Paul Gambaccini
In that much referenced Nostradamus-like Bible of dystopianism 1984, George Orwell's hero Winston Smith's job is in admin at the Airstrip One (UK) Ministry of Information.
Memorably depicted by John Hurt in the film released in its intended year, Smith spends his days affixing gaffa tape over the faces of old newspaper reports of political enemies of Big Brother's ruling Party – or 'unpersonning' them, in Orwell's alternative language.
The parallels with Stalin's regime in the USSR at the time were clear, but Orwell often referred to the fact that both extremes of fascism and communism eventually met around the back and in the middle. We control the present and near future by editing the past, according to the government/media narratives of the day.
The General Data Protection Regulations Act of 2018 and Information Commissioners Office appear not fit for purpose. This is due to the loss of Agreed Terms – the 21st century professional class disavow all rules set, and literature written, by old or dead white men. Thus, the whole of culture is apparently in need of re-narrating from the positions of power which discriminatory practices like affirmative action, positive discrimination and other kinds of identity-based 'empowerment' policies have allowed.
A person cannot live by critical race and gender theory alone. In tandem with the popular book 'Why I am no longer Talking to white people about Race', a biological male over 40 might easily want to write one titled 'Why I am no longer Talking to women about Sex (Confessions of a Biological Male)'. New 'woke' criminologists vs traditionalist victims of false allegations are in a watchful, silent stand-off outside the courts, and even for the 4/5ths of those convicted who are factually guilty, if empathy is the new cultural currency, where does that leave those with degrees of autism or psychopathy?
And what does a conviction mean in an era of the Balance of Probabilities? The word ‘conviction’ means to be absolutely sure of something, but postmodern sex law is essentially based on the opinion of twelve easily quietened voices, which have already received their wisdom from a biased media, now fully preoccupied with identitarianism.
After twenty-plus years of drastically skewed allegations (and everything after), there are now legion associations of the spuriously convicted, and, to an extent, hope is in the sheer number of allegations. This is because the supposed decriminalisation of sexual assault so often referenced in that same misandrist media is simply a result of the massive scope-creep of sex laws throughout the 2010s. There aren't necessarily more sexual assaults happening, but the scope of what sexual assault is has been expanded to include all grey area misadventures and misunderstandings.
Online press reports are harmful to the concept of rehabilitation, and the longer biased reports remain online, the louder the spuriously convicted must shout about it. The culture wars and the justice industry have put seduction on trial, and the media bias in sex allegation reporting has its roots in a new form of gender authoritarianism.
Androphobia in UK jury trials directly leads to prison dysfunction being a result of the bias in the media. Sex Offender Treatment Programmes (SOTPs) are essentially a form of conversion therapy and being friends with a person convicted of a sexual offence (Pcoso) will lead to its own new media demonisation. This is despite the fact that one third of British men have a criminal record and supposed sexual offences can range from down-blousing and up-skirting to the keeping/trading of prohibited images, to third degree marital sexual assault.
Sigmund Freud in the 21st century has also been unpersonned by the psychological academy, probably due to his theory - gleaned from observing his patients - of 'penis envy' leading to 'hysteria' in some women. By the political strategy of scope-creep, a new understanding of hysteria as the legitimate howl of a supposed oppressed class of women has led to this new un-word being made essentially one of the new taboos in psychological circles.
On the subject of relabelling, the term 'sex offender' has become as toxic to one spuriously accused group as the N-word once was to another and become reserved as the ultimate diss (also see paedophile). Concepts such as natural justice and fairness are seen as outdated and antiquated constructs of a supposedly power-obsessed patriarchy, and that power-obsession has been truly transplanted.
This new puritan age has enabled Generation Sex Offender, essentially restricted to one sex, and with its origins supposedly in the 'rape culture' perpetuated by growing boys in the playground. This has led to the death of spontaneity, as when these boys grow, they are emasculated by a media that distrusts their very nature, leading them to doublethink their every natural instinct.
Misbalanced juries are another iteration of the post-Freud, rolling news media phenomenon. Even if the jury members are randomly generated by algorithm, it's unknown who's controlling the input, and in jury rooms there is no guarantee of genuine objective impartiality.
The Right to be Forgotten became law in the 2018 General Data Protection Regulations Act, with the exception of media reporting in the public interest – which seems to be whatever Ofcom, the police or the publication deem it to be. The desperation of local press over their dwindling circulations in the internet age is buoyed miserably along by this exception, stranding Pcosos on a weekly basis with bereft mugshots from some locally occurring fit-up twenty years prior.
Sex allegations can also be a matter of social class in prisons, as those incarcerated in the UK under Operations Midland, Yewtree and Metoo through the 2010s tended to be from the professional middle-classes, leading to a strange demographic shift inside, as those who were strangers to a conventionally 'criminal' lifestyle rubbed along with those less so.
These gentlemen convicts of the 21st century – traditionally 'Ticket of Leave Men' - would wax endlessly and understandably about such issues as Google vs the Right to be Forgotten in the popular Mailbag pages of Inside Time - the only decent publication readily available in prisons of note. This new cohort tended to have a Ministry of Justice-inflicted form of PTSD, along with their partners left behind, all socially shamed by a compliant, demonising media and communities that trusted that rather than the stunned silence of the families and loved-ones involved.
Should absent journalists report on trials? These identitarianism vs humanism battles are played out by barristers in front of already sceptical juries and public galleries, but then syndicated by police media departments to local papers, along with those unpersonning mugshots, to be indelibly embedded into the algorithms for technological eternity, enmeshing their subject in half-truths at best, perpetually suspending him/them in aspic.
All this is celebrated as a move towards ensuring 'enthusiastic consent' by digital missionaries who will use these reports as evidence of some kind of sexual assault pandemic, where in reality they are just manifestations of the Other Side of #MeToo, wrapped up in the philosophical problems of maintaining innocence. Central to these problems is the fact that the adversarial judicial system requires binary positions of guilt or innocence, when nearly all contested accusatory realities are somewhere between, so then having a system define them as a 'risk', in perpetuity. This turns lived reality inside out for the (ex-) Prisoner Maintaining Innocence.
Biology is in pitched battle with postmodern culture, and the new moral relativism of 'staying at the top of the media agenda' is held up by various protest groups from Extinction Rebellion to Rape Crisis as some sort of achievement in human rights, as opposed to the exercise in savvy PR it actually is. Shifty-eyed handmaidens to gibberish excel in the art of sledgehammer diversity, borne out by the fact that in 2002 there were 12,000 rapes recorded in the UK, and in 2022 there were 70,000.
This statistic leads the observant citizen to request that the Colleges of Policing and Journalism cease using the word 'victim' before verdict, and where a defendant pleads not guilty, this be substantially reflected in media reports. The terms #evidencenottargets and #novictimsbeforeverdict are increasingly trending on social media for a reason: Winston Smith needs to peel back that gaffa tape, apologise for his propaganda-propelled mindlessness, and go lie under a tree with Julia for a while.
By Sean Bw Parker
Please let us know if you think that there is a mistake in this article, explaining what you think is wrong and why. We will correct any errors as soon as possible.