No sooner has fundamentalist fruitcake Stephen Green been revealed as a raving wife-beater than the recently appointed member of the Advisory Council on the Misuse of Drugs, Dr. Hans-Christian Raabe, is removed from his post after apparently "failing to disclose" that he was an insane homophobic bigot before accepting the job. As this article says, it's not just the bigotry that debars him - in fact you could just about argue that if it's unconnected to the job then it shouldn't, though I'm not sure that's an argument I'd run with - it's the more fundamental lack of concern for evidence and, well, just reality in general that's the problem.As amusing as this is, and as much as I'm enjoying my piping hot Quaker Gloatso Simple, it really is a bit piss-poor of the appointing committee not to have done even the most elementary bit of checking of reality outside of the airbrushed version of his CV that Raabe presumably presented them with. A simple Google search would have done the job.
2 comments:
But what is strange to say the least is how did he get appointed in the first place? I would have thought that those operating any normal selction process would have seen through him at the first stage. To be paranoid, was there a fundamentalist agenda?
I don't know about that, I just think there's still an ingrained cultural inclination to give bigotry and intolerance a free pass if it happens to have a religious banner attached to it.
It also seems that homophobia is just about still OK in those circumstances, whereas, say, racism wouldn't be.
So we wouldn't be having this argument if Raabe was saying: basically, I favour forcible repatriation of the Pakis and rounding up and firebombing the coons, but you can't use that as a reason to sack me from my job at the ACMD because it's not directly relevant. No-one would think that was a sensible argument, but there are those (mostly Daily Mail journalists, admittedly) who are filing this one under It's Political Correctness Gone Mad.
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