This post started life as two other posts, one about this story (BBC) and another about this one (also BBC), both of which served only to annoy me. When I originally wrote the posts, I found myself getting angrier the more I wrote; as is often the case with this sort of thing, the more you write, the more you see the issues with that about which you are writing, the angrier you get. It’s a classic example of positve feedback and it’s not, let me tell you, fun.
This morning, thinking to post both entries as one big one and maybe, in the process, tidy up some of the angry rhetoric and make it a lot less biased and me-centric than it originally was, I read this story, which whilst not actually directly related to either of the stories above, made me at least feel that someone else beside me – Jon Snow, no less – has a reasonable perspective on these things. Moreover, he isn’t about be strongarmed by people who love political correctness and the adherence to "the rules" above all else.
Because I cordially dislike bile in all its manifestations (to paraphrase Tolkein), I’m not going to give the original posts the oxygen they crave. They were opinion pieces and poorly-written ones at that. Instead, I’ll just leave the links up and let you form your own opinions. I’m not here to tell you what to think.