Illegal drugs are not medicine. If they weren’t harmful, they would be available in pharmacies. Some people think climate change scientists are not the best judges of whether climate change is real. Other people think doctors are not the best judges of what you should do when you have a mental illness.

Watching what the media has been doing on a variety of issues lately has made me lose all respect for most journos so I wasn’t appalled at the behaviour of the NotW but not really surprised. Noone reins them on and demands ethics and moral conduct from journos anymore – the lies they continue to sprout about climate change and the carbon tax and the deliberate misuse of language with asylum seekers have shown most of them no longer are independently reporting facts anymore.

It’s a bad time for the newspaper business, sales are going down and they are doing a poor job of illustrating why we should respect the work that they do. To me this phone hacking business shows how desperate they were for a scoop to sell papers. Pity. Because we’d all buy and read intelligent analysis and real in depth commentary on the many current issues that matter today. Instead of this titillation that they think we want.

Like you I never read gossip magazines. I’ve never been able to see the point in reading what is obviously fiction -make that lies -about real people without a consideration of the consequences to those people. You don’t have to read any more than the headlines as you stand in the check out queue to work that out.
This makes me look at the current News International scandal slightly differently from many people. While it’s indefensible by any standard I don’t think that the newspapers are the only ones to blame. If those stories didn’t sell newspapers the journalists wouldn’t have felt free to do what they did and, to me, this makes everyone who bought and read those newspapers also culpable or, at the least, complicit.

I think if people listen to lines in a song and think they understand the whole message, rather than listening to the whole song and hearing what it’s really about, well, then I’d be in a world with a different IQ average.

I heard a really interesting Hack on Triple J the other day about how they are now looking at treating substance abuse and mental illness together and that going cold turkey on substances is not always the best route, especially when the substances are self medicating.

And I don’t care if she decided it was not helping her, she shouldn’t have used her influence to shit on it. If just one person who could have been helped by rehab decided not to go because of that song…well, I just hope that didn’t happen.

As for the sexism stuff, you are no doubt right about that.