Trumps. What Donald Trump actually said:

“I like Mexico, I love the Mexican people, I do business with Mexico,” he said. “But you have people coming through the border who are from all over and they’re bad, they’re really bad … We have people coming in and I’m not just talking Mexicans, who are killers, they’re rapists, they are people we don’t want in this country.”

within hours, social media and the main stream media was awash with outrage claiming that Trump had said ‘all Mexicans are rapists’. He didn’t.

Then he followed this up by saying that:

“I supported him for president, I raised a million dollars for him, that’s a lot of money, I supported him, he lost, he let us down. But you know, he lost, so I’ve never liked him as much after that, because I don’t like losers… He’s not a war hero…. He’s a war hero because he was captured.

Now the definition of a Hero is a person of courage. I agree with Trump on this one – John McCain is a rightly applauded veteran, but to be courageous is to have a choice and decide to take the tougher option. To be courageous is to volunteer for military service in the first place, as opposed to being drafted. To be courageous is to volunteer for duty in the bomb disposal squad when you could have done potato peeling duties far behind the front line. Gary Powers was courageous when he signed up to fly state of the art planes – he wasn’t courageous for getting shot down, he wasn’t courageous for surviving two years in a Russian prison – he had no choice in those events. Yet those are the events that Hollywood and the US propaganda machine laud him as a ‘Hero’ for.

Can you be a Hero when you have no choice in the matter? I don’t think so.

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Tramps? Ashley Madison, the ‘discrete dating site for married couples’. Where to start?

Allegedly 37 million people in the world have declared themselves to be married but open to having an affair, if the figures given for registration on this site are to be believed. Apparently 20%, one in five, of the good citizens of Ottawa. which is the site’s home base, are signed up to the ‘service’. Reuters is reporting that the most common post code registered in Ottawa is that of the main Parliament building…

Is there any evidence that the people registered on this site are married? Or is it just another on-line dating service getting world wide publicity? Not so very long ago the BBC were happily publicising the Singlemuslim.com site which boasted a million members in the UK. Any evidence that none of the people using that site were already married? No, I didn’t think so.

Then there is Muslimatrimony.com which allows you to search for partners not only by sect, but by the particular doctrine of Islam that they follow – as opposed to Ashley Madison which allows you to search by those who subscribe to the particular sexual practice which you enjoy/endure. Masochists and Sadists can meet up and live happily for ever after…

Now one of the moral guardians which inhabits the lower levels of the Internet has hacked into the site and is apparently blackmailing the company/the individual subscribers with exposing them as ‘dirty scum’.

In the curious world of the Internet social justice keyboard warriors, selecting your life partner by racial profiling is perfectly acceptable, selecting your life partner by sexual profiling is not.

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Trims? The ongoing saga of ‘Female Genital Mutilation’.

Reports that at least 50 girls were taken from the UK to Somalia for female genital mutilation are being investigated by Scotland Yard.

Baroness Tonge was on a flight to Ethiopia at what is apparently ‘the start of the cutting season’ and decided that seeing so many women and girls on one flight was evidence that they were being taken to Somalia for the purposes of FGM. The Police have now committed themselves to interviewing those teenage girls on their return from holiday and asking them whether they still have their clitoris or not…

It is said that FGM is wrong because these are children who have no say in whether they are mutilated or not. That the procedure can result in horrific bleeding and infection since it is not always carried out in clinical conditions. I agree.

It is also said that in some Arab countries the practice is defended as being ‘part of their custom’ and something that has been done for hundreds of years. This is the same argument that is used to justify those in the UK who can see no reason why they shouldn’t continue to take a pair of scissors to their male children:

Manchester Royal Children’s hospital reports that it treats around three cases of bleeding circumcisions every month. In 2009 alone, in one hospital in Birmingham, 105 boys were treated at A&E for complications after circumcisions. One per month had life-threatening injuries. In June, a letter to the newsletter of the British Association for Community Child Health reported on some of the injuries caused by unlicensed circumcision practitioners in the Bristol area. They included a fractured skull caused by a baby falling off a kitchen table during a home circumcision.

