I see that the story about the nomination of a replacement in Strasbourg for the Man of the Year has been reactivated.

Just for the sake of clarity, it is not the nomination of a replacement for Judge Bonello in his role as Man of the Year that is being mooted. In this role, the mere passage of time will provide us with a new Man of the Year and there won’t even have to be a woman in the short-list, either.

Forgiving me my detour, might I ask, at this point, for comments about whether, in fact, a list of nominees for Man of the Year is legal if it does not contain the name of a woman?

I ask only because the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe seems to have the notion that a token woman forms part of any list very close to its heart.

Returning, after that flight of mild whimsy, to the main story, it seems that the Government is about to have to revisit its argument with the Assembly on whether, in order to be valid, a list of nominees to the European Court of Human Rights has to contain the name of at least one woman.

This issue, yet another facet of positive discrimination, has trundled on for many years, the only positive aspect of it being that Judge Bonello remains in office, continuing to bring honour on himself and – lucky us – on us by association.

Let me be quite clear, lest the many people I know who are involved, by the fact that they are nominees and men or aspirants and women, that my thoughts are not to be taken as any judgment on their capabilities, attributes, merits, demerits, intelligence or sheer brilliance.

I’m not stupid.

However, I really would like to blow my nose, in the manner of Monty Python, on this insidious tenet of “positive discrimination”, also known as “token niggerism”.

The proponents of this way of going about things justify their manipulative social engineering by saying that whichever minority they are sticking up for needs to be given a fillip. They ignore, sadly, the fact that the mere fact that they are taking this attitude is patronising and insulting.

How is a woman (or gay or black or handicapped person) who is placed on such a list supposed to feel when s/he knows that s/he’s only there because some bunch of nabobs decided that orders of merit are only worth so much when striving to choose the best.

Reducing the argument to absurdity, as if it wasn’t absurd enough, one wonders why, for instance, in establishing who can be a brain surgeon, it isn’t mandated from the very top of the Babylonian Tower that blind, quadriplegic and intellectually challenged individuals have the right to be made into brain surgeons.

After all, on the evidence of the extent to which these rule-makers believe that qualification and ability are relevant, brain surgery is about as difficult as making salad, a notion backed up by Messrs Emerson, Lake and Palmer in their seminal work some thirty years ago or more.

Moving further along the path of the positivists’ argument, is it not obvious that once a woman (in this case, it could be anyone in another context) has been list in order to “legitimise” the list, she starts out as hot favourite to get the nod? If not, including her in the first place would have been an exercise in futility, a ticking of a box that is evidence not of respect for the idea of equality but of the practicality of satisfying the whims of the bureaucrats (thank God for spell-check)

And what if the woman concerned were to be appointed, would she, being an honest and self-aware person, not have this nagging doubt that everyone knows – or is morally convinced – that she was there because of an accident of genetics and not because she is the best candidate?

The arrogance of the positivists knows no bounds. They are telling the Maltese Government, in this particular context, that they know better, that it is not possible that there is no single woman who can’t find a place in the list of nominees. That’s as may be, because as I said, I’m not about to put my neck on the block and say that all the many highly professional women of my acquaintance are not duly qualified, but where, pray, do the positivists get off, sticking their proboscis (I’m not sure that’s correctly rendered, but the little red line didn’t appear, so it must be, and I’m using Real English as the default language) into the deliberations of a sovereign state?

Just for the record, incidentally, I know that the word “positivists” does not properly describe these slavish adherents to the doctrine of positive discrimination, but I couldn’t think of a brief descriptor.

You might want to comment and provide one. The closest I could come up with, as a short(ish) title was “blinkered twerps”, but it doesn’t quite fit, I think.