Not prone to read sensationalist news, i've pretty much avoided the whole Austrian cellar story after it first broke and the headlines were enough to indicate what had happened, which was definitely more than enough information for my brain. However, had to check out the BBC story today, Austrian cellar man 'mentally ill'. The notion that someone who repeatedly raped his imprisoned daughter is NOT mentally ill is hard to fathom. Do sane people do such things to their own children? Please don't say 'yes.'

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In the interests of redeeming myself (at least in my own eyes) for writing about this yesterday and thereby participating in the onslaught of short-term memory news hype, here's a somewhat interesting article in Spiked about the extent to which the whole of Austrian is being stereotyped as part latent Nazi, part head-in-the-sand ostrich. Do people/media do this in because they really believe there is something in the Austrian national subconscious that needs attention, or because they cannot come up with a better way to sell their papers?