Venerable Beads

On Crime and Complacency

2012-02-07T07:38:00.017Z

Why do we have to have home pages?
Does any reader know of an email provider that lets you just open up, check your emails (and is that the plural of email, since the plural of ordinary mail is still mail? and if you buy more than one mouse for your computer have you really bought some mice, or is it mouses in this context?) and not be bombarded with hateful adverts, naff lifestyle features, repulsive celebrity gossip and endless pictures of a woman called 'Rihanna', of whom our complete awareness and unquenchable fascination are assumed as an obvious given? Like the ugly twerp who calls herself 'Lady Gaga' this woman's every outfit is a news story, yet she always looks hideous.

But it's the news headlines that are the most infuriating, revealing as they do not merely the obsessions of our normality-setting overseers but their priorities too.
A typical day's headlines last week:

We lead with
Posh sucks through straw to show off cheekbones for i-D

i-D is one of those expensive fashion and pop culture magazines that you see in every newsagents but have never seen anyone buy or read, and this is the gripping story that Victoria Beckham has been photographed for its front cover drinking through a straw to show off her cheekbones. ('Posh' is a universally understood nickname for this woman, used without reflection or embarrassment by pretty much all ages, races, classes and creeds.)

Almost as important:
TV sex addict's shocking confession: Woman at centre of Eamonn Holmes storm reveals her secret past

Just how, you may be wondering, does one find oneself at the centre of an Eamonn Holmes storm? What, indeed, is an Eamonn Holmes storm?
Well, Eamonn Holmes is a chubby morning tv presenter, who hosts a kind of lifestyle and celebrity magazine type programme, and a 'storm' in this context is what even our neutered media robots occasionally whip up when they say or do something not first rubber-stamped by the Ministry of Ideological Conformity. A bit like a 'race row'. Holmes, who seems unusually clumsy in the bad weather department, created another 'storm' just a couple of months ago, when he said to a woman who had been raped walking home late at night that he hoped she used a taxi from now on. (How vile do you have to be to take offence at that? Step forward, the official voice of the British media - speaking for you since 1968 [TM].)
His new 'storm' was to say "have you never thought of making a business of it? Charging for it?" to a woman who appeared on the programme to say that she had had sex with over 1000 men. What a rotter! What a cad! What a piggy-wiggy!
Oh, and the 'shocking confession' that made it to second place in the news headlines is that she was formerly a man, a fact blindingly obvious from one second's glance, I might have presumed. I don't know what you see in the photograph at the top of the article, but I see a man in a blonde wig.

Next:
TV teen mum smoked during pregnancy

This one, by contrast, has sparked a 'Facebook row', which is like a cross between a race row, an Eamonn Holmes storm and a ladies' knitting circle. This is the shocking revelation that a 17 year old kid, pregnant with the baby of one or other of the young Einsteins she gives her favours to (she's still waiting on the paternity tests to find out which one won't be around to raise it officially) broke the only moral law remaining in the entire arena of procreative and reproductive freedom.
According to my rancid internet news provider, the TV programme in which she appears is "a must-watch show full of drama, reality and heart-soaring real live births." Mmmmmmm!

But Channel 4 hit show One Born Every Minute has hit the headlines for all the wrong reasons this week... Wednesday's episode showed a 17-year-old first time mum admit she smoked during her pregnancy... Her comments sparked a debate on the show's official Facebook page, with many users slating the new mum.
"It's not her age that matters though. I don't care if she's 17 or 71. Smoking in pregnancy is a disgusting selfish thing to do," commented one mum...
Another, Rachel Stocker, who has first hand experience of the dangers of smoking while pregnant said: "My own mum smoked throughout her pregnancy with me."I'd like to think she did a good job bringing me up (as a single mother) but the fact is I have health problems caused by her smoking during pregnancy and passive smoking when I was a baby/toddler."These health problems wouldn't necessarily manifest themselves when your child is young. You can't anticipate the effect smoking will have on your baby - and if there's any effect at all it's not exactly going to be a good one."

And they say people today don't understand science.

Occasionally, though, on the home page news round-up, desperation shows.
Thrilling as these three top stories are, what do you do if nothing else of any real note has happened in the entire world that day?
Then, alas, you must reach for the filler story.
For want of anything more relevant to the lives and concerns of its readers, my internet provider was therefore forced to go with:

Scott Sorby Jailed For Murdering 94-Year-Old Woman In Care Home

This, nonchalantly alongside 'Posh' sucking through a straw, some haddock-faced bike smoking a fag while pregnant and a TV presenter saying slightly the wrong thing to a former man who has had sex with over a thousand other men:

A man who sexually assaulted and murdered a 94-year-old woman after breaking into a care home was told today he must serve a minimum of 24 years in prison.
A judge told Scott Sorby, 21, he had committed a "truly dreadful" act against Elizabetta Pecka in a "prolonged and ferocious physical attack" in her room. Bradford Crown Court heard Sorby had been jailed for four and half years when he was 17 for attempting to rape a student in Leeds. He was released part way through his sentence and was on licence when he broke into the Rosewood Court residential home, in Bradford, on January 21, last year. He battered the defenceless pensioner and dragged her into her bathroom, where he continued the attack as he also attempted to rape her. She died in hospital two months later, when she was 95, from pneumonia brought on by her ordeal. The judge, Mr Justice King, jailed Sorby, formerly of Bradford, for life and ordered he should serve a minimum of 24 years before he is released. Sorby showed no emotion as he sat in the dock surrounded by prison officers.The court heard Mrs Pecka told paramedics who took her to hospital: "Let me die - they were animals."The judge was told investigators found her room covered in blood...
Sorby told officers he had broken into the care home only to steal property and said in his letters he had become angry and began to recall the events of the attempted rape when he was 17.The court heard he blamed the victim of that attack at Leeds University, even though he knew she was innocent, and this escalated his assault on Mrs Pecka. Adrian Waterman QC, prosecuting, told the judge Sorby wrote: "Then it came to me - hurt her by raping her."
(...)
The court heard he was first reprimanded at the age of 10 and had a long criminal record which started when he was 13.The judge was told that after the attack on Mrs Pecka, and before he was caught, he committed two more house burglaries, took cash from a Co-op store and then robbed the same store, threatening staff with a knife. Sorby, formerly of Binns Lane, Bradford, also asked for a number of other similar offences to be taken into account.

This is the Britain that hides behind its front line of glazed-eyed idiots writing like children about 'Posh' sucking through a straw.
This is the Britain that is allowed to sneak and swell, unobserved and more or less unapprehended, behind the one that would rather swoon and foam at tv presenters being kind to rape victims or plainly hopeless teenage mothers that dare to smoke.
This is the Britain that, when it is exposed at all - as it inconveniently must be when these cases come to trial; but have you noticed how we rarely get to hear of such things until the trial stage now? - is cheerily exposed alongside news stories of such bowel-emptying triviality they must stand accused as comparable examples of how a society destroys itself from within.

The key word is complacency.
It is the complacency that can least be forgiven: the fact that such stories can be told with such culpable objectivity, as if the events, though wrong in themselves, are not indicative of any wider malaise that should occupy our attention, and can be related in a calm and factual manner without the need for editorial reflection - neither the case when there's a 'race row' in the wind - and certainly do not demand that we relax our drooling fascination with the cheekbones of the professionally jobless.

And if it's complacency you're after, you can find no better source than the British police.
When not carrying out three days of diversity training a year (as opposed to one in self defence and the handling of violent criminals), going through an eight-hour ‘e-learning’ package on their computers, and showing that they have accomplished three separate objectives to raise diversity awareness in their annual performance appraisal forms, they can always be relied upon to put our minds at rest, lest we fear that an excess of sensitivity might be somehow impairing the sense of outrage that we pathetic 'civilians' might still feel about the murder and attempted rape of a 94 year old woman in a care home by a 21 year old with a long criminal record released early after attempting to rape someone else.

The detective in charge of the case tells us:
"Thankfully people like Scott Sorby are a rarity in our society and if there is any comfort to be had from this awful situation, it is that he is no longer in a position to pose a danger to the community."
As for the victim:
"We should also take a little time remember to Elizabetta Pecka. Her life was lost as a result of Sorby's depravity and I hope that today's sentence will bring some sense of justice to those who cared for her."

Yes, "a little time." Then back to Eamonn Holmes.
And there should be a 'temporarily' somewhere in that bit about Sorby being "no longer in a position to pose a danger to the community", shouldn't there? Because he'll be out again after 24 years of peer-training in some criminal incubation centre, and only in his early forties. Good luck to you then, 'the community'.
Of course, I can't speak on behalf of "those who cared for" Elizabetta Pecka, but if it were me that would give me roughly the same "sense of justice" as the killing of the first born.

"Thankfully people like Scott Sorby are a rarity in our society."
Oh, how comforting.
A rarity. As opposed to unthinkable, unimaginable, unimagined and literally impossible - as they were in the society that even I can remember, let alone Elizabetta Pecka.
And how true, as well.
It is, after all, nearly two whole weeks since the trial of the 14 year old boy who anally raped a 77 year old woman in her home after he told her he wanted to interview her for a school project about the war.

Thankfully, such people are rarities.

On Shrillness and Projection

2012-02-06T07:44:00.011Z

I noted in my previous post the Left's curious habit of projecting their own weaknesses and nasty habits on to their enemies.
Actually, it's not curious at all. It is an interesting but omnipresent psychological quirk, and the time-honoured means by which secret, latent or aspiring oppressors reveal themselves thus, even - or especially - when hiding beneath righteous proclamations of wisdom, tolerance and generosity.

As with the Left, so with the atheists.
And yes, I do simply say 'atheists' rather than 'some atheists', just as I say 'the Left' rather than 'some on the Left', and so on, all down the line of troublemaking or grievance-mongering agitators.
I do this not in the interests of lumping the innocent with the guilty but because it seems to me that all causes must be judged by the worst they can achieve and not the best. Anything else seems to me analogous not even to the 'some good Germans' truism but to the 'at least they made the trains run on time' one.
The great Fascists of the twentieth century did, indeed, make the trains run on time. The point is not disputed, and the suggestion that Hitler was, on the whole, a bad thing is not dependent on any counterclaim that, in actual fact, the 9.33 from Berlin to Stuttgart was frequently seven minutes late, especially on Mondays. It's just not relevant. I'll happily accept the trains ran on time, if you happily accept that the Holocaust happened. Can't say fairer than that. Doesn't mean I don't like the idea of trains running on time - or for that matter a whole bunch of other unequivocally good and useful things Hitler did - merely that they cannot be used as mitigation.

I am an atheist, but the fact that I object to the idiocies of the atheist lobby is not enough: if I wish to continue calling myself an atheist I must make my objections public, otherwise it is entirely reasonable for others to make the assumptions about me that the self-appointed spokesmen of my creed work so hard to create. Same with lefties, same with Muslims, same with every other belief or ideology that is used to promote or excuse tyranny. Declare your difference, or live with the assumptions. Don't whine and act as if the world is supposed to guess you're different from the ones on the telly.
So yes, by 'atheists' in this context I mean the kind of people the public at large has every reason in the world to think of when they hear the word: a bunch of petty-minded, cynical, not very clever division-stokers who hide base motives behind the presumption of moral and intellectual superiority.
That's my team! Go, atheists, go!
I'm not going to call them 'militant atheists' because that's not how they view or promote themselves. They think of themselves as the mainstream, and are entitled to do so.

But like so many who agitate relentlessly for the suppression of freedom, and attack their enemies in terms so intemperate they virtually constitute incitement to violence, they are incredibly thin-skinned when it comes to any slight against themselves. (This is the classic Islamic shuffle: accusations of violence = hurt feelings = justification for violence.)

Of course, as with all unreasoning extremists, there is often unintended comedy to be found in this paradox, as their assertions as to the tone and meaning of their words and the words of others collide incoherently, yet with the blissfully untroubled assumption of coherence, with manifest reality.
There now follows a joyous example found - where else? - on the Richard Dawkins Foundation For Reason and Science website ("a clear-thinking oasis").

Back here, I was delighted to introduce you to the terrible crime, fully endorsed and wailed over by the dingbats that hang around the Dawkins site, of 'Atheophobia', which as the name implies, is the "irrational fear or hatred of atheists that manifests as a strong prejudice against those who do not believe in a God" and worse still as "incorrect statements... made about atheists at large". The rallying cry: "it is absolutely unacceptable for religious persons to denigrate atheists for their lack of religious beliefs."
Sadly, despite the patent rightness of their cause, and the constant gauntlet of prejudice and oppression they must daily endure in Britain and America, the term 'atheophobia' has not yet caught on. Don't ask me why. It's not as if it's not catchy.

One of the worst manifestations of atheophobia, needless to say, is referring to atheists as "shrill". It beggars belief how it can even be possible for slurs so unjustified to be tolerated in a free society.
Of course, it's a plain statement of fact when Dawkins accuses a Rabbi of "shrieking with an intemperate stridency of which Hitler would have been proud". But calling atheists shrill is too much, not least because it is so blatantly unfair.
Let a pompous nitwit called Russell Blackford pick up the story from here:

More Rubbish About "Shrill" Atheists - This Time In The Daily Mail:
It seems that any forthright expression of atheism is going to be called "shrill", though the same will not apply to similarly forthright expressions of theism.
In the case of Richard Dawkins - really, he's a gentleman by the standards of debate on almost any other topic. At times he is passionate or mocking, but aren't we all when faced by manifest injustice, nastiness, or cruelty? In his book, The God Delusion, taken as a whole, he does indeed argue for the unpopular point of view that we should be emphasising the ways in which ordinary religion resembles delusion, rather than whatever ways they are distinguishable, but the general tone is very mild...
In public appearances, Dawkins is usually gentle and tolerant - far more so than most people speaking on most subjects that they are passionate about. I've seen him go out of his way to be courteous to annoying and ignorant interlocutors.
... there has been a largely successful attempt to hold atheists who actually argue publicly for atheism to a special standard. Anyone who does not meet it is thereupon demonised, or simply dismissed as "shrill", "strident", etc... Meanwhile, forthright Christians who want to argue publicly for the truth of their views manage to be at least as "shrill" as Dawkins.
For example, I'm currently reading Mere Christianity by C.S. Lewis, which I don't think I've previously read in its entirety and have not opened for decades. As usual with Lewis, his style varies between blunt, emotive, self-righteous, and downright snide (I'll bracket off how naive the actual arguments are). His approach gets a free pass in our culture, but if an atheist wrote in exactly the same way he or she would be roundly condemned.

