Kill The Beast…

3 teachers from my brothers’ school have been arrested on suspicion of sex offences. Their names and faces are all over the news. 

Another person was arrested on suspicion on lighting the Maryville fire which killed 70 people, and is also accused of possession of child pornography.  The court has ruled that while it’s not okay to show pictures of him, his name, a rather unusual one, has been released.

Isn’t this…  a problem?  By making it known to the public who these people are, haven’t they been convicted before ever going to trial?

Of course, if this issue is raised in public discourse, the reaction is that people are trying to defend or shield pedophiles and arsons.  I think that demonstrates the point nicely.    Notice that it’s not that anyone is trying defend accused arsons or alleged pedophile.  The media may have to use those prefixes to keep within the law, but it’s rather ineffective if people don’t hear that word, and just hear the label after it.  I also don’t see how it’s fairer to the victims or their family that we throw all our notions of justice out the window, and latch on to whoever they throw to us at the time, tearing them to shreds.  Yes, that really makes things all better…

Okay, these people may well be guilty.  Maybe – just maybe – they’re not, and this is just a horrible turn of events in innocent people’s lives.  But they could well be guilty, they can’t be forgotten.  Even if they are guilty, they have families who are now being punished through public humiliation.  

Here’s another great example of the bloody-minded troglodytes that seem much too numerous here:  when Steve Irwin died, people started killing stingrays.  Even though stingrays don’t normally kill people and it was a freak accident.  The whole indiscriminate vengeance thing rarely achieves its ends on humans – such as the War on Terror – so how it was meant to work on stingrays I don’t know.  Then again, I might be overestimating their belligerence by seeing it as vengeance.  They probably just wanted to exterminate the species in order to avoid the danger of it happening again.  Sigh.

And then when there have been the recent spate of shark attacks, people went out and fished a couple of very large sharks, which made a bunch of marine biologists and conservationists facepalm a big dent into their foreheads.  It was so predictable, it makes me want to cry.

So on one hand I believe in the freedom of the press and freedom of information, but I’m losing faith in a lot of the freedoms and right to self-determination bullshit that I believe in, because I also believe in fair trial, and privacy so that morons aren’t prying into your life just because the police knocked your door down one night.  

And I find it so depressing that I think that the majority of people are stupid.  I thought I was average intelligence.  I’m not retarded, but I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed either, I probably will amount to nothing more than an office worker in my life and I think given the millions of years of evolution, the civilisations we’ve built, the fantastic technology we have, that this should indicate a population where I would be the average at least.   But given how averages are calculated, I think people stupider than me are more common than those who are smarter than me, and that’s a big disappointment.  Wait… not disappointment… the other word… screaming… terror…  suicide… nah, I can’t remember it now.    Whatever. 

End rant.