Online Child Porn – What the Papers Aren’t Telling You.

In the wake of the convictions of Stuart Hazell and Mark Bridger for sexually motivated murders of children, the papers are awash with speculative commentaries on online child pornography. The Daily Mail (of course) wants to know ‘What WILL it take for Google to block child porn?’ even […]

“Sweet-looking girl’ in Platell’s ‘child porn’ video identifed

Yesterday I provided what I believe to be conclusive evidence that a ‘child porn’ video that Amanda Platell claims to have viewed as ‘research’ for an article published online by the Daily Mail on 24th May 2012 and as a double-page spread (pp18-19) in the print edition of […]

Platell’s ‘Internet Hell’: A 12-year-old Commercial Porn Video (NSFW)

Note: I don’t usually do content warnings but I have tagged this post as ‘NSFW’ – ‘Not Safe For Work’ – because of it’s textual content which includes a fairly frank commentary on pornography and, in particular, on a legally produced and marketed commercial porn video, dating from […]

Statistics Laundering, Online Pornography and the Daily Mail

For this article I’m going to return to a subject I covered yesterday, that of ‘porn statistics’ or, to be more precise, statistics published widely on both the internet and by newspapers and other media organisation which purport to show that large numbers of children and young people […]

Daily Mail in Bullshit Mormon Zombie Porn Stats Shock

The Daily Mail are back on the trail of mandatory internet porn blocking, courtesy of a survey by the National Association of Head Teachers which claims that 90% of parents want a default setting on computers and smartphones which prevents the viewing of adult material. And at the […]

Marriage Equality, Conservative Politics and the Religious Right

Ahead of today’s House of Commons debate on the Marriage (Same-Sex Couples) Bill and the raft of wrecking amendments tabled, for the most part, by Tory MPs, I think that it’s well worth reflecting on exactly where opposition to equal marriage is coming from and, particularly, how that […]

Step Away from the Statistics, Harriet…

In just the last week or so we’ve seen Iain Duncan Smith publicly rebuked by the UK Statistics Authority for making claims about the government’s policy of capping benefits that were “unsupported by the official statistics published by the department” and Michael Gove caught using unscientific polls commissioned […]

Nadine Dorries: Self Preservation Society

You would normally expect an MP who has only just had their party whip reinstated after a six month suspension to lie low for a while but not Nadine Dorries: Conservative MP Nadine Dorries has suggested she might run as a joint Tory-UK Independence Party candidate at the […]

Daft Idea #1 – Screaming Traffic Cones

Via the BBC I I’ve learned of a new health and safety measure that I fully expect to be doomed to be a dismal failure: “Screaming” traffic cones are to be used on motorways across England to protect road crews. The cones are fitted with an alarm that […]

Nadine Dorries: Swallow the Money (Updated)

Would you be surprised if I told you that, almost six months on from her all-too-public appearance on ‘I’m a Celebrity Get Me Out of Here’, Nadine Dorries still hasn’t registered her income from appearing on the show with the House of Commons authorities? In fact, according to […]