Do you wanna be in my gang?

If you're on Twitter you can't help but have noticed last week the Twitterati throwing what I like to call a "twitfit", an outpouring of sturm und drang in 140 characters because former glam rock musician and convicted pedophile Gary Glitter had popped up on the popular microblogging site to announce a comeback tour.

As you would expect there were plenty of your standard neanderthal "Kill all peedofils they is scum, innit" tweets the majority were of the "Ew, throw this man off Twitter. Why doesn't somebody do something!" flavour... which as it turns out was exactly the point the troll who created the fake account was aiming for. In a statement this person, whoever he is because with a sense of irony he posted his manifesto anonymously, said he'd created the stunt to highlight that "OK you know Glitter is a pedo but how many more are there on the net that your kids are talking to that you don't know about" and calling for anyone on the sex offenders register to be disallowed use of the internet in perpetuity and an end to anonymity on the net.

And so yet again we see that leader of the four horsemen of the infopocalypse, the eevil nasty peedofil, being trotted out into the arena and performing a few half-passes and 20 metre circles at canter for the benefit of the sheeple who all cheer when some scumbag politico then pipes up "You see there, peedofils! That's why we have to take away internet anonymity!".

Of course on a fully registered internet we know what you read, where you go, what you say. Back in your pens sheep, we wolves in Parliament know what's best for you and if you dare to say different well, off to market with you.

Another thing that got me thinking as a result of this was do we actually believe in a rehabilitative justice system? Now I hold no brief for the kiddy fiddlers (and quite frankly can't bloody stand children) but do we as a society believe that old canard about "having paid your debt to society" and once a criminal has served his sentence he is a free man with a clean slate? It would seem to me that in the case of one faded rock star in particular, we clearly don't.