Rant of the Week: Stupid People (pt. II)

Two words.

Countryside Alliance.

I'm sure people would be more willing to accept their points of view, and listen to their arguments, if they didn't choose the world's greatest cretins to argue on their behalf.

Case in point: This morning, on Today, Simon Hart (head of the Countryside Alliance) was ebing interviewed. Now, given the grilling you'd normally expect on "Today" from John Humphreys you'd expect that you'd bone up on your subject, get some good examples and facts to hand.

But no.

Not Mr Hart.

What does he do?

His opening, main gambit is:

"All you have to do is look in the Sun today and see that every single person opposes the ban. And what the Sun says is usually indicative of what the population thinks."

Errrr.........NO!!!!!!!!

There are so MANY things wrong with that statement it makes my brain sore just thinking about it.

I loathe the Sun. I mean, I REALLY loathe it, in the same way that Saddam loathes Bush, and Donald Rumsfeld loathes humanity. I really REALLY hate it, and if there was ANYTHING I could do to bring it crashing to the ground, (preferably in an actual sense, burying certain people in News International with it), I would. It is an organ of hatred and perversity. It does more to damage inter-racial relationships, society relationships, and open-mindedness than any other newspaper.

But the thing is, it has to conform to company opinions, and when that company is News International, and the opinions are largely those of a certain CEO who owns most of the Western Media. I find it quite frankly incredible that a paper so against immigration is actually being prompted by the opinions of an Australian emmigrant, but then hypocrisy is quite common really in the media world.

Anyway, the thing is, the Sun no doubt received a great number of letters on the subject of hunting, but given that they take a Pro-hunting stance, they're hardly likely to:

a) cater to or be read by people who are anti-hunting, and

b) print letters that contradict their stance.

So a sample of letters in the Sun is hardly a balanced view of the opinions of society.

Secondly, of course, there's the fact that the Sun is read primarily in the South East. It has a vast readership, but if you go to, say the North West where I hail from, or the North East, you'll find very few people read it. Primarily this is because people haven't forgiven the paper for its coverage of the Miners' Strikes, or Hillsborough. But the point is that again, the Sun fails to account for a large and prominent part of society.

And for the leader of a supposedly serious part to use the Sun as a basis for his argument is unbelievable. Does he realise that people are not fooled by media bias? Does he himself not understand how the partisan press works? If the answer to either of these questions is yes, he should do the decent thing and resign. Or let himself be hunted out of his job.

I'm sure there is a reasonable case for hunting to be put. Personally I am against it, but then, I know that I'm not fully informed. I have never lived in an area of rural England where hunting is prominent, so I don't know the impact it has on local society. But as long as there are stupid, STUPID people like Mr Hart putting forward their case, the Countryside Alliance is never going to make headway, and never going to convince sceptics.