Formula One's Nazi Fun

Well well, Max Moseley, head of Formula One's governing body, seems to have got himself in a bit of a pickle in a Nazi Orgy!

Thankfully The Guardians Tanya Gold is on hand to provide some much needed sanity as the cogs of the morality machine grind into action and draw the usual contemptuous grumblings from the prudish and easily offended.

I fail to understand why this is even news! What he does in private with consenting adults is nobodies business to begin with and this just highlights the media's continuing obsession with all things sexual and says little nice about the fools who buy and read such dross. Including me I might add, although I add the caveat that if I was not blogging I would have never read it.

Once again we can see in action a strata of society that would like to regulate the goings on of adults in this country. Unfortunately the good and the great who watch over us seem intent on helping them. The Criminal Justice and Immigration Bill 2008 contains proposal for prosecuting those who pay for sex, and in Scotland they are using cameras to catch curb crawlers. Meanwhile, reports of thousands of women and girls trafficked into the UK for sex purposes each year are bandied about with seemingly little proof. Along with terrorism and child abuse, human trafficking is set to become another moral panic in the UK if we let it. We can be sure that a large amount of expensive police activity and probably many organisations and quangos will be needed to shore up the mythology. Thanks to the book Sex at the Margins: Migration, Labour Markets and the Rescue Industry by Laura María Agustín you can evaluate the facts yourself.

Max may be a dirty old devil for his game playing, but unless anyone was violently coerced or forced against their will to engage in his Nazi naughties, it strikes me that the police, media and us have a lot bigger things to worry about. Not least of all that printing this type of prurient interest nonsense is liable to arouse more nutters with a personal agenda of control and censorship. This puritanism and the nutters that subscribe to it, have manifested in our culture strongly over the last few years and as a collective they enjoy exploiting any sign of veering from their idea of normality, especially where men are concerned.

So, be they feminists, religious extremists of all hues, terrified parents or the victims of crime that seek justice over and above what the law has to offer we must be careful that little organisations do not start popping up all over the place with the sole purpose of curbing the often strange, but private behaviour of many of us.

Perhaps it is time we strengthened privacy laws so that what Max got up to could not even be published. A good start would be to give everyone copy write on their image and name. That way it could not be reproduced without permission or if there was a pressing public interest. Difficult to define I know, but lets start with privacy and work outwards, not the other way. The media may be forced to deal with the facts of a given situation rather than emotionalising issues and using images to influence a gullible public with little or no understanding of how manipulative the media can be.

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