The murder of Sophie Lancaster - kicked to death by a pack of feral, pubescent chavs because she was dressed as a “goth” - might once have genuinely shocked us, rather than simply appalled us. Sophie, a gentle and intelligent soul by all accounts, had gone to the aid of her boyfriend who was being beaten by the youths; please stop, she pleaded. So they killed her and continued kicking her boyfriend.

Her murder was not shocking because such acts of motiveless violence have become very familiar to us, these past 10 years or so. And when you delve beneath the surface of this case, the stuff you discover is terribly familiar, too.

The perpetrators - Ryan Herbert, 16, and Brendan Harris, 15, staring out of their police mugshots, with pasty crop-headed faces which seem to betray intense stupidity mixed with arrogance. We’ve seen plenty of their kind before: kids who feel themselves to be beyond the law.

The fact that they were hanging around a local park in the small hours of the morning, their parents quite unconcerned as to where they were or what they were doing.

Then there’s the park itself; a familiar, frowsy, urban wasteland, the subject of continual complaints from local residents that drunken yobs congregated there late at night, vandalising property and threatening people - but neither the police nor the local council were sufficiently concerned to do anything about it. Park wardens, the council said, were too expensive.

The mother of one of the killers sitting in the police interview room, laughing and joking with her son, utterly devoid of contrition - too thick to possess a conscience or a sense of right and wrong.

And, of course, the one thing you would have predicted as soon as you read the headlines - that both boys had been previously convicted of an almost identical, motiveless, assault, in the very same place.

Hauled before the bored magistrates, they were sentenced to a brief spot of community service. No acknowledgment from the authorities that such reflexive violence might constitute a future danger to the public. Just go off and paint some walls, boys.

Ryan Herbert was a bit of a star. He’d been in a rap video about how people had better watch out if they ran into his gang - the threats delivered in excruciating whitey-in-da-ghetto patois. The video was a “youth project” funded by the local council. Someone thought that a constructive way to channel the energies of these scum was to indulge them in their violent adolescent fantasies.

They were indulged, mind, at every turn - by their parents, by the courts, by the council, by a government which wants to send fewer such people to prison. Poor Sophie Lancaster has paid the price for this serial indulgence. We should be appalled, but not surprised.

Congratulations are in order for an Oregon man, Thomas Beatie, who claims he is five months pregnant. His missus, Nancy, is absolutely delighted. Everyone else feels just a tiny bit queasy, although no less jubilant on their behalf. Thomas is transgendered; his, or her, real name, or previous name, is Tracy Lagondino.

But Tracy had certain surgical procedures done, a couple of swift hacks up top and a few injections of testosterone and lo, she is now Thomas. But clearly the doctors didn’t mess around too much with his womb. Her womb. Whatever.

Some ill-mannered people have shown outright repulsion, insisting that it is not natural for a man to give birth to a baby. According to a transgendered lobbyist, Christine Burns, “It’s like saying you can’t be a woman and have a career.” Um, well, it’s not quite like that, is it, Christine, love? Anyway, I think Thomas should meet his critics halfway and at least have a bit of a shave before going into labour.

Men are behaving a little oddly all over the world. In New Zealand a chap rang the police to complain that he had been raped by a wombat. I blame the global credit crunch. We men just don’t know how to cope with it.

Kettle, pot and a blond bouffant

Geert Wilders is a right-wing Dutch politician with a somewhat antagonistic attitude towards Islam; one of these days I suspect his blond bouffant head will end up on a stick, separated from the rest of his body by some fundamentalist zealot obeying one of a hundred or so fatwahs pronounced upon the man.

Certainly that’s what Wilders expects. He lives a life of unrelieved misery, surrounded by armed guards at all hours; the death threats pour through his letterbox like junk mail. Islam is, of course, a peaceable and tolerant religion, and anyone who says it isn’t will be decapitated. I’ve always found a certain irony in that perspective.

Wilders’s latest contribution to the “battle of ideas” is a film called Fitna (strife) in which he calls for the Koran to be banned from Holland, thus displaying the very same penchant for authoritarianism as the faith which he attacks. He is surely wrong about that; doubly wrong because he considers himself a “libertarian”. I think he is not a libertarian at all, but an old-fashioned conservative. Even so, his film is worth watching - if only because an awful lot of people think you shouldn’t be allowed to see it.

The final word in reality TV culling

The Matsigenka tribe live in the remote foothills of the eastern Andes, in Peru, where they hunt monkeys, peccaries and the like with bows and arrows and do a spot of fishing. A superstitious bunch, their chief worries - up until now - were having their souls stolen by furry demons with enormous penises which they believe inhabit the surrounding forests.

However, it was not a well-hung demon that marched out of the forest trees to wreak devastation upon them recently; it was a British television production team, who wished to film a new reality TV programme about exotic, terribly backward people over whom they could patronisingly coo and fawn. You can imagine the sort of thing - I’m an Aborigine, for God’s Sake Leave Me Alone, or something.

Anyway, the Matsigenka allege that the team from Cicada Films gave them flu, to which they have no resistance, and four members of the tribe have consequently died. If the film-makers come back, they will “wipe us all out”, a tribesman called Kian-Kian told the press.

Cicada deny this inadvertent act of genocide, of course, and claim they never went anywhere near the Matsigenka. I hope they're right. But extinguishing an entire tribe is, I suppose, the ultimate in reality TV. Kian-Kian, come into the diary room please . . .

Geoffrey Matthews - apology

My item about charities last week wrongly stated the earnings of the chief executive of Prince Harry’s charity Sentebale.

Geoffrey Matthews, the part-time chief executive, was paid £20,000 per annum, not in excess of £100,000 as was stated. My apologies to Mr Matthews for the error.

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