Thursday Musings

So, did you see that video of Rishi Sunak and his motorcade the other day?  You know the one - his car is accompanied by hordes of coppers on push bikes and hordes more running alongside the vehicle, huffing and puffing.  It was all very bizarre and perplexing - when I worked in Whitehall, I saw the late Queen's motorcade sweep past every so often, (usually with some visiting foreign dignitary sitting alongside her), and her limousine was only ever accompanied by a couple of preceding motorcycle cops clearing junctions and a couple of Range Rovers, fore and aft, packed full of armed policemen.  All I could think, watching Sunak's OTT motorcade was, couldn't all those Metropolitan Police officers have been better employed molesting women, fitting people up or shooting black people?  Or maybe that's the point - this is the government's solution to a lack of public confidence in the Met in the wake of all these revelations of wrong-doing by its officers: take the worst offenders off their normal duties and assign them to protecting the Prime Minister.  That way, their opportunity for raping, beating, murdering and being generally misogynistic, homophobic and racist to the public will be severely limited, with Rishi keeping his eye on them personally.

It's been a week of bizarre stuff - just the other day I saw something along the lines of 'Lesbian Visibility Week' trending on Twitter.  Does this mean that there are invisible lesbians out there?  Is it a lesbian thing, being invisible?  I mean, if there literally were invisible lesbians out there, it would really freak out those crazy right wingers in the US - they could find themselves sharing elevators and stuff with lesbians and never know it.  Which, for their mindset, would be utterly terrifying.  Also bizarre has been Google's sudden decision that a trio of posts I made here fifteen years ago or so are, in fact, offensive.  Resulting in that idiotic warning about 'sensitive content' now coming up before you can click through to this site.  I'm still mystified as to exactly what is offensive about these particular posts that puts them above and beyond every other offensive thing I've posted here?  In one case I'm assuming that it is the 'offensive' language used, while another seems to cause offence by being a spoof piece about a non-existent porn film.  The third one seems to be objectional because it satirises several politicians and a religious figure, all long retired, by speculating as to what their sexual fantasies might be.  The reality, of course, is that no real, living and breathing, person has been offended by any of these posts - I know from my stats that nobody has read them pretty much since they were originally published.  Rather, I'm assuming that they've triggered something in Google's algorithm, (Google being Blogger's owner), resulting in the whole site being put behind a warning.

The trouble is that, even in their terms of service, Google/Blogger never really make clear exactly what they define as 'sensitive' or 'offensive' content, instead giving the usual vague guff about 'community standards'.  The fact is that just about anything can be offensive to someone and Google/Blogger are hugely indiscriminate as to where lines should be drawn.  Even if I just stuck to talking about films, for instance, they could arbitrarily decide that the sort of films I covered constituted 'sensitive' or 'offensive' material.  Anyway, the long and the short of it is that I've 'redacated' what I'm assuming are the offensive parts of those three posts, adding a note as to why this has been done.  I'll resubmit them in due course, to see if it makes any difference.  (I doubt that it will).  Quite frankly, though, I find this nonsense very exasperating and right now I'm considering setting up shop at Wordpress.com, taking all of the archived posts here with me.