I can imagine the outcry if a plane load of returning ex-pat oil workers landing in Addis Ababa were lined up to be interviewed as to whether they still had their foreskin or not – accompanied by world wide publicity and condemnation of the British practice of MGM.

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Tom’s? I have to address the ‘Tom O’Carroll’ saga. Overnight, my inbox has filled up with some pretty vile e-mails demanding I make my views on Tom O’Carroll clear. One even demands that I ban him from this site. I have no intention of doing so. I only ban people who repeatedly plant libel on the site or use foul language and make unwarranted claims about other posters which destroys the open debate we all enjoy so much here.

Paedophilia is wrong. Paedophilia refers to someone who has a sexual interest in pre-pubescent children, so typically those under the ages of 11 or 12. I absolutely agree that engaging with sex in children that young can cause lasting harm. I don’t condone the practice in any form. Because I don’t condone it, I am interested in what can be done to protect children from such harm. That means learning how it comes about, what are the facts, what can be done to make sure that those who have such interests are helped to protect children?

It doesn’t mean shutting my ears to those who understand paedophilia – and Tom O’Carroll has spent many years writing about the subject, studying it, and learning about it. No, I don’t agree with everything he says, as I don’t agree with everything a lot of people say about a lot of subjects.

However, he does talk a lot of sense about some issues. One of the things I did when I first listened to the recent Australian ’60 minutes’ broadcast, was to go to Tom’s site and read the full transcript of the whole interview. He had made a recording of the interview. It made for a very different impression of Tom’s views than the excerpts that were taken out in typical tabloid fashion by the Australian programme. No surprise there.

One of the things I totally agree with Tom about was the current fashion for claiming that finding a fifteen year old girl sexually attractive makes you a paedophile. It doesn’t medically – but acting on that attraction certainly does legally – that is the law, and I abide by the law.

If having sex at 15 was capable of ruining you for life, turning you into a drug addict, alcoholic, shoplifter, insert problems of choice, then the entire French female nation would be traumatised for life and deserving of ‘compo’. Ditto Spanish womanhood. It is obvious nonsense, and I applaud Tom’s courage (for he does have a choice!) in continuing to point this out. Equally for continuing to point out that those under the age of 16 are perfectly capable of enjoying sexual activity. Children as young as four or five can engage in masturbation.

I profoundly disagree with Tom as to whether this means that the law should be changed, or those of tender years should be given legal permission to engage in such sexual activity.

Apparently, for such is the tone of the various red hot e-mails I have received, I should now denounce Tom as a paedophile, along with Rolf Harris, Jonathan King, ban them from my blog and hound them across the internet. That is not going to happen. For three reasons.

1) I believe in listening to both sides of an argument. You learn nothing by living in an echo chamber. Besides, people are more than just a conviction. Their sexuality is just one part of their personality and being happily married I find it quite easy to engage with a large number of people of both sexes without engaging with their sexuality, thank you.

2) No matter how heinous the crime, you are entitled to be judged on the facts and defended fairly by outlining both the facts in favour of your guilt and those that disprove it. Where there are facts ignored by the main stream media that throw doubt on accusations, even convictions, I shall continue to publish them. I’m not interested in a mud-slinging contest nor mob rule.

3) No matter how heinous the crime, where you have been judged, sentenced and have served your time, as in the case of Jonathan King, society at large, and certainly I, have lost the right to impose further punishment.

I find it offensive that ‘internet figures’ for want of a better phrase, would seek to silence certain voices on the grounds that their public trial has revealed facts so heinous they no longer have the right to speak or be treated with any civility – and yet we know nothing of those who sit in internet judgement. I’m particularly mindful of the recent northern Ireland case of a man who spent his days ‘exposing paedophiles’ and publicising their addresses, who when taken to task turned out to be a sex offender himself.

So – you are wasting your time e-mailing me, or trying to drag me into ‘Twitter wars’ – I have better things to do with my time, and nothing is going to change on this blog.