This is pretty funny already, but the tears really start to flow when you follow his link back to the article that has inspired all this wounded prose, the original statement of theistic intolerance and incitement beside which Dawkins's gentlemanly tact pales.
It's by a terrifying zealot called the Reverend George Pitcher. Get ready for it, because this is not going to be pretty.

From Attenborough to Alain de Botton, the faithless are rejecting the shrill atheism of Dawkins:
There's something divine in the air. Agnostics and atheists are beginning to nod respectfully in the direction of the Almighty, while still, of course, maintaining that He's not there.
Just before he died, Christopher Hitchens expressed some generous sympathy for the Christian worldview, much to the evident frustration of his interlocutor Richard Dawkins. Then philosopher Alain "I'm not pretending to be an atheist" de Botton had his own transfiguration moment the other day when he proposed a "temple to atheism", because (I think) he acknowledges a human capacity for transcendance.
Now the venerable, agnostic natural historian Sir David Attenborough has confessed to Kirsty Young on Desert Island Discs that there might, after all, be a God: "I don't think an understanding and an acceptance of the four billion-year-long history of life is any way inconsistent with a belief in a supreme being."
There does seem to be a growing tolerance of faith among the faithless. And that is to be warmly welcomed, without in any sense suggesting they are coming to conversion or that the godly in some way have "won" the argument.
Because the sensible thing surely is to acknowledge that this is an argument that can't be won, like most worldly debates can. Those of us of religious faith need to concede that atheists might be right, however much we believe that they are not. And, by the same token, unbelievers, such as Attenborough and de Botton, need to affirm that we might be right - and they variously and increasingly are, by their words and deeds. Now we can get on with the common cause of trying to make sense of this life.
The narrow and rather meaningless argument to which Dawkins confines himself is the incessant charge that there is no "evidence" for God. And evidence, of course, is defined only within the strictures of his own empirical scientism. The problem is that faith isn't primarily evidential, as he demands it to be, but revelatory - and we would claim no less true for all that in explaining the human condition.
The shrill voice of Dawkins is gradually being marginalised by those of no more faith than him, but who nevertheless perceive mystery in humanity and, while not accepting the presence of God in the world, are prepared to face in the same direction as the rest of us and stand in awe and wonder.

Talk about divisive!
Oh, the bigotry! Oh the intemperance! Oh the - I'm sorry, but there really is no other word - shrillness.
"Those of us of religious faith need to concede that atheists might be right, however much we believe that they are not"?
How dare this man be so closed-minded? Why can't he live and let live? Why can't he try to bring people together in common cause, instead of always trying to drive senseless, unnecessary wedges between them?

Oh, no. My mistake. That's exactly what this gentle-hearted man is doing. And this is what has mortally offended sinister atheist agitators like Russell Blackford.
Thank goodness some of that atheist tolerance he's so proud of was able to step in and hold the Rev accountable, via the sage-like interjection in the comments section of one 'Darrell, Manchester' (hallowed be his name):

Pitcher, you disingenious T*AT. How this drivel can pass for journalism is beyond me. Take everyone out of context and try and find controversy where there is none. You'd think you were religious or something? Oh right... If you REALLY believe Christopher Hitchens (and I quote) ..."expressed some generous sympathy for the Christian worldview..." and that was the end of the story? You think that was in context do you? Would a man who was self titled an ANTI-Theist really express a sympathy for the Christian world view? NO NO NO. Sloppy, disingenious and disgraceful. All you god botherers please stop being so desperate and feeling entitled to 'respect'. You can all group hug and high-five each other as long as you want. it won't change the fact that you are slaves to your faith and far from freeing you, is shackling you to Bronze age myths that most humans outgrow roughly when they realise Santa Claus is made up. Get a grip and stop trying to proselytize.

At last! The voice of sanity, reason and politeness. And let's hope that 'disingenious' catches on where 'atheophobia' seems so tragically to have failed.
I'd also like to see more people writing "and I quote" before using a quotation mark. It takes away some of the ambiguity.

So in conclusion: yes, these berks are riotously funny on one level, and I hope you had as much fun as I did watching them at play.
But, if you could dry your eyes for a moment, do note that this particular tactic - of accusing your enemies of your own crimes - is symptomatic not merely of tyrants but more specifically of confident tyrants.
So do, please, keep a watchful eye on them.

Now it's the 'science'; next it will be the camps

2012-02-04T17:47:00.014Z

As we know, the Left is not really keen on the idea of adversarial party politics.
True, in periods of political sanity it embraces it as a means of having its voice heard, but whereas its opponents embrace democracy on principle, even when they're winning, the Left see it merely as a temporary route to getting where they want to be.
As soon as their shabby youth indoctrination gets them to the top of the dung heap, the freedom to air political differences becomes a mortal threat, and so they set about criminalising it.

In the past, this has had to be done messily and belligerently, at the point of a gun, or beneath the tramp of Hitler's Leftist jackboots. This can work, but it stokes resentment, and incurs the sympathy of other nations, and often leads to confrontation from which sanity again emerges the victor. (Then loses it all again with its damned, unending faith in humanity.)
As we know, this time, which might just be the last time, they came up with a cleverer scheme, a bloodless coup, which went to work within the institutions of education, law and media. It took longer, but it's more effective, because the sort of people who don't worry overmuch about death, crime and tragedy unless it's happening in Coronation Street didn't even notice, and by the time everybody else woke up, everything was in place to resist reaction: the legislature is all there, and popular culture is on guard to mock and demonise.

The giveaway in the Left's attitude to party politics is its refusal to accept that alternative points of view to its own are precisely that: alternative points of view.
Because there is only right and wrong, their opponents are not different, they are wrong. And because they cannot be that wrong innocently, they must be malevolent. So it ceases even to be a matter of right and wrong, but rather of good and evil.
Hence the unmistakably evangelical flavour of so much Leftist dogma, even as it pours righteous scorn on what it considers the unreasoning scriptural ethics of the Right.
In truth it is Leftism that is based on doctrine, faith and revelation, whereas Conservatism is founded in practice, experience, and compromise. As I never tire of saying, to the comprehension of just about nobody and the willing endorsement of fewer still, it is Leftism that is religious, and Conservatism that is Darwinian.

Most conservatives do not view the Left as evil, merely misguided. They do not hate them. (I do, but I am anomalous.) The Left, however, passionately hate their opposition and - while constantly accusing them of divisiveness and aggression, a tactic known and loved by millions (at least six million, anyway) as 'the old Hitler one-two' - would like nothing better than to have them permanently out of the way.
Then they can get on with the serious business of turning the free world into an Orwellian hellhole sewer, without having to stop every so often to make sure all the news outlets are singing in tune whenever an inconvenient Sarah Palin or Ann Coulter put their head up over the barbed wire.

Demonising and ridiculing them is the first step, and this is easily done, by seducing the young, who have so much righteous passion to spend and no ability to spot when they are being duped, into believing that the Right is a) evil, and worse yet, b) terminally uncool.
But this is only stage one, and once complete - as it now is - stage two begins.
Watch your backs, because the ground work is now finished. Now, they're doing the science.

When 'research' - a term that screams aloud the impartiality it almost never possesses - starts proving ideology, you can bet your black leather trenchcoat there's a Nazi or two in the house.
We've already accepted the idea that people who object to the promotion of homosexuality are not merely expressing an opinion, not even merely wrong but actually ill, suffering from an affliction called 'homophobia' that, if it announces itself publicly, must be cured by a trip to Stalin Camp for a little ideological readjustment.
Such petty Newspeak victories are important, but they don't go far enough.
This, however, is much more like it:

Next time you call group of right-wing racists a bunch of idiots, you can back yourself up with one simple word: Science!
Researchers from Ontario, Canada’s Brock University have been slaving over test results to come to the conclusion that many not-so-scientifically-inclined have said for ages — both right-wing thinkers and racists alike are kind of dumb.
The conclusion comes after spotting a correlation between children with low IQs and their ideologies later in life. It turns out that those with limited intelligence at a younger age are more likely to exhibit racist tendencies and favor more conservative political thinking as adults.
Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology and primary author of the findings, explains to Live Science that the, well, science of the issue is rather simple.
"Socially conservative ideologies tend to offer structure and order," explains Dr. Hodson. Structure and order, of course, are much easier to make sense of than, say, disarray and chaos. Given that, the less intelligent will gravitate towards more manageable ideals and, as he says, "Unfortunately, many of these features can also contribute to prejudice." [sic]
The study in its entirely was published this week in the journal Psychological Science, and there Dr. Hodson and Michael A Busseri write that after studying a data set of 15,874 persons from the UK, “we found that lower general intelligence in childhood predicts greater racism in adulthood, and this effect was largely mediated via conservative ideology.”
“A secondary analysis of a US data set confirmed a predictive effect of poor abstract-reasoning skills on antihomosexual prejudice, a relation partially mediated by both authoritarianism and low levels of intergroup contact,” add the researchers.
In summation, they write, "right-wing ideologies, which are socially conservative and authoritarian, represent a mechanism through which cognitive ability is linked with prejudice."
"For example,” add the doctors,“research has revealed that individuals who more strongly endorse social conservatism have greater cognitive rigidity, less cognitive flexibility and lower integrative complexity. Socially conservative individuals also perform less well than liberals on standardized ability tests.”
In smaller words (for all your racists out there)[sic], here’s how Dr. Brian Nosek from the University of Virginia explains it to the Huffington Post: "Reality is complicated and messy . . . Ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution. So, it may not be surprising that people with less cognitive capacity will be attracted to simplifying ideologies."
Of course, the study’s authors note that “all socially conservative people are not prejudiced, and all prejudiced persons are not conservative."
We’d like to see their research in full before we go ahead and agree on that one though.

How utterly, utterly terrifying.
If this doesn't make you sick to your stomach you are either a monster or an idiot; the kind of person who identifies who gets to die, or the kind who'll do the job for a shilling and a badge.
Bother not to dignify it with analysis. Ignore the casual, unsupported and unquestioned assumption of a given connection between racialism and conservatism, where none in fact exists. Distract yourself not with the giveaway projection of the Left's own pettiness and hatreds on to its enemies, or its description of conservatism as an ideology (it isn't, but Leftism is) or its exact description of Leftist reasoning being applied to conservatism ("Reality is complicated and messy... ideologies get rid of the messiness and impose a simpler solution.")
Bother not to point out that a piece which decries the mental capabilities of others is written in English so bad that some sentences are literally not sentences at all. Do not even honour it with the almost impossible to resist retort to that "Socially conservative individuals also perform less well than liberals on standardized ability tests" crack (namely: 'oh yeah? Any time you're ready, Lefty dipshit; I'll bring the pencils, you bring the entire western media.')
I repeat: forget all that.
Don't dive into it; you'll be trying to get the smell out of your hair for months. Just stand at the edge and look at it, complete and entire. Watch it squelch and slither. Watch it grow and devour. See how it poisons the air around it, chokes the life out of all it touches. Meet its stare. See how it smirks. It wants you to be scared. Are you?

It's all coming back in style, all that stuff the Left love, pretended to hate, but really never stopped loving: eugenics, segregation, the elimination of undesirables. Everything old is new again.
That the methodology and procedure behind this idiot research is, additionally, ludicrous, ludicrous to a degree that should not merely shame those responsible (some hope of that) but also be obvious to anyone that gives it a second's consideration, is not the point, though the fact that it is not instantly acknowledged as ludicrous is extremely important. (Because it shows with chilling clarity how far down the road of unreason we have now travelled, how confident are the evil, how gullible the sheep, and how cowed the good and the sane.)
Yes, this is the most shameless abuse of academic subsidy since the Stanford University report that showed how people found it easier to identify hazy sketches of apes if they were shown a photograph of a black man for a fraction of a second first.
But this is par for the course when you are literally crazed with ideological conformity.
The important thing is that it is not passive. The point is that we are looking at it not in a history book but are historically adjacent to it. The point is the very fact of it: that it is here, that it is now, that it is among us, that you are here and it is there and it's asking 'what are you going to do?' and you are in all likelihood saying 'nothing', or 'pardon?', or 'what time's Britain's Got Talent on?'

Nothing what?
Nothing, sir.
That's better...

The point is that it's NOW.
They have now reached the stage where they are producing the studies that scientifically prove their loathsome prejudices.
Nazi social propaganda made the Jews into the enemies, but it was Nazi science that made subhumans of them: they did the research and proved it. This is how the Left view Conservatives, and God help you, now they're doing the research.
Scientific research is a wonderful enabler of Fascist aspirations. Prejudice is all very well, and deliciously easy to incubate in others, but it lays you open to charges of hypocrisy.
But you just can't argue with scientific facts.
And if the facts show that Conservatives have to be suppressed, perhaps segregated, surely denied a voice; for the good of everyone else and, indeed, for their own good, well... cruel to be kind and all that.

The Left are building a world where theirs is literally the only the voice that can be heard.

Buy freedom, get enslavement free!

2012-01-26T10:04:00.008Z

Ask a Leftist Progressivist about their aims and their outlook and you’ll soon see, as if it needed demonstrating, that their self-righteousness and self-veneration know no brakes or bounds.

But ask them about how much they have achieved over the last forty years and they’ll shrink before your eyes and retreat into mealy-mouthed regret that so little has been done, how much more there is to do, and how tragic that the forces of reaction still pull them back a pace with every leap forward they manage to take, that somehow, for all their efforts and despite the patent rightness of their cause, the world they are handing on to their own insufferable, lawless children is in most significant ways the same old stew of right-wing repression that was given to them by their own parents.

The truth, you don’t need me to tell you, is the exact opposite: their aims are self-contradicting, delusional, dangerous and, beneath the thinnest pretence of social morality, basically Fascist.
But their achievements have been immense.

If they were only honest it would help just a little.
If only one of them would be sincere enough to say that they have taken a country that forty years ago looked so set in its ways that nothing could ever shift its attitudes, and with a mixture of skilled propaganda, the seduction of the young, the slow seizing of citadels from within, and a lot of good old fashioned menace and intimidation, turned it almost completely from one thing into another, in most cases into its exact opposite.
If they would only admit how brilliantly they have taken ownership of the media, education, the courts and the police - once the seat of deeply ingrained ideological opposition to their campaign, now powered entirely by their own choking fuel of undergraduate revolutionary tautologies.

