Alpha Mummy

The Alpha Mummy posters are up in arms again today. For once they are not at war over the stay-at-home vs working mothers debate (although no doubt that will re-surface presently). No, they are outraged because some people have 'hijacked' their debate. It seems the Alpha Mummies want to ban anyone from commenting on 'their' threads who is not an 'Alpha Mummy'.

It seems that what has got them het up is a MAN has infiltrated the blog attached to a national newspaper which is ONLY FOR ALPHA MUMMIES. And not only a man but one who expressed a different opinion, although it has to be said, in a slightly oafish fashion. To be fair to him I don't think his method of expressing himself varied that much from some of the other regular commenters. His crime was to start off his comment (on a post debating the pros and cons of the embryo bill - a view on which cannot surely be limited to mothers) by stating where his point of view comes from (male, a father, a catholic, a scientist and lawyer) which I think can be helpful on a thread which contains so many separate points of view. His basic, if long winded point, seemed to be that life starts some point between conception and birth and at that point (whenever it is) the embryo is entitled to protection. Ergo if 'it' is entitled to protection then it is not right for 'it' to be sacrificed for the grearer good; his viewpoint was that this point was at conception therefore embryo research in this context should not be permitted. What the alpha mummies objected to was this statement: "unless there is/are god/s then all ethics are abitrary." In actual fact, I think he is using arbitary to mean something other than coming from nowhere, rather that ethics are not based in concrete facts, to which I agree. It seems an unusual place to start an argument though, as it the existence of god/s is not something that can be 'proved' in the scientific sense. However, it is not necessarily a statement which deserved jumping on in such vitriolic fashion ending with Jane writing "My original objection to xx's behaviour here was that he arrives out of the blue, not an Alpha mummy but as a guest, and then posts in a way that makes me think his ambition is to control the debate by setting the questions that he wants us to answer".

How they wish for an alpha mummy to be defined, I don't know. Certainly some of the regular commenters go by female names and appear to have children, but as we all know, you can take on any persona on the internet. Most of them claim to have Oxbridge firsts and be busy, but quite frankly they can't be that busy if they debate so often during the day. They also seem to be unaware that they are attacking people for behaving as they are doing.