Balance, Crime and Punishment and Rocking

This post is going to start off seriously and become lighter as it meanders. I don’t know why. It just will…

1. Balance
On the way in to London village this morning(*) I noticed a shop-front with the sign ‘Hillingdon Women’s Centre’.

I stared at the sign and my hackles began to rise.

If, I thought, the Hillingdon Women’s Centre is privately funded I really couldn’t care less. But if it receives just £1 of public money, where, I want to know, is the Hillingdon Men’s Centre?

Never mind whether or not there’s a need for one. There’s no equality in need.

A situation is either subject to equality or it is not.

As you might be able to tell, I do believe in equality. But I don’t believe in positive discrimination. I do believe in putting in place a legislative structure to ensure balance. But I don’t believe in quotas or check-box apportionment. I do believe in the best person for the job. I don’t believe in ‘the most appropriate’ person for the job.

I also believe that positive discrimination creates inequality at worst, and at best has enormous potential to breed dissatisfaction or even engender contempt.

And I’m not focussing on the Hillingdon Women’s Centre vs Hillingdon Men’s Centre as an example, but I’ll acknowledge that I am using this as a principle – a principle which I would apply to any gender or religiously orientated discriminatory-related bias.

In fact any kind of positive discrimination on the grounds of religion is fundamentally flawed before the ink is even dry on the paper – and I say this as an atheist.

How, asks my head, can any degree of balance be established between a religious organisation and atheism where there is no governing body? But it would be stupid to use the argument ‘people who belong to religious organisations need some kind of positive discriminatory mechanism but everyone who has no religious affiliation does not’; it lacks balance.

I also believe in crime and punishment.

2. Crime and punishment:
Those little bastards out there, those teenaged children standing at the roadside of the A40 throwing snowballs at the traffic as it drives past. They should be caught, handcuffed to the railings at the side of the road with their parents and every passing driver should be actively encouraged (if not paid) to throw snowballs at the little darlings.

For two or three days. At least.

3. Rocking:
I have finally fixed something that’s been annoying the hell out of me since, ooooh, well, since, ummm, since I installed this theme.

I have finally fixed the clock display on the toolbar. Down there, bottom right.

See?

It now has a 24-hour display.

Yes I know I got all of the other time displays to readout in the 24-hour clock ages ago, but the appropriate fix for the toolbar time has evaded me for weeks.

Until today.

Ha!

I rock. Sometimes.

Oh yeah… And I put an author archive tag on Soph’s name in the blogroll. Try it! It’s lovely! 🙂

(*) Yes, I made it in to work. By 08.35 I was sitting at my desk feeling ever so lonely. By 09.00 three of us were in – all long-distance travellers; one from Manchester, one from Nottingham and me. The locals were conspicuous by their absence.  🙂