It is, in a sense, truly laudable, certainly massively impressive. One can only be impressed at the scale of it, and the relative subtlety with which it has been carried out, by how the entire war has been waged and won at the level of ideas, with scarcely a single shot fired or drop of blood spilled - except resultantly, in the self-despising wildernesses those ideas have inevitably made of British towns and cities, and where they still expect a once law-abiding, sober and selfless people to live content.
True, there have been witch hunts, plenty, as all revolutions demand, but no actual public executions.
Yet.

If you could only be like them, and truly not give a damn how many innocent people die, or how horribly, or how often, so long as they swear obedience to your opinions about things of little comparable importance, it would, I think, be impossible not to be sincerely awestruck at how much they have done, in the face of so much initial resentment, disdain and mockery, in so incredibly short a time.
But they will not admit this.
Still they whine and agitate, bully and vilify, and feign renegade stealth as they rampage through what remains of the pre-revolutionary consensus. Every day is Day One, stock is never taken, the only view is forward, and the horizon never gets any nearer.
If you could once induce them to look over their shoulders they’d be able to see all the corpses falling off the back of their cart – but that would require integrity, humility, bravery and decency on their part.
So good luck with that one.

Of all their successes, it is in redefining the British consensus on sex that best shows how complete their achievement has been.
Talk about redefinition! Not so much a shifting consensus as revolving one.
What word other than ‘triumphant’ could describe an ideology that takes a concept like ‘disdain towards minority sexual practices’ and in just thirty years turns it from a defining tenet of inclusion within civil society to a criminal offence? To turn something people were once punished for doing into something they are punished for making derogatory remarks about?
And even this is part of a much bigger, more important coup: the centralisation of sexuality itself. Indeed the issue of homosexuality, because it happens to be prohibited in scripture, that pick and mix grab bag of arbitrary moral nuggets, has proved a welcome smokescreen deflecting attention from this larger, more interesting agenda.

It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when the British were taught to be reticent about all their sex lives, including the heterosexual ones. And that sexual incontinence (known neutrally as ‘sexual permissiveness’ and by the revolutionaries as ‘sexual freedom’) was to be scorned, not out of what the revolutionaries mocked as prudishness, but because it was understood (through historical precedent - and that is why they don’t teach history, or anything, anymore: empty minds are more supple) that undiverted sexual desire was just about the most powerful force there is for social disruption, fragmentation and regression. That to dwell obsessively upon sexual matters reflected a much wider cultural and social morbidity, as well as an uncaring individualism that is antithetical to the goals of civil society. That sexual immodesty was a bad thing because it was immodest, not because it was sexual. That a mind fixated upon sex was by definition one lacking in aspiration, curiosity or attainment. That sex without the associated network of commitments and responsibilities breached the wall between civilisation and the jungle, which they had just spent two hundred years building at enormous cost and effort, in the face of just the sort of mean-minded resentment that was now intent on tearing it down, only this time with the sly face of beleaguered integrity rather than the honest incomprehension of the savage.
Indeed, part of the reason why homosexuality is so important to the revolutionaries is not because of any particular inequality in comparison with heterosexuality but because our sexual identity itself is now deemed utterly central to our social identity, and so to feel unable to declare one’s homosexuality is like being forced to deny one’s religion, nationality or family name.
Ironically, in the days when homosexuality was foolishly illegal, sexual identity simply wasn’t seen in this way: one’s sexual characteristics might reasonably be assumed but never declared, and the notion that they may be of relevance in defining us, as persons or as agents in society, would have seemed belittling (as indeed it is).
The whole world of sex was a private one: and no concept annoys Leftist revolutionaries more than privacy, wherever and to whatever end it be evoked. Privacy is a barrier to state encroachment, an attitude of mind that leads to all kind of other unhelpful affectations, like the right to freedom of conscience and belief. So from grief to breastfeeding, all must now be done on public display. Modesty is a sin, embarrassment a sign of defiance and animal instinct a virtue, and having successfully laid siege to religion, nationality and family, all that remains to fill the smoking hole left behind in our sense of selves is sex.

And it is so easy to sell! Because it preys upon human weakness, sex is a gift to revolutionaries of the subtler sort.
Again, measure the scale of their achievements.
They have not merely increased our appetite for sexual imagery, our susceptibility to be seduced by sexual display in advertising, our cod-Freudian attributing of all human endeavour to sublimated sexual desire, and our willingness to act upon our sexual whims without regard to the interests of those whom they affect.
They have turned distaste for sexual imagery into an insatiable craving, lofty contempt for the exploitation of sex in advertising into an enthralled enslavement to it, the pop-Freudian model of human psychology, once rightly rejected, into ignorant truism, the pursuing of one’s sexual desires without thought for others from a sin to an inalienable right.
And all too, too easy.
That’s something else those people who built that wall between civilisation and the jungle knew only too well: it was incredibly thin.

And so, on and on, down and down we all go together, into the supposed Utopia of sex without responsibility or result, without guilt or consequence, without meaning or effect. And all the while the engineers of the revolution goad us on from the sidelines, encouraging whatever petty, division-stoking resentment our descent churns up in its wake, ignoring the inevitable consequences in brutality, crime and the enslavement of women to men, and, above all, pretending that every last, feeble sputter of objection from the dying pre-sixties morality is the claw-flexing of the repressive behemoth that even now is denying ordinary people their fundamental sexual rights.

Sex is the meaning of life: this is, of course, the Darwinian truth and always was and will be. It is a measure of how magnificent a human invention morality was that a few brave geniuses worked out that only by pretending sex was not the meaning of life could life ever be meaningfully lived.
Was it J.G. Ballard or William S. Burroughs – some idiot, anyway – who said that an epoch that produces vast quantities of pornography is also by definition one of tremendous cultural vitality? If he had extended his list to take in rape, murder, sexual sadism, female disempowerment, poverty, misery, stagnation, social breakdown and cultural vitality, I might have agreed with him. Except for the bit about cultural vitality, of course.

This week, Boots the Chemists have been in the news, mainly because they are, after all, Boots the Chemists: a pre-revolutionary British institution that therefore trails behind it the thin remembered smoke of pre-revolutionary certainties.
There’s something oddly comforting about it as a fixed feature of the high street, a bridge between the good days and the bad.
Such institutions are among the main targets of the revolutionaries, and they confront them with a particular zeal. They know better than to burn them down; the trick is to infiltrate and subvert from within, so that the buildings themselves still stand. Propaganda is vastly easier to impart, for example, if it is ostensibly coming from something that is still called ‘the BBC’, just like it was when Reith held the reigns.
So, there is still, to our leaders’ dismay, something instinctively, residually shocking, even when every provincial shopping street has its own branch of Ann Summers, in Boots the Chemists selling sex aids.
But of course they now do, because of course they now must, and with the cowardice so typical of our age they are sold not as temporary assuagers of sexual insatiability for those incapable of thinking of anything but the sensation of having a penis in their vagina or a vagina around their penis yet whose busy schedules conspire to frustrate their right to have sex every second of the day, but rather as facilitators of something they call ‘sexual well-being’ (to 'help you and your partner have a more positive sexual relationship', by which they presumably mean a more electrically positive one, and quite possibly a more HIV positive one).
Sexual well-being... to help you and your partner... Awwww. Aren’t we just the cutest, most caring, loving, couplesy people ever? We’re just too adorable. Sometimes I want to wrap us all up and put a bow around us.

And because one might just as well object to cows farting as seriously advocate any kind of a brake on the free expression of our fundamental sexual identities, what little opposition the exciting new Boots dildo range has evoked has been sublimated into the usual channels: children see them and ask what they are; old ladies have to walk past them to get to the surgical stockings; there’s a time and a place, and so forth.
On AOL News they even framed it as a survey, one of the many hilarious ways in which the internet mocks and pastiches the idea of democratic representation.
What do YOU think? Make YOUR voice heard! SHOULD Boots be allowed to sell sex aids or not? Is it all just good fun or is there anything to be said for sexual modesty at all (within reason of course)?
And with the wit and individuality of thought that have made the British a byword wherever the subliterate bang into each other on the way to the pub, both of the set responses have been liberally offered in the comments boxes, by thousands of budding sages who either genuinely think they are saying them for the first time, or more likely believe that saying what you’ve heard someone else saying is the lofty summit of intellectual expression.
So there is, first, the hilarious answer: If you are inconvenienced having to walk past them to get to the corn plasters, imagine how I must feel having to walk past all that medicine just to buy a vibrator.
I hope this does make you laugh, because if you read up on this story you’re going to read that classic many, many times, often literally many times in succession, written by people who must have decided to write it with their own name attached immediately after reading it with somebody else’s name attached.
Ah, the freedom of conformity.

Then, there is the serious, knockdown answer, and get your pipe lit and your velvet jacket on for this one because it’s good.
If you don’t like it… don’t go in there.
Humbling to imagine the visionary extent of any mind capable of coming up with such a thing. It’s enough to make Stephen Fry look like a mere television personality.
As you’ll know, if you keep a close eye on the stock arguments of the revolutionary consensus, this is a cunning variation on the old ‘if you don’t like it you can always switch off’ classic, by which calls for the censorship of pornographic sex and equally pornographic violence in films and on television have been so inventively batted away for the past half-century or so.
Except now, instead of telling them to stop watching television they’re telling them to stop going into shops. (If depravity really bothers them as much as they claim, that is.)
The reasoning is in both cases the same, and very telling: we live not in a symbiotic society but in a world of individuals passing through and by.
All that matters is freedom of choice, and what I choose to do is not merely none of your business, it also can have no effect whatever on how you choose to live your lives. I’ll do my thing, you do yours, and we’ll all live our solitary lives in insulated proximity and complete freedom.
In truth, of course it cannot work like that: the marketplace of ideas is not a democracy, and the idea that one is somehow able to ignore, or not be affected by, a society saturated with pornography, immodesty and aggression is a ridiculous one.
And even if our poor reactionary takes their charming advice, turns off the television rather than question their right to watch Hostel 2 on Christmas Eve, and stops going into Boots rather than question their right to not have to visit a lowly sex shop purely because they want to insert a piece of vibrating plastic into their reproductive orifices, and henceforth lives in an ever-shrinking circle of denial, ignoring the currents shaping the world around them… that still doesn’t mean they’re safe.
The world without has this funny tendency to intrude on the world within – especially when everyone outside is marching slack-jawed and drooling to the beat of a media consensus as crass, coarse, philistine, fatuous and belligerent as our own.

I’d like to think it’s just that little bit harder to make the ‘if you don’t like the world you can just sit tight and pretend it’s not happening’ argument this week than it was last week.
But I doubt it somehow.
If I had to predict, I'd say that nothing will have changed, no wall of ideological conformity will have been breached, and no chink of light will have been cast on the dark certainties of the media class consensus, in the light of the case that came to court in Oxford – yes, Oxford - this week, of a fourteen year old boy who anally raped a seventy-seven year old woman, after she let him trustingly into her flat when he told her he wanted to interview her for a school project about the war.
No searching questions will have been asked among the social revolutionaries, and no dots joined, when it was noted in court that the assailant’s long-departed father is a violent alcoholic on the sex offenders register, and the mother’s subsequent selection of male role models included an impressive three more convicted, state-registered perverts.
And no irony will have been detected in the very fact that a crime of this sort was committed by one so young means it cannot be subject to more than two years of detention (minus time already served of course – do you think we’re barbarians or something?) and the assailant himself cannot be named, because the law presumes him not fully responsible at so tender and incomplete a stage of development.

This world of which I speak is not something that has come upon us like an ice age. We have built it. Like Marley’s chains we have forged it link by link and yard by yard.
Are we happy with it?
Job well done?
Was anything in the past really so bad that it justifies this as an alternative?

Even to hear these questions being asked by its architects would be something. Instead, their deafening silences, or oleaginous denials, or above all their continued belligerence towards the pathetic tattered fragments remaining of the old certainties surely puts them far beyond contempt and into a state of criminal culpability.
Do you want to live in this heap?
In a world where a woman appears on a British television show (misguidedly to my mind but with obviously sincere and laudable motives) to discuss the fact that she has a rare condition called ‘uterus didelphys’, meaning in effect that she has two vaginas, and within days she receives an unsolicited offer of one million dollars from Steven Hirsch, owner of the American pornography company Vivid Entertainment, to be filmed having sex with strangers? (Incidentally, why does this unwanted proposition not constitute sexual harassment?)
Of course, to the modern, anything-goes aesthetic, Hirsch is a businessman, no different from someone who makes their fortune selling kitchens or car parts, albeit one seemingly made primarily of plastic, like the women he defiles, and somewhat reminiscent of a fire-damaged Action Man doll.
Hirsch suffers from a rare condition called ‘doofus moronica’, which means that if he ever closed his mouth and attempted to breathe through his nose he would die. Though he poignantly underlines how tragic it is that the technology does not exist to put someone against a wall and shoot them slowly, you may nonetheless find some small justification for his existence by imagining him in a locked warehouse with a couple of tigers.
How much nicer, though, to not have to imagine him at all, as our grandparents did not have to do, in the world we took away from them.

i wasnt even there

2012-01-08T08:36:00.009Z

How rewarding it is to see what keyword searches have been bringing the most traffic to the site.
Here's the most popular routes here this weekend:

1. scarlett johansson nude pictures sent to husband
2. scarlett johansson stolen photos
3. charlotte johansson leaked pictures
4. i shot my sister nude
5. i wasnt even there
6. nude spanking
7. scarlett johansson exposing bare ass
8. scarlett johansson mirror
9. scarlett johansson nude
10. scarlett johansson thick legs

The first thing that strikes me when looking at this is how eccentric it makes me feel for always capitalising and punctuating, even in keyword searches.
Next I am struck by the frustration I must be causing, since these fevered explorers will find only one tiny photo of Scarlett (and none at all of Charlotte) Johansson's 'nude pictures sent to husband', supporting a lengthy essay on how pornography is analagous to Nazism, and from which her bare ass and thick legs have been prudishly cropped.
I feel almost guilty. Not the kind of bum-out they had in mind.
I wonder if any of them stopped to read on. Actually I rather like the idea that somebody looking for 'nude spanking' can end up here. So they should.

