Dan from Wikio has been in touch looking for a loving, tender home for the preview of their latest Overall Blogosphere.

Some quick comments: The Craft blogs are taking over (a good thing)! Lib Dem Voice down, Labourlist up! Alex Massie on the rise! Mark leapfrogs me again, the rotter.

So without further ado…

It’s odd when journalists actually stick up for Lib Dems. It’s even weirder when they stick up for Lib Dems in error, too.

The controversy around the Adventure Playgrounds – that story where parents were banned from hanging around watching their kids – first caught my attention when The Heresiarch sent me a link to the Mayor Dorothy Thornhill’s comments. After contemplating suicide, I decided not to give it too much extra through. Life’s too short, isn’t it?

But, while I wasn’t paying attention, the story became huge and the Mayor’s comments on this subject were deleted. Luckily the Heresiarch had cut-and-pasted it into his own blog in full.

Here’s the relevant quote:

At one playground a few parents started to stay around for all the sessions, this increased to the extent that staff felt they were spending more time worrying about what the parents were up to rather than watching and supervising the children! They should not have been allowed to stay that’s never been the policy, so yes we were lax in allowing it and have now decided to tighten up.

Imagine what those same papers would say if a child was snatched from the playground and we were accused of allowing free access of adults onto our site. Or worse still one of those adults was using it to acquire knowledge of and groom other children – yes sadly it happens we all know that. Again, we would rightly be pilloried.

I’d say that’s a classic example of paedo-noia gone bonkers, starting with the staff (absolutely terrified) and then the politicians (absolutely terrified) and resulting in absolute stupidity.

John Rentoul, writing on his Independent Minds blog, draws our attention to a post over on Sadie’s Tavern – presumably because he wants to have a laugh at a rival over at the Observer. Oh dear. So, dutifully, I followed the link. What on earth could possibly have been written that would save that Mayor after what I’d read? Sadie writes:

Once again that tedious old high-Tory proponent of negative liberty, Henry Porter, heartens all would-be journalists by demonstrating that an inability to undertake the most basic research and a propensity to wilfully distort the facts through the medium of a writing style which would have a Key Stage 3 teacher weeping with horror, need not be a barrier to a lucrative column in a Sunday newspaper.

Oh no! Not a High Tory proponent of Negative Liberty!! Not an inability to undertake basic research and a propensity to wilfully distort facts!!

Here we go.. here’s the really great bit:

The Liberal Democrat Voice and the Liberal Conspiracy have comprehensively debunked the original Metro article that gave rise to Henry’s latest bout of apoplexy over ainshunt libertees which you should read in full. In summary: they are not “open access” playgrounds, they are supervised facilities in which the children undertake activities that could be dangerous if they are concentrating on making sure that their parents are watching them rather than watching what they are doing. And, in spite of the fevered imaginings of both Porter and the Daily Mail, there’s not a mention of a paedophile in sight.

Right. So an entirely different story to the one that came out of the Mayor’s mouth then?

Let’s see. Sadie has a quote from the Mayor!

“Quotes attributed to me have been taken out of context – I’m not saying adults shouldn’t be allowed on playgrounds – I’d go and shoot myself if this was the case – only on these specialised play facilities! We have 40 other playgrounds elsewhere in the Borough where parents are welcome to stay.”

WTF? Seriously? Hang on, let’s look again at what the Mayor actually wrote herself again:

Imagine what those same papers would say if a child was snatched from the playground and we were accused of allowing free access of adults onto our site. Or worse still one of those adults was using it to acquire knowledge of and groom other children – yes sadly it happens we all know that.

Hmm. Inability to undertake basic research and a propensity to distort facts? Fail, Sadie. Complete fail. I suppose, really, the original spin came from Lib Dem Voice though. Worrying.
UPDATE: The Mayor reposted the post here. I’m assured it’s word for word the same, although I’m not sure this substantially changes the story

Alcohol is a recreational drug. Most people tolerate it well – they use it in moderation and suffer very little in the way of side effects. It should be a model of how reasonable, self interested adults are perfectly capable, when they know the facts, of using recreational drugs in a mostly beneficial way.

We should be the kind of society where we can make informed, adult choices about these things. But informed, rational adults are not the target of the drug prohibition. It’s children and the yahoos and the donkeys that behave like children that seem to ‘demand’ that the state sets the boundaries for these children and wannabe children.

In this country we seem to have a problem with a minority abusing alcohol, causing havoc and chaos in our cities and town centres, making them no-go areas at night.

The state is attempting to lay down new boundaries for that too… but why? Why is it necessary? What’s wrong with our particular society that we’re like this?

I think I have a pretty good idea why we’re like this: Telling someone that’s drunk so much that they’re throwing up, yelling, screaming, fighting and behaving like a toddler that they’re utterly repulsive is less socially acceptable than getting paralytic itself. Infantalism is cool, rationality is not. Celebrating stupidity is hot, celebrating intelligence… well not in this lifetime. Bloody intellectuals, eh? What do they know?

But again, I ask: Why? Why are we like that?

We delegate the dirty work of being uncool, boring and judgemental to politicians…  and we all seem surprised when they’re utterly incapable of doing anything about it and slowly society seems to be getting further and further away from any hope of being able to end drug prohibition.

No matter how much better things might be without prohibition, the majority can only see the potential bad – that this is not a society mature or civilised enough to cope with the freedom.

How do you fight this? What do you do about this? Are we in a chicken and egg situation where the state will only treat us like adults if we behave like adults, or will we only behave like adults if we’re treated like adults?

Those of us that already behave like adults resent and hate being dragged under the control of the state for things that other people have done and do, like a squad of soldiers being made to do press-ups because one failed to shine his boots properly.

That’s our democracy though, isn’t it? We vote for the politicians that promise to ‘look after us’ and ‘be nice to us’ and ‘stop people doing bad things’ and we wonder why we get politicians that regard themselves as surrogate parents for a nation of children.

Yet perhaps it’s because this is a country with more rules than freedoms, where the level of inhibitions on our behaviours and controls on our lives has become so oppressive, so subconsciously unbearable (all these additional things on top of simply trying to raise a family and put food on the table) and so universal we’ve come to celebrate and admire those who seem to live beyond these rules, those who rebel – that we ourselves have created the climate where there are cultural incentives and advantages to hedonism, to completely letting go of all self control for a few hours to get away from it all.

So we love rebels, and we love to rebel… well, until we see the consequences of that uncontrolled abandon in the form of vandalism, violence, abuse and so on, at which point the politicians being in more laws, more rules and the pressure keeps building, and glamour of the rebel continues to grow. Round and round we go…

Any society that thinks hedonism is a substitute for liberty is always going to end up like ours, isn’t it?