Women – Page 18 – Prog Gold

Paris Hilton is a victim of her class

Published on June 12, 2007

Paris Hilton wearing this season's squad car design

[By Martin Wisse, X-posted from Wis[s]e Words, pic added by me]

By all reports Paris Hilton is a despicable human being: shallow, vain, racist, spiteful and crude. Rich from the day she was born, she never has had to lift a finger to get what she wanted, she never had to work on anything she didn’t want to and she never had to struggle for the kind of opportunities most of us would be lucky to get only once in our lifes. She’s the walking proof that those who have can only get more. Yet what has she ever done to deserve the hatred unleashed on her, especially after she got sentenced to fortyfive days in jail for driving without a license? Compared to other members of her class she’s practically a saint. She hasn’t bought up perfectly sound companies and gutted them for a profit, destroying thousands of jobs in the process, she hasn’t started any wars or profited from them, she wasn’t responsible for Enron or Worldcom, had nothing to do with Katrina or any of the thousands of disasters normal members of her class leave in their wake.

Which is why she, According to David Walsh at the World Socialist Web Site, makes for such a good scapegoat. Because she may be rich, but she isn’t powerful; an outsider not connected to the real powers in the land, the people running the US government and the US businesses. As Walsh puts it:

To help retard the development of a rational opposition to the current political and social state of affairs, the media cultivates an artificial hostility toward much easier targets. A seething but politically confused population is fed victims, sacrificial lambs, so to speak, while the real criminals go about their business.

The aim, conscious or otherwise, is to make sorting out what is actually taking place in the country more difficult by encouraging a facile and undemanding (and perhaps temporarily cathartic) outrage against a Paris Hilton or some other such figure. The population is intended to feel, falsely, that its cause has been served and blows have been delivered against the rich and powerful, when all that’s happened is a young woman guilty of a misdemeanor has gone to jail for a month or more.

By offering Paris Hilton as a figure to hate, attention is deferred from the systemic failures of capitalism unto the moral failings of an individual. If we believe that the problem with Paris Hitlon and others like her having personal fortunes the size of a small country’s annual budget while thousands of others have to sleep under bridges and eat out of garbage cans is not that a system which allows such gross inequalities is wrong and immoral, but only that some people cannot handle wealth well, then we will accept that others with great wealth but the tact not to flaunt it so much, do deserve their wealth and we accept that the system as it exists is right and proper.

Strange Times Indeed…

Published on June 11, 2007

…when ir’s the Tories that are making the anti-racist noises.

Hazel Blears, evil dwarf, New Labour careerist to beat all careerists and candidate for the deputy leadership, has been, like Gordon Brown last week, making dog-whistle noises to BNP voters:

Labour chairman Hazel Blears was accused of stereotyping immigrants today after suggesting that the public associated them with anti-social behaviour.

The deputy Labour leadership hopeful expressed concern that people in her Salford constituency were “worried” about changes in the community.

“We have got areas in Salford where private landlords are letting properties with 10 and 12 people in there,” she said.

“Now, the community doesn’t object to the people – they object to the exploitation and the fact that that leads to people being on the street drinking, anti-social behaviour.

“They don’t object to the people being there, but they object if they are undercutting wages and not getting the national minimum wage and they are not abiding by health and safety, so you have got to enforce the law.”

What I object to is underqualified midgets ith the compassion of a rabid stoat aspiring to political leadership via nastiness, racism and botox.

But never fear, Tory shadow Home Secretary David Davis was on Blears like white on rice:

Her comments, in an interview with the Independent on Sunday, prompted Shadow Home Secretary David Davis to blame her for the public’s concerns.

“It is wholly irresponsible for Ministers of the Crown to stereotype any group in society,” he said.

“If anybody is responsible for the concerns about immigration – on housing, education or indeed community relations – it is a Government that, while Hazel Blears was a Home Office Minister, allowed 600,000 immigrants to enter the country in one year.”

Well, quite.

It really has come to something when it’s the Conservatives you have to rely on to protect us against government ministers’ politically expedient racism.

Finally, An Outbreak Of Clue

Published on June 7, 2007

Connecticut ‘Porn Popup” trial teacher Julie Amero has won a retrial, with the help of geekdom:

A US judge yesterday ordered a retrial of a schoolteacher found guilty of computer porn charges after a sustained campaign by internet specialists proclaiming her innocence.

Julie Amero, 40, was convicted in January of being responsible for a series of sex advertisements that popped up on a classroom computer and were seen by pupils, in a case that has caught nationwide attention and raised important questions about content control on computers.

The prosecution at the trial in Connecticut had claimed she must have clicked on the websites for the adverts to begin appearing. But after the trial, 28 computer science academics in the state sought to prove that the rapid-fire sequence of pop-up sex advertisements could have appeared automatically.

More…

Common sense 1, stupidity 0.

Comment of The Day: Tell It, Sister!

Published on June 6, 2007

From the Tantrum Of The Week section at Bad Mothers Club:

Men who sit with their legs spread on the tube Janep

Listen you selfish, space grabbing prat. You don’t see women lolling all over the seat, spilling into their neighbour’s space. Oh no – we keep our arms folded, our bag on our lap and our legs crossed. But not you – SHORTARSE. You have to sit there with your elbows poking into me, and you flabby legs wide apart. You may be trying to give the message that your cock is SO BIG that you have to keep those legs wide to give the beast plenty of room. But what you’re really saying is: “I am insecure and selfish. And I’m shit in bed”.

That goes for metros, trams, buses and trains too; in fact anywhere where women and men sit together in public. For once and for all, no, we don’t want to see your balls. When we do, we’ll ask.

Watch Out, Watch Out, Holiday Snap Thief About

Published on June 6, 2007

Ananova:

Teen found herself on porn cover

A 17-year-old Staffordshire student is taking legal action after finding her photograph on the front cover of a porn film.

The snap of Lara Coton – taken on a family holiday when she was just 14 – was being used by US adult entertainment firm TVX Films for Body Magic.

Last year Lara e-mailed the picture to an art website, which displays work from photography students across the UK, reports the Daily Telegraph.

Her mother, Christine, had taken the photograph inside their hotel room in Blackpool in 2004. She captured her daughter wearing a black top hat and black dress.

Lara, of Tamworth, Staffs, found the photograph on the front of the American porn film earlier this year after a friend tipped her off.

She said: “I was horrified when I found out it was being used to sell a porn film.”

She wants compensation for her image being used without consent.

TVX Films claims it was entitled to use the picture because Lara had put it in the ”public domain” but has agreed to change the cover.