But I'd hate for you to think that this is representative of the traffic I generally receive.
For some reason the Scarlett Johansson obsessives were out in force this weekend, or perhaps it was just one Scarlett Johansson obsessive who wouldn't take no for an answer. (Imagine his increasing annoyance, as every possible formulation of the holy grail for which he was searching brought him time and again to the same curmudgeonly social comment site.)
Normally the people who want to see Scarlett's bare ass share peak search space with people who are interested in drunk British girls vomiting.
Here's last week's top searches:

1. scarlett johansson nude
2. wittgenstein
3. scarlett johansson stolen photos
4. scarlett johansson stolen pictures
5. drunk britains
6. english girls
7. ruth england hawke nude
8. great britain drunk people
9. new year vomit
10. people throwing up

Interesting, huh?
And this is not some New Year aberration. I assure you that the interest in vomit and drunk English girls is constant year-round.
Given that most of my traffic comes from outside Britain, I wonder what this obsession reveals? Could it be that our unique brand of grotesque pissed-up slapper has become not merely an internationally-recognised trademark, but an international fetish?
Incidentally, if you're wondering how close the competition was for those top spots, I can tell you that Scarlett Johansson nude beat Wittgenstein into second place by just four searches. It's still anyone's game.
Come on, Ludwig fans! Are you going to take this lying down? I want Scarlett's bare ass beaten into second place next week.

So anyway, here you are. Special New Year's treat. Knock yourselves out.

Now, as a follow-on to my post on Diane Abbott, in which I observed that "so guileless is she that it is virtually impossible to stop her in her tracks", here's hilarious proof of that from some silly BBC politics programme or other.
When you've finished roaring with laughter at her antics, and in particular at how she acts as if not being able to answer is a sign of utmost nobility of spirit, watch it again and laugh afresh at Michael Portillo's facial expressions as she is speaking.

Justice must be blind

2012-01-06T07:51:00.011Z

In an ideal world, in a Britain where savage murder is not literally an everyday occurrence, all murders should receive the kind of constant media outrage, scrutiny and calls for implacable justice as that of Stephen Lawrence.

There is nothing wrong with the degree to which it has entered public consciousness - would that all crimes did the same.
Similarly, to those directly involved, and specifically his notably old-fashioned, dignified parents, who have been forced to confront what we can at most only imagine (and many of us are incapable even of that, in a culture which teaches its children to despise empathy and venerate selfishness), it is unlikely that they can even see the way in which his name has been appropriated to serve an agenda unrelated to the horror we should all feel at the crime itself. Neither should we expect them to be concerned by that if they did.

But for the rest of us, there is more at stake here.
That the country has lost the stomach to control violent crime, even to be rightly horrified by it, is obvious to all, every day. Lawrence's murder, like so many others, is an indictment of modern British society, a reflection of how the 1960s new dawn of freedom, ushered in by the most arrogant idiots that ever sucked oxygen, is incapable even of protecting its citizens from the savages it knowingly and proudly breeds. The contemptible villainy that allowed it is almost beyond contemplation.
But it is that same contemptible villainy that is setting the terms in which we are expected to understand it. It is this contemptible villainy which insists that the Lawrence case is not one of murder but rather of 'racist murder', which is apparently something different and, to our shame, something worse.
The idea that the murder of pre-decided special interest groups is worse than that of anyone else, and should carry a different sentence, is one of the most obscene our rulers have yet devised. What kind of perverted mind ranks and orders murder victims in terms of moral priority? Are there words capable of conveying the foulness of such a concept?
Just ask the grieving relatives.

The fatuous and inestimably damaging Macpherson Report alleged 'institutional racism' in the police force, and implied without anything so old-fashioned as evidence that this had causal implications in the failure to bring Lawrence's killers to justice. It was only the first of many times his name would be stolen for use by ideologues.
But while the suggestion that racialism is 'institutional' in the police was an outrageous slur, the institutional obsession with it in the print and broadcast media is very real. Every report about the Lawrence trial explains not that two men have finally been convicted of his murder, but rather that they have been convicted of "the racist murder of Stephen Lawrence".
There are at least two books about Lawrence written for use by children in primary schools. Whatever spirit is animating that, it is not healthy opposition to the crime of murder. Yet this is a point one is almost incapable of making without incurring the insanest slurs.
When Princess Diana's death led to that extraordinary and shameful mass-psychosis characterised by Kim Jong-il-style incontinent public grieving, and the mass assembly of thousands of people all individually cocooned in self-obsession, it was permitted to say that we were witnessing something dark and shameful and unprecedentedly vulgar, without implying the least disrespect to those who actually knew her and whose grief was genuine.
So it should be possible here to say that by fixating on Lawrence's murder above and beyond those of the thousands of others killed in like fashion every year on Britain's streets, we not only create the illusion that it was in some way exceptional, we further enable the cultural climate in which the true scale of the problem is not confronted by those we have elected to keep us safe.
And the fact that we do so not accidentally, not because Lawrence has been arbitrarily adopted as a symbol of that wider malaise, but rather because our rulers have consciously borrowed his tragedy to serve as symbolic of something else entirely, should give all of us pause.

We should all know the name of Stephen Lawrence, but it simply should not be the case that we should all know the name of Stephen Lawrence and should not know the name of Kriss Donald. Even I, though familiar with the appalling crime itself, couldn't actually summon up his name unaided, and had to go to Google, where the keywords "burned alive" and "I'm only fifteen" took me straight to him.
Donald's murder should have been on the front page for a week; the subsequent trial likewise. If Lawrence deserves a memorial plaque, so does Donald. Indeed, so does everyone hideously and senselessly murdered on the streets of Britain. Which would of course mean there would be no actual streets left, just a carpet of wall-to-wall memorial plaques.
Most people, however (though possibly not most people reading this), wouldn't have a clue who Kriss Donald is, and no matter what angle you come at this subject from, you have to ask yourself in all seriousness why that should be.
It takes nothing away from the horror and tragedy of Lawrence's murder - which I (and, again I suspect, most people reading this) would punish far more sincerely than our justiceophobic rulers will, even on this occasion - to observe that once our cultural leaders begin playing favourites in this most horribly but necessarily democratic of arenas, the days of the Horst Wessel Song are not far off.
And Lawrence will be served least of all by that.

Another year, another boring Diane Abbott story

2012-01-05T15:15:00.011Z

Don't people realise that if they complain every time Diane Abbott does something moronic it just means we'll all have to see her hippo face on the news pages for a few days again?

Is that what you really want?
Look - even I've gone and made you good people look at it here, and there's another photo of her, at least as horrible if not worse, a few paragraphs down.
See what you've done?
Let the woman alone, for all our sakes.

So she 'tweeted' that "white people love playing divide and rule".
So what? What's the big problem? The woman's a complete cretin, and everybody knows she's a complete cretin. Next story, please.
The thing to do when she makes an ass of herself is to laugh at her. Don't whine like a bunch of schoolgirls. It's demeaning. It's what lefties do.

But wherever this story has appeared, the online comments all tell the same depressing story: vapour fits of outrage, calls for her resignation, and endless slight variations on 'Just imagine if a white politician had said that about blacks - they'd be busted out of their jobs in ten minutes!'
Yes, I know they would. So remind me again: is that a good thing or a bad thing? The problem, I thought, is that we live in a country where freedom of speech is now illegal. Better surely to oppose fascist infringements of basic liberties than to demand they be applied to everyone fairly. That's just crazy. If you try to fight totalitarianism by its own rules, you help it to win.

Back in the free world, Abbott should be able to think whatever the hell she likes, and to say whatever the hell she likes.
The law only has any business sticking its gavel in when and if she acts on her opinions in such a way as to inhibit the liberty of somebody else, and even then it should only recognise the illegality of the act itself, and remain silent as to the opinions informing it, over which it should have no jurisdiction at all.

Abbott's comment was typically bovine, a sign of her deep commitment to that foolish racial isolationism that is fully as inexplicable to me when it takes the form of morbid veneration of one's own skin colour as the belligerent resentment of other people's.
But is any white person reading this actually offended by it? Upset? Hurt? Belittled? Do you feel in any way implicated in Abbott's generalisation, and would you give a toss anyway?
Of course not. So grow up and shut up.

Abbott is an interesting phenomenon, her career a telling comment on our times. Her extraordinarily unearned self-confidence, endless resilience and wild ambition would command snakelike fascination in anyone, still more when displayed by a woman who is a national laughing stock, fully as thick as she looks, and incapable of forming any argument or holding any opinion that is not entirely juvenile, instinctive and unmediated by rational consideration. She's a one-woman student's union.
Yet so guileless is she that it is virtually impossible to stop her in her tracks. When it was pointed out to her that it was hypocritical to send her children to public school after years of bigoted opposition to educational selection, her devastating reaction was to admit that yes, it was, but that's what she's done and there's nothing more to be said about it.
Similarly, her initial response to this new furore was to say that black people are still denied the opportunities they deserve and are still treated unfairly by the police, an observation so spectacularly unrelated to the issue at hand as to defy any attempt at a reasoned response.
But her second effort was even better: “I understand people have interpreted my comments as making generalisations about white people. I do not believe in doing that."
But you just did, you mad cow!
Madness to try and reason with the woman. She doesn't hear you. She just smiles, as if she knows something we don't. Which, believe me, she doesn't.

But she is admirable in one sense. So unguarded is her naivety, hypocrisy and paradoxical pride in herself, she serves as an invaluable alternative to the slicker new breed of political used car salesmen, the Milibands and Camerons and their like, who think they can hoodwink the masses with careful stage management. Better one who is unable to think before they speak than one who barely says anything of substance at all, without first processing it through the blandolux soundbite generator.
Miliband the Even Younger's alleged insistence that she apologise to him personally, and then to everyone she may have offended, is infinitely more sinister than the woman's own, honest, old fashioned mad bigotry.

Deck the halls and bolt your windows

2012-01-01T12:26:00.011Z

I hope you all had a safe and happy Christmas, and therefore were not the mother of three children murdered by her boyfriend and dumped in a canal in West London on Christmas Day, the Nottingham woman stabbed to death by her husband on Christmas Day, the the man shot in the head at point blank range by a complete stranger in Manchester on Boxing Day, the babysitter stabbed to death as she looked after a four year old child in Borehamwood on Boxing Day, the seventy year old man found stabbed to death in the street at midday in Rainworth on Boxing Day, the teenager stabbed to death in broad daylight in the most famous and busiest shopping street in London during the Boxing Day sales, the man murdered at a New Years Eve party in Luton, or any of the other victims of the 15 murders so far in Britain this festive season, their relatives or friends.

I also hope you made every effort not to 'see the New Year in', or indulge in any of the traditional forced - and in the context somewhat grotesque - merriment that characterises this most grimly pointless of fake secular holidays. What, after all, do you have to look forward to this year?

Only right, under the circumstances, that the barrel-scraping New Years Honours list should fling a knighthood at the tv executive who brought Big Brother to British television, a CBE at the increasingly weird Helena Bonham Carter (once a promising young actress who seems to have matured in reverse, and is now reduced to feigning boring eccentricity in humiliating imitation of a silly American film director), and an OBE at Lorraine Kelly.

Then there's this chap:
Don't be fooled by the naff street fashion, or by the fact that his instinctive response to the prospect of being photographed is to assume the regulation confrontational scowl.
This is Chris Preddie, 24 year old former gang member and drug dealer, and cousin of the teenagers who murdered ten year old schoolboy Damilola Taylor, who decided after his sixteen year old brother was shot to stop being a gang member and drug dealer, and instead go to theatre school and do voluntary work for Crimestoppers. It was 'peer pressure', folks, but he's 'turned his life around'.
This, in the Britain you voted for, is enough to entitle him - and not, say, someone who has devoted their life to charity work without ever having sold a single drug and without first needing the incentive of having their brother gunned down in the street - to an OBE.
You probably think I'm joking, but I'm not.

The debate is over: I have found the New Jews!

2011-12-20T07:49:00.009Z

Back in 2008, Shahid Malik, minister in the Department for International Development under Gordon Brown, famously went public with a clever, thought-provoking analogy he'd come up with.

"I think most people would agree that if you ask Muslims today what do they feel like," he said, "they feel like the Jews of Europe." Perhaps in anticipation of the mild cough of protest that duly resulted, he immediately clarified: "I don't mean to equate that with the Holocaust but in the way that it was legitimate almost – and still is in some parts – to target Jews, many Muslims would say that we feel the exact same way."

In May this year, the respected, not in the least iffy Oxford academic and all-round good egg Tariq Ramadan made the startling observation that "Muslims are replacing Jews as Europe's scapegoat", adding that "people who were against Judaism are now against the Muslim presence in Europe."
In an article this July, Ravi Shankar (not the musician apparently, just somebody forging a career with the same name) asked thought-provokingly: "Are Muslims the New Jews of Europe?"
Then this month, Syed Soharwardy, founder of the Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, saw to the heart of a new law requiring Muslim women to remove their burkas when swearing the oath to become Canadian: "Muslims are going through that situation right now that the Jews faced before the Holocaust. That was going on in Germany before the Holocaust, same thing is happening now about Muslims."
Meanwhile, over in Switzerland in October, 2000 protesters organised by the Islamic Central Council of Switzerland paraded the streets wearing yellow stars. Nicolas Blancho, head of the Islamic Central Council, explained the symbolism: "Muslims are treated as second-class citizens and are discriminated against, for example because they wear a headscarf or because of their name when they look for an apprenticeship or are looking for an apartment." Justifying the analogy still further, Tony Blair's nutjob sister-in-law Lauren Booth, speaking at the event, explained that people often glared at her in the street.

You'll notice that there seems to be some disagreement here as to exactly what did happen to the Jews of Europe during the Holocaust, perhaps attributable to the patchiness of the historical record. Did they have to remove their yarmulkes when applying for German citizenship, as Primo Levi maintains, did they experience mild discrimination when looking for an apprenticeship, as was so movingly documented in the film 'Schindler's List', or did they get glared at in the street like the daughter of the man who played Alf Garnett's son-in-law?
The answer of course is: none of these, because as everybody knows, the whole thing's a myth.

Yves Kugelmann, editor in chief of a Jewish newspaper in Switzerland, called the yellow star parade "simply idiotic."
You ain't seen nothing yet, Yves.
On the Richard Dawkins Foundation website ("a clear-thinking oasis"), Helga Vierich asks: "Are atheists the new Jews?"
She links to an article entitled 'Ratzinger’s blood libel against atheists', in which a blogger writes: "Joseph Ratzinger knows that he can’t aim his pious invective at the Jewish people as his predecessors did. So this most contemporary pope takes aim at the next best enemy of his faith: atheists. It’s another blood libel in the making."
This in turn references Ratzinger's observation:

The enemies of religion…see in religion one of the principal sources of violence in the history of humanity and thus they demand that it disappear. But the denial of God has led to much cruelty and to a degree of violence that knows no bounds, which only becomes possible when man no longer recognizes any criterion or any judge above himself, now having only himself to take as a criterion. The horrors of the concentration camps reveal with utter clarity the consequences of God’s absence.

