One vixen, who he tried to rescue from a collapsed earth, had the temerity to bite him! Why, who could imagine a frightened and cornered wild animal biting a person who touched them? Any animal worker will tell you that being bitten is part of the job when you get close to wildlife.

He also tells us that he believes two of his family terriers were killed by foxes. One through mange (because dogs never, ever get mange without the help of a fox) and one due to a “characteristically vicious assault”, which suggests to me that he didn’t actually see the fox killing his dog. Quite apart from that, if his dog was killed by a fox, it’s very likely that the terrier (as I’ve already said, they have hunting and killing in their genes) started the fight.

And then there’s the big issue. Rory cites two instances of foxes attacking children to boost his campaign against their brushy reign of terror. What he doesn’t tell you is that these two cases are pretty much the only two in a fucking age. The BBC felt the need to do a measured evaluation of how often foxes attack people, and I can save you the bother of going to look it up. The answer is (drumroll) almost never, you foaming at the mouth mail reading chumps.

From all this easily debunked nonsense, Rory reaches “the inescapable conclusion that the urban fox is a pest that needs to be controlled.” Well I’ll tell you what, following his logic (disease, bite rates etc.) then clearly we need to shoot all the domestic dogs and cats in the UK, and probably all the small furry pets too, because they bite people a hell of a lot more than foxes do. SSY demands that we start to eliminate this dangerous menace NOW, and we further posit that any objections to this plan are just lily livered liberal nonsense that does not recognise the fact that humans are clearly superior to other animals, and have a right to destroy any part of the natural world that inconveniences them in any way.

The face of evil.