Thersites Writes

Let me nail my colours to the mast here and say I support a woman's right to choose. Or, since I hate euphemisms, abortion. For those who claim I'm in favour of murder, I'd like to ask if it's any less of an act of murder to have an unwanted, unloved child born into this world? Or for that child to grow up poor because his or her mother got pregnant too young or for that child to be given up after its birth and passed from foster home to foster home, with no roots to speak of? Or is stopping the 'evil' of abortion worth the wretched sight of babies born permanently ravaged by their mothers' drug habits? You may as well dash the child's brains out there and then on the delivery room floor.

Or is it any less an act of murder for women's bodies to have their autonomy taken away by the state? Would you be so 'pro-life' if the precedent thus set lead to you not being able to do with your body in the way you want? If abortion is banned, it could well be a slippery slope. Either way, there would be a roaring trade in coathangers.

That said, I really hate the terms 'pro-choice' and 'pro-life'. It’s the sort of misleading Newspeak so beloved by our cherished New Labour government. 'Pro-Choice’ isn’t in favour of the foetus having a choice. (Not that it could anyway, but you get the point). And 'Pro-Life' doesn't rate the mother's life too highly either. (The implication being that the unborn child is far purer and so far worthier than the murdering slut carrying it is).

If either side had any balls, they'd call their stances 'Pro' or 'Anti' Abortion and be plain and honest about it. But that would yank away the self-righteous bullshit of ideologues trying to preach their epic battle against the forces of evil/Satan/infanticide/patriarchy/rape/incest. (Delete according to taste).

But still, stories like this make my blood boil. I think a later (as in, 20+ weeks) abortion is only right in extreme and/or life threatening circumstances. Having a clubfoot isn't, the last time I checked, a killer. It smacks instead of parents who are so damn vain and demanding, that a child with any flaws just simply won’t do. Heaven forfend that these (often well off) tossers have to put up with looking after a child with Down’s Syndrome, or Spina Bifida or, in one extreme case, is able to hear while their parents are deaf. Gene scanning just commodifies the human condition. It also lets parenthood – already one of the dodgiest and least reliable of professions – run amuck with its petty egotism and small-dicked desire for control. (Cleft palates aren’t an excuse either.)

Far be it for me to be controversial at this point, but at their most extreme, ‘Pro-choice’, ‘Pro-life’ and Nazism all connect at their most extreme points. They all objectify people’s bodies, all get drunk on their own piety and they all make far too narrow judgements on who does and doesn’t get to live. If you don’t want your child because their left leg is slightly wonky, or you’ll force a young girl to give birth to her rapist’s child then you’re marching to the tune of the truly sinister whether you like it or not.

The hard and sharp answer to the abortion debate is that there has to be a balance struck between ‘choice’ and ‘life’. I don’t think there should be laws stopping mothers getting abortions in most cases. But this needs to go hand in hand with the consensus that disability is not a ‘problem’ and that every child born should be valued. Whether or not parents with ‘hard’ lifestyle choices have abortions is one thing, but we should all reserve our right to condemn them for it nonetheless. To sum up, Abortion is too complex an issue to be solved with one simple, pat answer. Not that this will stop anyone.

I watched Oldboy last weekend... And came away much in the same state that I did after watching The Baby Of Macon or Last House On The Left. It's not so much a film as one of those Catholic pilgrimages where you flay yourself and wear sack cloth: a director's pompous desire to punish his audience rather than stimulate it, for some unknown higher purpose.

What starts out as an interesting action film/thriller degenerates into a pretensious slough of improbability, flat and univolving characters, silly histrionics and the sense that director Park Chan-Wook is a depressed nihilist, in the style of Thomas Hardy, who wants everyone else to feel the same way.

I suppose the film's point is the futility of revenge, but that's all very well when the director seems to be wagging a finger in the face of the audience for daring to enjoy the protagonist, Dae-Su, get his own back. You can't help feeling that Park is too defeated and unhappy to face up to his monsters so punishes his character and the audience for engaging theirs. He probably realised, too, that the film was getting to be too enjoyable, so threw away some of the most interesting ideas and concentrated on being bleak, morbid and obscure. The 'twist' was also plain silly and contrived.

It's not half as good as it claims, is a depressing chore to watch and isn't much more than a day out for a director's hobby horse. No wonder the fanboys loved it - pretensious and masochistic crap always impresses the pseuds. It's also vague enough to project your own self-congraulatory readings onto it, but I think that's more down to Park's limitations as a director than any grand plan on his part.

All in all, avoid.

A Heavy Metal band wins Eurovision, and the Grauniad can barely hold back its contempt.

Seriously, though, since when did such a pack of vain, overpriveleged tossers wield such influence anyway? If you're not 'cool', by Grauniad/Islington standards, then you're scorned by everyone else.

If you don't believe me, look at the charts, the music mags, TV, the radio. They all echo the Grauniad line, whether it's a taste for cheezy crap pop, inane indy or a patronising 'pat-the-ghetto-on-the-head' love of Hip Hop. While we claim to be a 'classless' society, it's class as in good taste and self-determination that's been lost.

We still all secretly yearn to be told how to think, what to wear and what to buy by whom we consider our social betters. This consensus dates back to the time when British music stopped selling abroad and started becoming an onanistic chat between guffawing twats in moptop haircuts who all go to Oxbridge and then put on Mockney accents to get on television.

And like all elites, the Islington Twats can't bear to be challenged. Lordi's win and the 12 points the UK gave this band got the Guardianistas puking - how dare those kitsch peasants in their semi-detached houses and second hand cars vote for this squareness? The Grauniad can't bear to take criticism on its blogs from readers - that's usually a sign that they can't see others as anything other than subordinates. The Guardian's centre-left politics lets you enjoy feudalism's benefits with a dash of guilt in lieu of absolution, just like how the Catholic Church used to let off all those depraved French aristocrats.

But here's a radical idea. Just love the music you really like. Fuck the NME, fuck Alex Petridis, fuck those twats who think you're a joke 'cos you don't frog march to their Horst Wessel theme of listening to what you're supposed to and not what you like. Listen to Heavy Metal! Jazz! Bolivian pan pipes! Elevator music! Bird song! Tatu!!!

Or as Lordi put it, "Would You Love A Monsterman?" If so, you can love your record collection too.