This, we are told, amounts to a 'blood libel' against atheists. Atheists are now a race.
One commenter, with superhuman politeness, cautions the author against using the term blood libel in so grotesquely inappropriate a context, but he replies, unruffled:

Jenny, thanks for your comment. I had some qualms about the choice of “blood libel”, too, but felt he was making a rather strong accusation himself that atheists are directly responsible for the worst, most violent crimes in modern history. That, in fact, was the substance of his speech. It’s no less serious an accusation.
I know well the history of blood libels. Ratzinger, however, has made something of a sport of targeting atheists as his church once directly attacked Jews. Beneath the surface of diplomatic Kumbayaing, it’s the same old libel. But the blood is on the hands of his church.

Now, even if Ratzinger was wrong here, which he isn't, to use his words to equate the Pope with Nazis and atheists with Jews is quite a stretch.
But you'd never guess that from the enthusiastic endorsements of the fruit and nut assortment that regularly gather under Dawkins's roof, where Ratzinger is critiqued with their usual intellectual thoroughness, that is to say he is called an arsehole, a cock-end, "Pope Rat's Arse", and "manifesting to us signs of Alzheimer's disease. lol"
"Ratzi the paedophile protecting Nazi does it again," explains one. Another, amusingly called Daniel Clear, writes that "atheists are not quite up there with jews when it comes to nazi oppression but it could easily happen."

I know the world looks to me to make sense of these difficult matters, so don't worry, I've sorted it all out again.

A 2010 report showed that anti-semitic incidents around the world more than doubled in 2009 over the previous year, reaching a twenty-year high. Leading the world in the Jew-bashing Top of the Pops were those enlightenment paradises Britain and France.
In Britain 374 violent incidents against Jews were recorded in 2009 (up from 112 the year before). Although France managed only 195, that was still an impressive rise on the previous year's 50. The world total of recorded incidents in 1989 was 78.
Writing in the Guardian this year, columnist Deborah Orr wrote that the exchange of kidnapped Israeli soldier Giliad Shalit for over 1000 Palestinian terrorists, far from a terrible capitulation to terrorism and a tragic marker of just how far Israel's innate decency will stretch, was in fact "simply an indication of how inured the world has become to the obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives."
It continues:

Netanyahu argues that he acted because he values Shalit's life so greatly. Yet who is surprised really, to learn that Netanyahu sees one Israeli's freedom as a fair exchange for the freedom of so many Palestinians? Likewise, Hamas wished to use their human bargaining chip to gain release for as many Palestinians as they could. They don't have much to bargain with.
At the same time, however, there is something abject in their eagerness to accept a transfer that tacitly acknowledges what so many Zionists believe – that the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.

We are used to more or less guarded anti-Semitism as a daily occurrence in newspapers as vile as this one and The Independent, but this was something else, something far less guarded, something coming confidently out of the shadows.
In a follow-up, Orr apologised only for its ill-chosen use of the word 'chosen', and responds to an imaginary objection with stunning irrelevance:

It would be absurd to believe that Jewish people are any more or less capable of making geo-political miscalculations than anybody else, or any more or less likely to be called to account for them. Evidence from every corner of the world, throughout the ages, attests to the fact that such behaviour is all too typical of humans, as is reluctance to accept that such actions are bound to have their critics.

As if the problem was the suggestion that Jews might be capable of making "geo-political miscalculations", rather than the fact that the twisting of reality in its account of the prisoner exchange, so that it can be read as an example of Jewish bigotry rather than sheer, terrible desperation, reveals a mind so diseased with hatred that you can actually see the lamps of the enlightenment being turned off one by one as you read it.

In conclusion, then, I have firmly and finally identified the 'New Jews of Europe'.
It's the Jews, same as usual.

Great things about the 21st century #324: When charities attack

2011-12-14T06:12:00.019Z

The writer Peter Hitchens is, for noble if knowingly ironic reasons, a member of the charity Amnesty International.
Every year, he gives them a not insubstantial sum of his own money in order that they use it to help fight political oppression all over the world.

It should go without saying, and once did go without saying, and yet now here I am having to say, that any charity has an obligation to use such donations as it receives wisely and respectfully, that is to say solely and sensibly in direct pursuit of their stated aims.
So what was Hitchens expected to make of this video, one of a series all as witless, pointless and unpleasant to look at and listen to?

'Smug' just doesn't cover it, does it?
From the very first it nauseates. The self-satisfied, confrontationally mocking voice of the narrator. The way he says the word 'heroes'. The 'funny' organ music. The obscene anti-Israel propaganda framed as righteous comedy. The line "if human rights make these people angry they've got to be a good thing" over a shot of silly framed pictures of popular tv presenters, elected politicians (this is a charity, remember) and, most idiotically, the tv fox puppet Basil Brush. (I can only assume this refers to the incident a few years ago when the police investigated a joke about gypsies on his tv show, but that, surely, received nothing but mocking condemnation. Amnesty, it seems, took it seriously, and thinks Basil Brush's human rights record make him a better target of their ire than Mahmoud Ahmedinejad.)
And then, the attack on Hitchens begins, a man who helped pay for the video.
Notice anything about the references to Hitchens and to the animated rubbish that follows? They allow for no debate of any kind.
After acknowledging that at least 65% of the country want capital punishment restored, the video refuses to engage with them, take them seriously or try to persuade them of its alternative view. Instead it offers only mockery, and a smirkingly unfunny parody that says: "We think the views of 65% of the population are unworthy of respect, and that anyone who disagrees with us is fit only for demonisation".
The video therefore is designed not to reach out, educate and inform, but to flatter those already in agreement with it. In other words, it serves no purpose whatsoever.
Yet Amnesty spent Peter Hitchens's money on it, money that might have been better spent on, oh I don't know, fighting human rights abuses or something.

The phenomenon of the charity propaganda video is one of the most interesting and unpleasant milestones of the internet age.
The classic example was 'No Pressure', issued a while back by the 10-10 carbon emissions something or other campaign, partly tax-funded, and created by the multi-talentless Richard Curtis.

This one was notable, of course, because it proved so resounding an own goal that the campaign, which launched it so crowingly, ended up swiftly withdrawing it.
God alone knows how much money was wasted on this one, and how better it might have been spent.

And they didn't even see it coming.
Like Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand in the aftermath of their BBC-sanctioned act of criminal intimidation directed against an old man, these unspeakable shits thought at first that the outrage was coming only from what they think of as the lunatic fringe, and safe in the mistaken belief that most commentators would be behind them, issued only larky, sarky, deliberately insincere pseudo-apologies. ('Franny' Armstrong, the founder of the 10-10 project who also made the more ambitious eco-Fascist propaganda feature 'The Age of Stupid', joked that they only killed five people in the film, "a blip" compared to the millions who would die as a result of global warming.)
Then, as the firestorm escalated, the tone changed most gratifyingly, the film was junked, and the non-winky, through-gritted-teeth apologies were subsituted for the fuck-you ones.
This is important not because the apology was sincere (of course it wasn't), or that they might learn something (of course they didn't), or that it might encourage them to lay off a bit from now on (of course it didn't), but because their very unpreparedness shows just how chillingly confident they are.
They issue this monstrous little production truly unaware that its threats or the vileness of its imagery and tone will be received with anything other than delight from one quarter and cowed acquiescence from everyone else. No, they weren't seriously advocating the deaths of those who disagree with them - they're saving that for next week - but what this video is saying, in what it imagines to be a disarmingly ironic and witty way, is that this is an issue we right-thinking people are becoming increasingly unwilling to allow you a choice on. Take the warning now, while it's still being delivered in stylish postmodern fashion, because next time we won't be smiling. Do what you're told willingly, because you have no choice anyway.
Under the guise of leftist do-goodery, something truly terrifying has yet again been set loose in the land.

The only reason I didn't write about it at the time was because, for once, the national response was so gratifyingly, vocally and overwhelmingly negative, and because there was little I could add to these excellent commentaries by James Delingpole and Melanie Phillips.
(And it's a little off-topic, but do also read the section 'Rescued by Boris Johnson' in 'Franny' Armstrong's Wikipedia entry. How revealing is that 'central casting' observation?)

'Franny' Armstrong, plus the leader of the Labour Party, plus a sign reading 'The Age of Stupid', equals a photograph that needs no caption.

But it got me thinking about these nasty little propaganda videos that charities keep issuing these days.
The Delingpole link will bring you to this, which in some ways is an even nastier one, issued by Greenpeace, sharing with Curtis's opus the unmistakable tone of intimidation bordering on physical threat, and the giveaway fascist tactic of exploiting the young's resentment of adults.

(When that hateful little runt says "Either you're for my future or you're against it", how badly do you wish you had one of Curtis's little red buttons?)

Now, here's two more abominations issued by Amnesty.
They're part of a series in which actors, shot in close-up against a black background, look you straight in the eye and tell you what they've been told to say about issues that they, as parasitic servants of the people, have in fact no right to discuss at all.
The techniques are classic. The reassuring tone, aided by the speakers' familiarity from other contexts, the unequivocal claims, the implicit condemnation of dissent.
The effect is really creepy if you can see past the mesmerism - especially when you remember the kinds of places you've seen these techniques used before.

This first one is presented by John Hurt, who wants to tells us some "facts about the world we live in":

As it happens, just like Hurt, I too believe that one of the most pressing social problems we face (or rather refuse to face) is the sexual, proprietorial and territorial brutalisation and intimidation of women by unchallenged sexually potent males, fuelled by pornography, the cult of entitlement and the collapse of unequivocal authority in the home and the street.
Where we differ is in the fact that Amnesty typically gets the problem about face, in its obsessive fixation on victims rather than criminals. So it's violence against women, rather than violence done to women by men, and it's all our problem, and perhaps even all our faults (which may be true, but not in the way Amnesty thinks).
So ingrained now is this culture of 'all victims, no villains' that Amnesty shy away from pointing the finger squarely at the baddies even when they're on the okay-to-single-them-out list: white people, westerners, men.
It's almost as if they know the problem is not so much the latent savagery that is a defining natural component of masculinity as the specific fact that the sexual revolution they support unshackled this savagery after two centuries of relentless and impartial repression by conservative civilisation.
So they can't even name names here, the poor bastards. (Still, no Fascist can survive long without somebody to hate, even Amnesty. Thank God for Americans and Jews, that's all I can say.)

Typical of Amnesty's counter-productive tactics is its juvenile invention of absurd statistics, making poor Hurt say: "one in three women are beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused throughout the world".
Now, this is a third of all women in the world. Clearly, there are going to be statistical hot spots and cold spots where the average is varied from, in both directions, but one in three is a vast number even for the hots pots.
Yet the video isn't even saying this, because Hurt has the trusting idiocy to to add, "Look around you. One in three women."
So he's not even allowing for statistical imbalance. He's saying that one in three women I know, for example, are beaten, coerced into sex or otherwise abused.
This absurd overinflation of fact does not make the problem seem bigger than it really is but smaller, because we sense that such a figure can only be arrived at by the lumping together of 'abuses' so trivial as to insult the women who really have been abandoned to a life of despair and sexual ownership: the luckless - and, increasingly, defensively savage themselves - women of the British underclass, abandoned by the Amnesty class.
Thus is a cause undermined, its victims betrayed, an outrage trivialised, and ultimately of course, a problem made worse.

Torn between the totalitarian's urge to legislate and the liberal credo that there is no social problem that cannot be educated away (and the kindlier the smile and softer the voice the more effective the education) Amnesty advocates nothing beyond blind faith in human nature - until it's too late, whereupon they'll be pressing for the suppression of civil liberties just like all the other Leftist Fascists.
Punishment is okay provided we all suffer it: it's the singling out of the guilty that they find intolerable.
What they cannot do, because it gives away too much about the agenda they support and the insupportable conception of human nature they endorse - is acknowledge that this is a problem of social change.
"And we claim to be civilised?" John asks.
Well, no actually. People like you do, John, whereas I, down here with the peasants, have learned not to. We used to be, a lot more than we are now, but recapturing that spirit is a forlorn hope while people like you and Amnesty continue to defend the cult of rampant license and the orthodoxy that all and any efforts to restrict sexual freedom are immoral.
The only way to combat 'violence against women' is to penalise and stigmatise those expressions of male sexual irresponsibility and aggression that were once roundly condemned but are now freely exercised in a society that has sacrificed sacrifice and given the elbow to the shouldering of responsibilities.
This will also entail the reorienting of a popular culture that not merely glamourises sexual decadence and folly, but actually treats with suspicion the ideas of lawfulness, sobriety, ethical certainty and social responsibility and cohesion.
In what we now have instead of these despised certainties of just a few decades past, in the return of jungle ethics and primate hierarchy, in all areas where male supremacy is left unchecked, we see a plain consequence of the progressivist agenda Amnesty continues to stand alongside.

The same tricks here, too. The same mix of confrontational but phoney factual assertion and man-to-man reasonableness of tone, delivered by Jeremy Irons with that instant visual identifying symbol of a great ac-tor in 'one of us' mode: the scruffy grey beard.
It's not one of his better performances - I personally find him much more convincing when he goes out foxhunting - but you have to admire the confidence with which he reels off that blizzard of assertions, stated as uncontested fact but actually so untrue their very outrageousness is designed to make them harder to challenge. (Communists knew this: the bigger the lie, the more it's believed.)

So countries with capital punishment don't have lower crime rates.
Really, Jeremy? Lower than what, for starters. Show me the numbers.
Countries that abolish capital punishment are not "plunged into criminal chaos" (and notice how wearily he says that, too!)
Really, Jeremy? Britain, for example? Try swapping homes with an old lady in a Manchester council estate for a fortnight you millionaire idiot.
And get this one: capital punishment targets the underprivilleged.
Really, Jeremy? Where did you find the control group to validate that piece of utopian wishful thinking?
Notice that he doesn't even claim that it inadvertently discriminates against the poor - no, it actually targets them!
Well, it helps if they're murderers too. In other words, note here that he's not saying innocent people are being executed, he's saying that a disproportionately large number of poor guilty people are being executed, compared with wealthy guilty people.
This may be something worth looking into, but it's not an argument against capital punishment per se! It's a problem with capital punishment in practice, not in theory, and the point could be equally used to advocate more executions of the wealthy. I think you'll find, if you deign to look, that crime disproportionately affects the poor as well, which is why the majority of them are in favour of capital punishment.

