A Small Victory for Personal Liability

There are meagre pickings to be had in the quest for reassurance that we haven't quite turned into America yet, and people can actually be held accountable for their own stupidity. This is one of them: a daft young chef acquitted of a rape since the woman concerned was paralytically drunk and then apparently decided to take out her hungover self-loathing on the most obvious external target. It's more than likely that in the moral outrage-driven States the undeniably sad little opportunist accused would have been given no benefit of doubt and would be trying to count bricks by now through buggery-moistened eyes. At least some notion of the value of Blackstone's Formulation still seems to apply to our legal system.
It was heartening, too, to see the backlash against Julie Myerson and her book about her estranged, dope-addled teenage son, in which she bizarrely managed to adopt some moral high ground in bleating to the world of the evils of skunk while profiting amply from her son's personal problems and abdicating all responsibility for the mess he was in at the same time. It's so much easier to blame consumption of Things Which Are Not Allowed when things go wrong (and therefore, pointing the finger at both someone and something other than yourself), rather than allowing any doubt to creep in that maybe making a living off the foibles of your children as your muse, since their very birth, isn't exactly conducive to them thanking you for it when they realise what you've been doing. Particularly when it was apparent to anyone reading year upon year of her regular Living with Teenagers column between the lines that here was one self-regardingly parasitic piece of parenting that was bound to create damaged goods.
But it's the prerogative of the twattering classes to shift culpability onto anything they don't want to understand, much as right-wing Little Englanders can always be relied on to attribute a goodly portion of society's ills to immigrants. Left to them, we would soon end up in a transatlantic culture of victimhood and drown in a morass of suing. Well, not quite yet.

On a footnote: my satisfaction didn't escape unsullied after all. Peter Bacon, the aforementioned chef, left the court hearing declaring 'It's awesome to be able to walk free'. Yes. 'Awesome'. Oh rats' cocks.