Teenage lust

The New York Times has a fascinating piece about Chile's sexual awakening, which just goes to show what happens when governments try to suppress sexuality. Accompanying Dirty pictures are also available for the post-literate.

I only link to this because the likes of Family First and their family of fundies are constantly shouting for suppression; and they will be doing a lot more of during the election campaign - you mark my words. But it simply does not work. You try to stop kids doing something and they do it even more. Every parent knows that, surely. The same phenomenon happened in Spain after Franco died. It always happens that way.

Not, of course, that the politics of the fundies and the tories are evidence-based; quite the opposite. It is all about those jerking knees, not about facts. Such was shown recently when that nice Mr Key presented his revenge policy to a conference of professionals. His answer to teenage crime is boot camps, which do not work. The professionals were understandably annoyed. Nice Mr Key was upset that they did not understand him (what was he thinking?) and wailed "they actually do work." But, as I said before, they do not. If they did, the likes of Mr Key and the oh-so-scholarly and visionary Maxim Institute would be able to come up with case studies, evidence, that sort of thing. But there is none, because boot camps are no more than the concrete reaction to the seething desire for revenge on young criminals: "teach them a lesson, give them discipline." So send them to camps where they can get fit and disciplined - necessary qualities for their future lives in the criminal gangs that they will meet in the camps.

But then who needs facts when feelings will do? Well, the righties want some facts to support their feelings, but there are none. So they sulk and claim that there is a mean and unfair conspiracy of lefty social worker do-gooder academic ivory tower type people. But that is not enough, so they make up their own facts, like that Paul Cameron did when he could not find any social science to support his prejudice against gays. Either that or, as Mr Key did, they simply repeat what everyone who works in the professional areas knows to be untrue, as if saying it often enough would make it true.

Of course, righties know that if you say something often enough, it takes on a quality parallel to being true: a state where it appears to be true and the truth appears to be false, if it is known at all. Such a parallel reality can be found on the troll farm which is uthink, where the resident Epsilon-minus Semimorons grunt to one another, seemingly under the impression that it was the wayward youths who were booing Mr Key, not the professionals charged with their care. Really. It is no wonder that the likes of Mr Key can become leader of the tory party, when his supporters are this stupid.

Let me tell you another. An Olympic athlete and his mate walk into a bar and beat up a customer, apparently for wearing a pink polo shirt - an obvious sign of sexual deviancy. And what happens? The athlete gets diversion and name suppression; and he gets a scholarship to do more athletics at the taxpayers' expense. Shall we wait for the Sensible Sentencing Trust to complain that celebrities get away with hate crimes because of name suppression? Shall we wait for Family First to protest against homophobic violence?

Nah, it's not worth the anticipation.