Then there is the certainty of miscarriages of justice.
Well yes. Juries did take things more seriously, back when it mattered a damn what they decided, and when it was reasonable to suppose they could understand what they were being told. Miscarriages are far more frequent now, in an age when jury trial is a kind of pantomime that anyone can have a go at, and the consequences of a guilty verdict for the defendant are so trivial it hardly matters anyway.
But back in the days of respectable, intelligent juries, unanimous verdicts and respect for the courts and judicial procedure, miscarriages were far less common, and I challenge anybody to come up with a miscarriage of justice that ended with execution. (Excepting the special case of Derek Bentley, who should have been pardoned, but was not innocent in a strictly legal sense, that is. Ruth Ellis? James Hanratty? Timothy Evans? Guilty as charged, m'lud.)
And this too is at heart a cultural problem. The problem is always cultural, as only the bravest and most hated crusaders have had sense enough to recognise and courage enough to say.

So distracted are we by all this that it is easy to overlook the moment when Irons looks at us with his big puppy dog eyes and asks plaintively, would it be right anyway, even if all those other problems were decisively ironed out?
For most people, I think, the answer to that one is yes. As blanket moral condemnation of the right to execute murderers is certainly not how the abolition of capital punishment was sold to the electorate. If some magic and infallible test could prove to everybody's satisfaction the guilt of most suspected child murderers, for instance, there would be fewer people standing up for the wrongness of capital punishment as a principle than there are people willing to read a David Baddiel novel.

The three standard objections to capital punishment are: the vague certainty that it is a reflection of a brutal and uncivilised society, the abstract assertion that nobody has the right to take somebody else's life, or the practical objection that, whatever our feelings in theory, the risk of a miscarriage of justice leading to the death of an innocent is simply too great.
So compelling are all of these reasons, we rarely think beyond them, to where their logic really takes us.
Yes, the wanton taking of life should be seen as entirely inexcusable and impermissible, which is why the institution of the death penalty was seen as so important a signifier of this prohibition. A society without the courage to insist on unqualified retribution for ultimate crimes is one that lacks certainty of purpose, courage and, ultimately, love.
What such a society looks like is visible to anyone who cares to look outside, unless, like Jeremy Irons, they can afford to live where reality's tentacles have not yet reached. One of the most obvious features of such a society is the exponential rise in both murders and in the savagery of those murders. An everyday fact of life in such societies will be the brutal killing of the innocent by those who may once have been deterred by the risk to their own safety that capital punishment promised, or by those who would once have aleady received its benediction, instead newly released from brief incarceration.
This then leads to the generation of lynch mobs, and to the necessity of an armed police force meting out instant justice, both carrying a risk of innocent or avoidable death far greater than the sober judgement of a responsible jury.
In other words, capital punishment is necessary because its absence is a reflection of a brutal and uncivilised society, because nobody has the right to take somebody else's life, and because, whatever our feelings in theory, the risk of a miscarriage of justice leading to the death of an innocent is simply too great. The reasoning was sound, you just drew the wrong conclusion.

Now, to get the real measure of all these videos, press play on them all at the same time, so that each sentence is reduced to just one more noise in the overwhelming cacophany of arrogance, threat, whining and contempt they create en masse.
Ah, yes. The authentic sound of modern Britain.
It's like throwing open your windows in the morning.

Nothing special

2011-12-04T09:14:00.011Z

Two stories this week tie together for me.

First we have Jeremy Clarkson, a basically foolish television presenter who presents robustness of thought as larky eccentricity and so helps to neutralise it still further in the general culture, apparently embroiled in another of those boring controversies the media like to invent when they can't fabricate a 'race row'.

This time it's interesting, though, because it shows how popular attitudes are reversing, and therefore what does now qualify as provocative and tasteless and what does not.
Discussing people who commit suicide by throwing themselves under trains in a newspaper column, he wrote:

I have the deepest sympathy for anyone whose life is so mangled and messed up that they believe death's icy embrace will be better...
However, it is a very selfish way to go because the disruption it causes is immense. And think what it's like for the poor train driver who sees you lying on the line and can do absolutely nothing to avoid a collision.

According to AOL, "the comments have sparked criticism among suicide and mental health charities".
Paul Farmer, chief executive of Mind, described the piece as "extraordinarily tasteless in its tone," adding that "people who have contemplated suicide... will think it is in extremely bad taste.
"It stands out like a sore thumb from what is increasingly a more supportive approach to suicide by the media."

The suggestion that suicide, especially when performed in public in circumstances that cannot fail to traumatise large numbers of people, in all likelihood including very young children, is selfish and wrong is now a controversial one. To suggest it forcefully is "extraordinarily tasteless", people who have "contemplated" doing just that appalling thing "will find it in very bad taste" and - most telling of all - "It stands out like a sore thumb from what is increasingly a more supportive approach to suicide by the media".

Well, that more supportive approach to suicide, along with the more supportive approach to abortion and the more supportive (read: coercive) approach to euthanasia may at least help us all to cut down on our fuel bills.

Anyone else remember this, which crept into the New Scientist a couple of years ago:

Victoria University professors Brenda and Robert Vale, architects who specialise in sustainable living, say pet owners should swap cats and dogs for creatures they can eat, such as chickens or rabbits, in their provocative new book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.The couple have assessed the carbon emissions created by popular pets, taking into account the ingredients of pet food and the land needed to create them.
"If you have a German shepherd or similar-sized dog, for example, its impact every year is exactly the same as driving a large car around," Brenda Vale said.
"A lot of people worry about having SUVs but they don't worry about having Alsatians and what we are saying is, well, maybe you should be because the environmental impact ... is comparable."

Now we have this (hat tip to Darrell):

In Durham, England, corpses will soon be used to generate electricity.
A crematorium is installing turbines in its burners that will convert waste heat from the combustion of each corpse into as much as 150 kilowatt-hours of juice — enough to power 1,500 televisions for an hour. The facility plans to sell the electricity to local power companies.
Some might find this concept creepy. Others might be pleased to learn that the process "makes cremation much greener by utilizing its by-products," in the words of cremation engineer Steve Looker, owner and chief executive officer of the Florida-based company B&L Cremation Systems, which is unaffiliated with the Durham enterprise.
In Europe, tightening regulations on crematorium emissions, coupled with the high price of energy, will lead more and more facilities to go the way of Durham in the future, Looker said.

Remember those poor soppy plane crash survivors, stuck halfway up a mountain fretting for days about whether they should have eaten their dead comrades in the Andean air disaster? What a bunch of big girl's blouses! By this logic they should have tucked into Mrs Moskowitz before the chocolate bars ran out.
What is a corpse after all if not meat, what is a person after all if not meat - or a brilliant means of powering 1500 televisions for an hour? Well, it's good to know my life had an ultimate meaning: he gaveth his life so that 1500 cretins could watch The X-Factor. This is what we are charging now for humanity.

Who's the atheist here? It's me, remember? So why is it that I'm constantly having to defend the sanctity of human life?
We all know that the future Hitler planned to impose upon is now just around the corner through our own free choice, and between the abortions at one end and the euthanasia at the other - not compulsory, you understand, merely encouraged with all the 24-hour blanket subtlety the media class can muster - we will soon have a good twenty or so years of Soylent Green sandwiches before our bags are packed for us, provided we're perfect in the first place of course. Or what passes for perfect these days: incredibly uninformed and fashionably dressed.
I don't believe in pixies and elves but I do know ideas have consequences, and that pragmatism in matters once deemed spiritual - the application to social policy of the Darwinian fact that we are evolved animals that invented morality - leads to a kind of universal Auschwitz, where there is no purpose to living and so no right to it, without the consent of a council of technocratic bigots wearing Richard Dawkins masks.

Now that the Monopoly money has run out, and the people are taking to the streets to protest the prospect of having to first earn what they spend, this is going to be increasingly sold to us as a regrettable necessity, a sensible and pragmatic solution for pragmatic times.
Of course we don't want to use corpses for fuel, but hard times call for hard measures. The idea that it could work the other way: that we could avoid the conversion of one dead person into mere commodity simply by turning off 1500 televisions for an hour... well, there's regrettable - and there's just plain crazy.

And of course we don't want you to voluntarily shuffle off when you cease to be of any practical use to anyone, and God knows we'd never force you, but isn't it just a teensy bit selfish, eating all that food and occupying all that space, when you could be powering somebody's television somewhere?

Make no mistake and allow no exception: we are the worst generation that has ever lived.

It's sort of like my past is an unfinished painting

2011-12-03T16:30:00.013Z

Well, that Kate Nash video certainly went down like greased honey with a lot of you, so now here's some more pop magic to brighten your day, this time from a pretentious ignoramus called Stefani Germanotta, who performs under the alias 'Lady Gaga', because she decided it would be a good idea to.

Remember when pop stars used to come on, sing a crap song and then sod off again in three minutes flat? No such luck anymore.
This new video clocks in at just under fourteen minutes, beginning with some pompous, hilarious narration, then a scripted narrative section, then a sort of piano prelude, then a sort of electro prelude.
Don't skip the spoken intro: it's a laugh riot. If I had to pick a favourite line... well, it's tricky, since just about every sentence is stuffed to the gills with non-sequiturs, tautologies, oxymorons and drivel, but I suppose it would come down to a choice between this bit of prime nonsense:
"When I look back on my life, it's not that I don't want to see things exactly as they happened, it's just that I prefer to remember them in an artistic way, and truthfully the lie of it all is much more honest because I invented it"
and this obliviously senseless claptrap:
"Clinical psychology tells us arguably that trauma is the ultimate killer: memories are not recycled like atoms and particles in quantum physics - they can be lost forever."
Presumably the people that listen to the woman's vapid sub-musical clowning lap up this kind of gibberish in the same spirit with which she expounds it; as a form of validation, and justification of self-regard, even though its random assembling of non-understood terms and concepts is capable of conveying the pretence of meaning only to the very young or the very dim.

The pop song it has all been created in order to hawk finally kicks in after just under nine ball-busting minutes of agonising tedium, starting off like a forgotten Abba album track before segueing into an electronic synth doodle more than worthy of comparison with 2 Unlimited or Stock, Aitken & Waterman-era Kim Wilde. Never has the gap between a song's merits and the vainglory with which it is presented and announced yawned quite so Grand Canyon-wide.
Visually and thematically, it pairs the singer's suggestion that she is "gonna marry the night" and "go down to the bar but I won't cry anymore", and "won't poke holes in the seats with my heels 'cause that's where we make love", is "a soldier to my own emptiness" and knows that "skeleton guns are wedding bells in the attic" with beautifully photographed destruction, mental illness, hospitalisation, car crashes, physical squalor and sexual self-worship, mined for every ounce of the glamour such things apparently possess in pop land.

You can only sit and wonder just how much was spent on this utter, utter rubbish, and why the 99 per-centers aren't camped outside the talentless idiot's house, calling for her head on a pike.
You can, if you wish, ponder the deep, incredibly troubling implications of it all in terms of what our popular culture says about us, and what we apparently want from it, and just how little we demand of it, and just how much we are prepared to tolerate from it in terms of its creators' contempt for us and veneration of themselves, despite being among the most insignificant mediocrities on the planet.

Or you can forget all that, and lighten up a little, and sit back and put your feet up, and just enjoy the sheer, thundering crapness of it all.

Nothing wrong with anything anymore

2011-11-24T21:45:00.027Z

“They were sent to my husband. There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s not like I was shooting a porno. Although there’s nothing wrong with that either.”

Interesting comment, that, from Scarlett Johansson, about the nude pictures she took of herself, that were recently stolen and plastered all over the internet. (I wasn't even there.)

It raises two points, the first about the internet.
What on earth do we mean when we say 'plastered all over the internet'? Nothing is plastered over the internet. It is put there. We do the plastering ourselves, through the choices we make. What does this tell us about the power of the thing, and of our role in shaping its preoccupations - the fact that a couple of fuzzy snaps of a film star showing fractionally more than she does in her actual films can flood the world in seconds, from non-existent to in literally everybody's home, in as long as it takes to turn a computer on, download and hit publish?

The fact of it, divorced from context, is of course amazing and a tribute to the geniuses who invented this thing. Do not, whatever you do, get me wrong.
But don't you get a bit tired, just a touch weary, just ever so slightly lethargic, perhaps just a tad BORED OUT OF YOUR FRUSTRATED SKULL, every time you are made to reflect on how wonderful the internet is, with having to divorce it from context all the time?
Wouldn't it be great if the context was amazing too? But how often is it?
Once would be good.
Forget context, the way we're all ordered to, and sure, the fact that Scarlett's ever so slightly infuriatingly out of focus bristols had toured the world by breakfast is certainly a technical, mechanical marvel. Something akin to Stevenson's rocket, and aesthetically, perhaps, even superior to it. (I'm not denying the importance of Stevenson's rocket, of course, I just mean it's rare that I've caught myself wondering what it might look like serving me breakfast in a French maid's costume two sizes too small.)

But let's think less about the internet's amazing power - just for a moment - and let's think more about the shape and direction of its interests, of its appetites.
Call me individual, but isn't there something fundamentally misconceived about a technical marvel this all-encompassingly powerful being made everybody's inviolable property, and just setting it loose among them, as it were, which is what happened, what seems like a lifetime ago, but in fact, even now, just a few short years ago?
How can it even be said to be impersonal, when we all know that while all things have the capacity to flood the world in seconds, only some do, and most will not. What do the things the internet chooses to fixate about say about the internet?
And yes, I do feel justified in talking about the internet as though it were possessed of its own consciousness and imperatives. It is alive, an extension of the minds of its users, as much a part of us as the things we do and say. All human life is here. And all human life is a terrible thing.

