Thersites Writes

Yet again, that smug thug, the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (who I will now refer to as 'Thingy' as repeatedly typing his surname is a surefire route to RSI) is rattling his sabre. Iran continues to try to get nukes (for civilian purposes, honest guv!), destroy Israel, spread Persian hegemony across the Middle East and generally be a shit. No change there, then, but it's now helmed by someone who looks like a stoned Alan Rickman and who can't be arsed to do up his top shirt button or wear a tie. The scruffy git.

It'll all end in tears. No matter how big and strong you are, it's never good to piss off neighbours who hate you anyway. There are enough Sunni Muslim states and indeed well-armed Israelis willing to bury the hatchet (in the nearest Shia, alas) and stand up to the yobs from Tehran, including Thingy.

Plus, Thingy is making enemies here, there and everywhere. If you really want to be a world power, do you really want to threaten the destruction of Europe and the US? True, everyone in the EU are, as a rule, too shit-scared to stand up to the Islamist ASBO brigade. But that can and will change - it's a fact that worms will eventually turn if you step on them enough.

That's bad news if you're a moderate Muslim and it's you who's getting the rubber glove treatment from overzealous coppers. But there's a certain callousness on the part of radical Islamists towards their 'brothers'. If a few or many get harassed, beaten, lynched or beaten up, then it's a golden opportunity for cheap propaganda. And hey - if they were good before they snuffed it, they'll probably go to heaven, so it doesn't really matter anyway...

(And that's what defines Islamic extremism - a tendency, indeed a need, to find a convenient get-out clause for everything, allowing one to be a total twat and still sleep at night. For if truth be told, the Islamists are more like traditional politicians and media whores than they dare admit. It's all self-serving realpolitik, hot-air rhetoric and weasel-words once you strip away the zeal.)

But perhaps what will do for Iran, other than a hail of Israeli warheads, is its own success. Since 1979, the Iranian population has boomed, with the average age now being around 24.8, and a growth rate of 1.1% in this year alone. [SOURCE] And there's nothing more damaging to a bunch of corrupt, ageing, stuffy old git mullahs and their toadies than a large number of bored, well-educated young people.

Perhaps that's why Thingy uses a potent cocktail of religion and nationalism to drug the masses. But what happens when those ambitions are frustrated?

Thingy and his mates might well be happy to live in a Sharia cage, enforced by bearded bootboys masquerading as a decency police. But for the young of Iran, living in that cage for the rest of their lives must seem a dismal prospect.

And so, it may well be that the Iranian regime will come crashing down once its first true crisis comes along. But whether that will be the passion of youth or a nuclear winter is yet to be decided. For now, it's happy to keep on playing chicken with its enemies, and may yet have to be plucked…

So, violent porn is getting banned in the UK and we'll all now sleep safely in our beds. Hurrah!

Actually not. First of all, a pervert is a pervert, so if we somehow stop his supply of filth, that in itself is not going to stop him carrying out crimes. Vigilance may, though, and so could everyone looking out for everyone else a bit more.

But the thrill we get by symbolically purging ourselves of the latest scapegoat, be it guns, dangerous dogs or tacky Italian video nasties in the 80s, has always vetoed common sense, so there you go. And in that vein, the proposed law makes a sweeping assertion that all violent porn is immoral. True, if it features unwilling parties or encourages genuinely depraved behaviour like child abuse or bestiality, then throw the book at 'em.

But while violent porn involving willing parties isn't your cup of tea, and is certainly not mine, why shouldn't consenting adults watch what other consulting adults do? It's as if the notion that DIRTY PICTURES are a terrible thing in and of themselves, irrespective of whether a person is or isn't being preyed upon in them.

And that's the point: the crack down is just another symptom of the UK's dysfunctional relationship with sex. We're still wrestling with sex education while teen pregnancies and VD infection rates go through the roof. We get into a fix over violent porn, but magazines, media and society splash semi and fully nude images everywhere.

Our hypocrisy in this regard is equal to that of prisons where you get treated like one of the lads if you run over and kill a toddler, but get lynched if you molested him or her first.

And it's ironic too on the one hand that we can no longer look at bondage vids, but the BBC is still happy to show footage of a biker nearly crushing a WPC beneath his wheels. Ah, but you see, that's just violence. No one got an erection or anything...