In its natural state, human existence, like all existence, is an unimaginably wretched thing. That's why a time came, probably as a result of trade (that 'capitalism' thing we all hate now too) when people decided to band together in common interest, in communities of families that grew into societies of friends, to take a stand against tooth and claw living, and instead to construct our own world they way we want it to be, put a fence round it and keep the wolves and savages out. Then once people started doing just that, its obvious benefits became more and more attractive, and it started to spread.
Thus was born civil society.
The great thing about civil society was that it was basically a club that anyone could apply to join: all you had to do was uphold certain standards and follow certain rules. Material poverty was no barrier: aspiration was positively approved of.
The reception room of civil society was called 'the middle class': creative intellectuals since the beginning of the twentieth century have encouraged us to despise it. In fact it was, like the morality that bred it, the greatest thing humans ever invented.
Before the twentieth century the greatest artists and writers dedicated themselves not to the excoriation of civil society to its enshrinement. And when the mass media began in the twentieth century it was enlisted as a further aid to its propagation. The 'middle class values' of early television, subject of so much derision in latter years, were an invaluable means of defining the parameters of the society it spoke to and for, which is why the issue of censorship and its limits was so important.
Middle class culture was not just a reflection of the aspirations of those who made it and consumed it and the world it enclosed - it was also a sentinel, keeping the real world at bay. It was not hiding from or denying this wider reality - a claim frequently and wrongly levelled against it - it was explicitly rejecting it.
Not anymore. Thanks to the wonderful internet, it's all right here, in your home: every last bit of what's out there, with no voice of authority to sort the approved from the outlaw. Even today, you'll hear people saying what a good thing this is.

For many, the job of the internet begins and ends with the provision of pornography.
No other aspect of our cultural lives has been as totally and relentlessly democratised by the power of the internet. National borders crumble, laws and prohibitions shiver in the face of its unstoppable juggernaut promotion of this basest and most dangerous of human endeavours.

Which brings me to the second point about that Scarlett quote: the way she follows the observation that it wasn't like she had shot a porno movie with the hasty assertion that there would be nothing wrong with that either!
Why say it, then? Talk about wrestling with one's conscience! Two holds, two submissions and a knockout - all in one paragraph!
That phrase shows beautifully exactly where we are, culturally, at this precise moment: the use of pornography as a symbolic evil to minimise the importance of an act of rash tawdriness in the first few words, then in the very next breath, a hurried retraction of that original, defining sentiment.
It is no longer cool to be uptight about pornography. It is no longer wise, if you are a young sexy movie star, to be seen to have any kind of a moral or political problem with it. It is a fundamental freedom, and a reflection of freedom, a symbol of the overthrow of the wicked and repressive middle class consensus. This is, more than anything, the internet's doing.

Once pornography was an evil that marked the line between civil society and the underworld.
In my lifetime, post-sixties, it has never been quite that, but it was, if nothing more, a shameful, embarrassing thing. Now, popular culture makes off-handed easy reference to it, seemingly mindless of the fact that what it is discussing so lightheartedly was literally criminal just twenty years ago.
I remember the first time I ever encountered that leering poltroon Russell Brand was in a magazine article that included a sidebar headed 'Great Russell Quotes', intended to illustrate the witless simpleton's supposed way with words. One of them read: 'On Internet Porn: “A smutty Lewis Carroll labyrinth following a white rabbit of filth.”
I mentioned it here at the time, but in the context of a wider cultural decline that sees an illiterate hailed as a wordsmith, and chooses to illustrate his linguistic dexterity with his definition of internet pornography as a labyrinth following a rabbit.
But here I'm making a different point: this was not some countercultural publication for cutting-edge youth. It was one of those free magazines they give you on trains: as bland and mainstream in its attitudes and intended audience as could be. And yet here was an untroubled, casual reference to pornography, with no sense of judgement attached. It wasn't expressing approval of pornography, of course, or demanding ours, but it did, nonetheless, assume our consent in acknowledging it as a common or garden part of our world. In other words, if civil society still has walls, pornography seemed to have jumped them, and was now in here with us. And I remember when Page 3 of your Super Soaraway Sun was controversial.

One of the few things Orwell got wrong when he imagined 1984 was that his totalitarian rulers would prohibit free sexual relations: it’s a strange, eye-opening bit of nuttiness that leaps from a book that hardly puts a foot wrong in the ideological sobriety - and accuracy - of its predictions. For a moment, one of the most perceptive imaginations of the twentieth century joins that of DH Lawrence and suchlike teenagers.
The truth about the value of sex under cultural-fascist enslavement is to be found not in Orwell but in Nigel Kneale’s Year of the Sex Olympics. The only thing Kneale got wrong was to imagine his future decadents retaining their cultivated tastes, accents and manners in tandem with the fruits of sexual liberation: the Sex Olympics are too clinical and consensual. He assumed the need to artificially separate sexual incontinence from the physical squalor that is its inevitable natural consequent, never dreaming that squalor would itself hold an allure for tomorrow’s cognoscenti.
But Kneale knew what Orwell did not: that the totalitarians will keep their slaves quiet not by denying them things and keeping them in cages, but by giving them things and letting them run free. The fact of enslavement makes revolutionaries; the illusion of freedom makes zombies. That is what Kneale saw, and that is where we are, now.

The twentieth century was a cultural battleground, in which the forces of libertinism, armed with bewildering new technologies and the twin evils of youth and idealism fought a merciless war against the forces of reaction.
The result was inevitable: conservatives were ill-equipped to defend the traditions under assault by any means other than those least likely to succeed: by appeal to those very traditions, and worse yet, to the scriptural authority underpinning them.
Because their allies were either literally or temperamentally children, and held the key to a new and intoxicatingly successful propaganda weapon called Youth Culture (also known as Pop Culture), the libertines were able to paint their campaign in the broadest of strokes and have their every propaganda fantasy believed.
The most successful of all their fantasies, perhaps, was the still widely held supposition that wars of morality were being fought against them by a resurgent Victorian puritanism, rather than aggressively by them, and purely defensively by the Mary Whitehouses and Lord Longfords.
Even today, modernist revolutionaries like to act as if they are a besieged cultural minority, shoring their flimsy castle against constant assault from reaction’s white horses massed without, as opposed to, more accurately, the exact opposite.

Tragically, the one decisive new weapon the good guys should have been able to call upon was instead captured by the enemy too. Sociobiology, sometimes called evolutionary psychology, was the science that emerged at the same time as the 1960s cultural revolution and almost immediately proved the reactionaries right and the libertines wrong. Though it demonstrates and explains the importance of resisting the overthrow of social and sexual custom and constraint, and the inevitable and dire outcome of not doing so, it is still even today posing as an ally of leftist progressivism, though many of its practitioners, not least Richard Dawkins, know they are lying and occasionally reveal the fact in unguarded passages of self-divided revelation.

None of the great cultural battles was as doomed, and has accordingly been as resoundingly lost, as that waged against sexual restraint. No cause was less cool, nor easier to caricature and misrepresent than that which argued for the suppression of pornography, or for the baleful consequences of its legitimisation.
Sexual sobriety and, worst of all, conformity, were tarred as fundamentally hypocritical creeds, invariably a reflection of how keenly the censorious themselves felt the pull of sexual desire, and how weak they secretly knew themselves to be in its lure.
And these people who would stand fast against this utopia of useless bestial freedom: oh what fun it was caricaturing them! Frustrated old vinegar-titted women, jealous of new generations brave enough to embrace promiscuity, or dyspeptic old Colonels, who rage against sexual freedom in public, then retire to the privacy of their country homes and watch schoolgirl spanking videos in a big nappy.

For some reason still there is no greater victory for libertines than the discovery that one who holds out against them is a secret indulger of vice: witness their delight when American fire and brimstone evangelists are caught with prostitutes or boys. Their reaction is never delight that another has joined their team: it's exactly the old-fashioned cluck-clucking and censure they supposedly decry. But of course, what they are objecting to is not vice but the desire to keep it private. For this is the worst thing of all: hypocrisy.
Is it, though? The assertion is never contested, but it's surely illogical if one accepts – as they above all must – that sexual desire is a natural component of the human character that comes with the basic model, not an optional extra we choose from the rack. Though the excesses of our sexual imaginations are of course shaped by the prominence and prioritising of sexual imagery in the surrounding culture, still ultimately, like Popeye, we am what we am.
So for someone with an innate tendency towards a desire they cannot rationalise, how much braver of them to deny it than indulge it, even if the mask slips behind closed doors. Whatever it is, it is certainly not hypocrisy, because it is not true to say that the public moral position is a lie: one who is truly enslaved to pornography might surely be even more keenly aware of its dangers and horrors than one who is not, however unable they may be to truly banish it. Doubly so in the Internet Age, when it comes to every house unbidden and the slave finds himself trying to resist nothing more difficult than the act of pressing a button to be flooded with all the horrors that a debased and suicidal culture can conceive.

Pornography is no longer a private vice, any more than it is merely an affair of two people having sex with each other, or one person displaying their reproductive anatomy. That weak-tea drug lost its power long ago: today's pornography addicts need stronger doses, and here again the internet is to blame not merely for being the vehicle but rather the actual engine of this progression, for supply stimulates demand, and the greater the supply the greater the demand.
Now the solitary vice is the shared passion of a worldwide community, with every conceivable kink and quirk of the sexual imagination lavishly catered for, most assuredly including the sexualised love of cruelty, extending both to violent sexual imagery and to the filming and sharing of acts of pure sadism and brutality.
Imagine anything – let your mind extend as far as you can go into depravity and horror – come up with the vilest, most unthinkable thing your brain will countenance. Then don’t whatever you do type the results into a search engine.
You know as well as I do, without the smallest need for convincing, that you will find it there.
This great wonder of technology, this all-changing, all-subverting testament to our imaginative and technological genius, has built a bridge between the foulest individuals in the world, and made of each isolated soul a member of self-vindicating world community.

And yes, this is why I hate the internet, and why it will destroy us.
Perhaps because it is used so overwhelmingly by those who had no hand in its creation, and could not even imagine how it works, the internet is the ultimate example of how the greatest imaginations feed the meanest, and how supreme technological sophistication and attainment will lead us back to the cave and the cudgel quicker than wars or natural disasters ever could.
A society that despises restraint will inevitably invent an internet that does likewise. No thing made by humans is unreflective of the humans that made it. Hand the Victorians the technology to invent the internet, and a very different kind of internet would have resulted.
It is, in its very construction, its very components, visibly the invention of the kinds of people that lived through the great cultural revolutions of the 1960s, testament and tribute to a concept of democracy that is really not democracy at all but a kind of equal ops anarchy, where everyone has a voice and so only the loudest and basest and most threatening is ever heard: just like in the good old days, before they invented civilisation.

As well as making conformity of values impossible, and the prevention of mass criminal, revolutionary and anti-social mobilisation even more so, the internet is an instant portal into the very worst of the human imagination, a kind of evil brain pulsing and living in the corner of your room.
If horror had a smell you would never stand for it: the stench rising from every computer would make it as absurd a presence in your home as an uncleaned toilet in the dining room. Nonetheless, this is your computer, sat on your desk so friendly and sleek, and yet with the things you hate more than anything else – things you would actually advocate taking up arms against the advancement of – right there, boxed and invisible but there all the same, a gateway to the abyss next to your vase of flowers and the picture of your kids when they were three.
How do we reconcile this paradox: that this wonderful amazing thing, of which we are almost if not yet quite forbidden to say anything bad, is at the same time an instant means of access to imagery and material the mere viewing of which, without any personal investment beyond giving it our attention, is enough to warrant not merely criminalisation but – that hardest of all things to achieve in a decadent utopia – genuine ostracisation?

Look at poor old ‘Gary Glitter’.
In an age when false accusations of sexual misconduct against the celebrity class are routine and regular, how remarkable, yet unremarked, was it that the exposure of this man as a consumer of child pornography was to the best of my knowledge followed up by not one accusation of sexual assault committed throughout his long and presumably temptation- and opportunity-strewn years of fame.
In other words, this desire for children, that he must have felt all his life, he was presumably able to resist acting on, all that time, either from fear of exposure or genuine moral self-prohibition.
Then, suddenly, along comes the internet. Now, he must resist nothing more self-involving than the flicking of a switch. What has he done, in the act of seeing what he had previously been only imagining, in the viewing of material the creation of which he had no hand in, that was there yesterday and will be there tomorrow whether he looks at it or not? What defence is there against such a temptation, if the desire is there as well?
Of course he succumbs, and we – too cowardly to admit that his downfall is caused by our weakness as much as his, our failure to defend an old-fashioned morality that was in fact his own protection as much as anyone else’s – we turn on him with the savagery of true hypocrisy, the hypocrisy not of sly calculation but genuine unrecognising ignorance, and we call him a monster.
A bit late in the day for that, I’d have thought. Saddest of all, perhaps, he is then forced to play the monster's role, the only one that society will now allow him, and inevitably he finds he starts to enjoy its renegade allure. So now he grins menacingly at the cameras, his bald, Aleister Crowleyesque visage too reassuringly grotesque to be seen for what it really is: a profound reproach, from one who began on our side of the wall and was led outside when we enshrined the right to selfish pleasure.
All the allegations of actual sexual misconduct levelled against Glitter have been subsequent to his exposure, when even the smallest restraint has been eroded to nothing, and by we, not him: thus is the failure of the sexual revolution exposed in miniature.

That sex is about the most potent force animating human behaviour, that worlds are turned on its pin, ships truly launched by what might once have euphemistically been called faces, is a fact understood by all centuries prior to our own. It informs much of our great literature and art, and has been scientifically proved by sociobiology.
It is everywhere so manifestly true that only the ideologically pre-programmed could possibly be stupid enough to claim otherwise. Sensing instinctively what sociobiology objectively and inarguably demonstrates, generations infinitely wiser than our own encased raw and murderous desire in a protective overcoat of checks and balances, rituals and regulations, codes and rules and obligations.
They also regulated its public expression in ways that we in our greatness mock as prudery, hypocrisy, and ‘Victorian morality’ (the adjective automatically disqualifying the noun).
Boring libertine shits will tell you there has always been pornography and there always will, and they are, of course, perfectly right. But it was once held in check invisibly, by its very scarcity and renegade status.
Mere sexual exhibitionism was enough to satisfy those trapped in its web until well into the last century: only when that becomes freely available and accepted by the wider culture does the law of diminishing returns kick in, and like any other drug the dose must be strengthened with ever greater debasement, ever greater squalor, an ever greater undercurrent of menace, and diversification and specialisation into various eccentric deviations, each with their own dedicated clientele, for which the internet lovingly caters.
It is not the existence of pornography but its acceptance that is fatal to society, and while we rightly punish some manifestations of it – such as those involving non-consensual violence or children – more severely than others, it is a typical abrogation of our moral responsibilities to have lapsed into the view that consensual, mainstream pornography is fine and dandy.
This is an incredibly new consensus in Britain: until virtually the end of the last century we were a laughing stock in Europe for our continued criminalisation of literally all forms of unsimulated sexual intercourse in published media.
The position was relaxing, it is true, but it was the internet that made the whole affair irrelevant. Who cares what the BBFC do with DVDs when you can switch on the computer and see anything you want at a second’s notice?
Once you had to skulk to the newsagents with your coat collar up and your mouth dry, and wait for everyone else to leave the shop, just so you could get your hands on a magazine that showed women with their legs apart. Now a whole world of sexual depravity awaits you any time of the day, and nobody needs to know until you have to get the computer mended. Even then you’re fine, probably, so long as there’s no kids in it. Everybody does it, you know.

The truth about pornography is that it’s a kind of Nazism. There’s actually nothing fun or excusable about it at all, I'm afraid. Sorry. I wish sexual freedom was as uncomplicated as they all say it is. I'd be all for it. But it's not. And pornography, its inevitable consequent, is a gesture of violence, of intimidation, of incitement, directed most obviously against women but also against civilisation itself, and against the presumption that civilisation is admirable or even possible. It is a serious and powerful assault on the concept and possibility of shared values, with the additional peril of being addictive and mentally debilitating.
Of course naked women look just terrific and we’d all like to be the one Scarlett sends her holiday snaps to. But these are not the kind of desires pornography panders to, though in its simplest and most antiquated manifestations it can now seem sufficiently naive as to be mistaken for mere harmless wish-fulfilment.
The truth about pornography is that it is not the indulgence of mere fantasy; it is not passive but radically proactive, it is an attempt to remake the world, to construct a parallel society within our own, where women exist not as agents but as willing vessels of permanent sexual availability, who welcome, enjoy, even seek out their own debasement.
In even its mildest forms it is a profoundly revolutionary as well as deceitful call to arms, proclaiming the natural superiority of the savage and the irrelevance of moral stricture. It is the liberation, without consequence (supposedly), of the sadistic impulse, and of the urge to sadistic self-assertion and the reduction of others to the status of means rather than ends, exactly analogous with slavery or vivisection, and actually less defensible than either, because pursued for mere pleasure rather than from misguided expediency.
It is the triumph of what Darwinism showed to be the natural condition of competing organisms, and what we in days of lost wisdom constructed social codes to temper and tame, which we are now demolishing brick by brick, because we are the stupidest and smuggest idiots who ever lived.

One really does have to sympathise with those whose enslavement to pornography is such that they are simply unable to withstand its complete and risk-free availability, even though they know in their hearts they are better people than it forces them to be.
But the people who are open about it, who defend it, just a bit of fun, a bit of harmless fantasy, the celebrities and comedians who joke about it, most of all the men and women responsible for creating it…
They should be kicked into the sea.

They should be buried up to their chins in pig manure

2011-11-24T06:32:00.015Z

By one of those curious twists of circumstance that help to keep a man diverted on the otherwise discouraging dawdle from crib to crematorium - a journey that starts off so rich in enthusiasm and interest that it seems almost indecent that now, little more than halfway through it, and just when you might have thought I'd be really getting into the swing of it all, I find that I have to sit down to put my shoes on, and getting an invitation to a party feels like the guard coming into the cell polishing his rifle and saying, "it's tomorrow, son; tomorrow at dawn" - I found myself watching a movie the other day, starring a glowing, twinkling ball of infectious energy (and I use the word infectious here in the strictest toxicological sense) by the name of Shirley Temple.

Of course, there may be a minority even today that likes to watch precocious children saving the day, holding their own in banter with the adult supporting cast and then finishing the whole thing off with a song and a big lollipop, just as there are always going to be people ready and waiting to be amused by chimps articulated by faux-cockney voiceover artists, wearing clothes and shifting pianos.
But the point to remember about Shirley Temple, other than that she was really a fully grown male midget only pretending to be a girl, which isn't strictly true but fun to imagine when you're watching her all the same, is that she was not, in her heyday, a minority interest at all but a superstar. Man, woman and - perhaps oddest of all - child flocked to her adventures like anti-semites to the Guardian's 'Comment is Free' website.

How could they have survived long enough to breed us? How could they have coped with so little cynicism, with such simple, tragic, wonderful, enviable innocence? How could they have made it safely through such happy, gentle days, so near to our own that some who lived then live among us still, yet temperamentally as distant as the golden age of egesting out of the window into the street. A whole way of living and seeing gone, gone forever, gone utterly and beyond retrieval, lost as thoroughly and completely as the Buddhas of Bamyan and Hugh Laurie's sense of irony.

And yet, for a generation so trained at sniffing out and spitting at anything that seems naff or old-fashioned, we are remarkably unblessed with forward sight. I love it when people look at photographs of themselves from ten years before, and laugh, "What did I look like? What was I wearing? How could I have thought that hairstyle looked good?"
They never get beyond the questions to the obvious answers: you looked the way you thought you wanted to look, just as you do now, you were wearing what was deemed fashionable at the time, just as you are now, and you thought your hairstyle looked good because you had blind faith in the mindless, shifting consensus, as you do now. And ten years on, you'll say exactly the same things again.
That's why that cynicism that is so sharp when directed at the past so inexplicably blunts in the presence of the fads and ephemera of our own age. The most hilarious nonsense slips clean under the cynicism radar that way.
Surely if anything deserved a dose of our finely-honed condescending disdain it's this, for example.
A friend forwarded it to me in retaliation for exposing him to the Beyonce song in an earlier post. He'd never come across it before I pointed it out, but curiosity got the better of him and that was that: the screeching cow had claimed another scalp.
So on the 'one good turn deserves another' principle he responded by treating me to the laugh-a-line Kate Nash for the first time. He also made me chuckle by telling me about an occasion on which he threatened to get out of a car in the middle of France and walk when the driver put her CD on.
It is for sure the most extraordinarily unpleasant sound, more like one of those witless parodies of contemporary pop singers that female comedians do than the real thing, the hilarious vocal affectations presumably an nth-degree attempt at post-Winehouse authenticity, though as my correspondent rightly notes, the hand is so overplayed that "she sounds retarded". And the whole issue's academic anyway, since, perhaps needless to say, she went to stage school and thus wears her vocal tics like a trilby and dark mackintosh. (This, incidentally, is the same friend who once described the uniquely unwelcoming facial features of Pete Townsend as "like a Nazi", a strikingly apposite analogy that seems truer and truer the more I think about it, which luckily isn't all that often.)

Though most people seem to accept that a society's popular culture is as good a measure as any of its mood and preoccupations, and therefore by extension that the changes in its constituents mirror changes in the wider society, surprisingly few seem able or willing to take the trivially easy next step of acknowledging that the journey from Shirley Temple to The X-Factor is therefore something of a plummet, in just about every sense: moral, intellectual, aesthetic and psychological.
I have said this many times before, and speculated just as often as to the possible reasons why so simple and inarguable an observation proves so difficult to sell, and causes such resentful disagreement.
Mainly, I suppose it is just this odd need so many otherwise rational people feel to be a part of the cultural moment into which they have been tossed, to retain a stake in it, a toehold, even if in private they find it increasingly alienating, or at least irrelevant. Even if it gets harder by the day to find a tv programme they really want to watch, or a song they can bear to listen to, there remains something bizarrely panic-inducing about the prospect of being asked what they think of Adele, or Downton Abbey, and it somehow coming out not that they don't like them, which would be okay if daringly iconoclastic, but that they don't know what they are, which would apparently be terrifying.

But more interesting to me are the slightly different objections I sometimes get to my preoccupation with the dregs of pop culture on this blog, by people who basically agree with me as to its merits.
Some seem to think it is irrelevant: of course it's all rubbish, they say, but there are much more important things, so concentrate on those.
Others seem bizarrely capable of shutting it out of their lives and not worrying about it: just ignore it (as if it will go away).
Occasionally I even get the classic 'lighten up' objection: it's just a bit of fun, if you don't like it turn it off but it's not doing any harm, so lighten up.
How I envy these light ones, so lightened up they emit shafts of 50 watt incandescence, and have to put weights in their shoes to stop them floating off forever into that happy high ground where our cultural choices have no measurable social and political impact.
But for heavy, unlightened souls like me, rooted to the ground with our lack of irony and postmodern cultural eclecticism, the picture is a rather different one. Here, among the heavied down, all tv shows, films and pop music seem equally contemptible and contemptuous, corrupt and corrupting. To we, the pompous tv dramas that portray sordid murderers as geniuses and sexualise torture, comedians and presenters that dictate opinion and demonise dissent, pop music that encourages tribalist bigotry and terrifies those who lived through the Second World War, and all the other daily manifestations of an ideologically proactive popular culture which despises the gentle, the elderly and the freethinking have only too obvious effects on their worshippers, and thus to everyone who shares a pavement with them.

Most generally, I am asked. 'what's the connection?'
Of course a useless society will produce a useless culture, this argument runs, but what possible justification can there be for suggesting it works the other way round?
Well, another correspondent sent me this link, detailing how the X-Factor and its foul presenters exploited, tormented and mocked a mentally ill woman for fun and ratings, a woman whose desperation to join their useless ranks should have roused them to deep, perhaps even suicidal introspection, yet instead so utterly contemptible and beyond hope are they, it merely inspired that response familiar in playgrounds the world over whenever a weakling is knocked to the ground: bullying laughter, and the low, menacing chant of triumph.
It's all here, for anyone who thinks that The X-Factor is 'just a bit of fun', or too trifling to worry about, or a mere reflector of its larger scenery. Here we see the true face of youth culture, its belligerent tribalism and seething, almost physical hatred for any too stupid (or too clever) to want to be part of their gang - or worse, as in this case, for those who do want to join, who want to be their friends so very desperately, but are too hopeless to pass the cool test. The reminder that this is a programme for gangs, and the pleasure comes from savouring the debasement and humiliation of outsiders every bit as much as feigning instant adoration for the talentless, narcissistic dipshits they are told to approve of.
The sneering, heartless attitudes displayed here by the programme's presenters - all the worse coming from people who are transparently yet so obliviously stupid and without merit themselves - are in effect the true animating force behind all pop culture, which defines itself by what and who it excludes as much as or more than by what or who it embraces. It's about keeping up, but also about making sure there are always some who cannot, and laughing at them when they fall behind. It fosters both unquestioning uniformity of opinion and an obsessiveness with trivia that excludes all possibility of engagement with weightier matters - both states a boon to the true puppet-masters: the power-hungry cultural elite now decisively poised to plunge the free world back into leftist totalitarian enslavement, where it would have been half a century ago, if their poster boy Adolf hadn't turned out to be a bit mad and off-message.
The real stroke of genius in these programmes, of course, is the concept of the audience phone vote. The goggle-eyed slave first watches the official court of no appeal offer their vapid, plucked from the air opinions about equally bad but varyingly cool acts - then, fully worked up into a lather of sadism, they get the chance to administer the coup de grace. It is a kind of dress rehearsal for mob rule, and the lessons learned are daily enacted outside. It encourages the public to be sofa slob Neros, choosing clemency or annihilation with a raise or a plunge of their greasy thumbs, keeping them fat and stupid but at the same time keeping the old killing instinct well honed. It fosters all that is worst and ugliest and most dangerous in the human spirit.
And so they don't notice how the freedoms their ancestors died for are being taken away one by one without a struggle, nor would they care if they did, so carefully have they been lobotomised and drugged by the media class elite. This is not a trivial matter, nor is it just a bit of fun.

Now another frequent refrain heard in these parts is that I am all very fine and dandy when it comes to identifying problems, but a bit rubbish at coming up with solutions.
It's an accusation I generally dodge, because there's no reason to assume that a problem must have a solution a priori, certainly not by causal necessity: some problems may well be insoluble, and many of the ones we've lumbered ourselves with in the last century certainly look that way to me.
Here though, you'll be pleased to hear that I do have a solution, and one what's more that is simple, inexpensive and easy to implement. Start rounding up celebrities, beginning with the X-Factor panel, and bury them up to their chins in pig manure.

It sounds almost too simple, I know, and one could be tempted to ask: surely if it was just a case of burying them up to their chins in pig manure, then somebody would have done it ages ago. But then, that's the trouble with great ideas: they seem so simple after someone else has had them.
"Why didn't I think of that?" Huxley asked after his first encounter with Darwinism. The same applies here. How long and often have we imagined ourselves forced to endure the preening and self-glorifying of witless, graceless, pointless youth culture terrorists, when so simple a solution had been so close at hand for so long!
All we had to do, if we had only realised, was to bury them up to their chins in pig manure.

Think of the instant benefits of this. You wouldn't have to see them on television anymore, because they'd be in the middle of some rainswept village green, buried up to their chins in pig manure. So the television schedules would suddenly empty, and a few hundred channels would close down, because all the advertising revenue would stop (partly because there would be no robot slaves to hypnotise anymore, and partly because everyone connected with the advertising industry would be next in the pig manure anyway).
And best of all, you can look out of just about any window in the land - so great will the need for space be to carry out so adventurous a scheme - and see people who just last week were on your tv screens, sneering at you, intimidating you, making you think that the only option available to you was to be, dress, think and talk exactly like them or else be nothing at all, now suddenly not on your tv screens but there in front of you, and not sneering but buried up to their chins in pig manure.

We could even get a petition going. E-Petitions are the latest wacky wheeze the government have come up with to achieve the modern politician's ultimate aim of doing as close to nothing as possible while the grumbling populace fail to rise up because they still think they have a voice and some kind of a role to play in the democratic process. A kind of stealth Fascism, that still permits regular elections and changes of governing party, on the secret understanding that all eligible parties are exactly the same - and the more they attack each other across the Commons floor the more alike they actually are - and that television has rendered the electorate so stupid they'll accept a concept as blatantly insulting as the E-Petition and actually think it represents an improvement in government accountability to those they are paid to represent.
For those reasons, I'm not all that keen on this slimy hi-tech version of Hyde Park Corner, that celebrated safety valve for political impotency. Look at the number of signatories the average E-Petition gets, look for that matter at the number of voters a general election now brings out, and compare that with the number who vote, week on week, for their 'favourite' X-Factor performer. Who needs Hitler?
So please sign my E-Petition calling for a) the abolition of E-Petitions and the restitution of democratic representation, and b) all celebrities to be buried up to their chins in pig manure.

Now I know that some of you are more sensitive than me, and you may feel that this whole burying celebrities up to their chins in pig manure scheme, though admirable in its aims, is perhaps a little too draconian in its intensity.
I sympathise, and on the whole I commend you on your decency and kindness.
But I would recommend the following course of action.
First, watch BBC-1, without distraction or interruption, for an entire day. Then, on the following day, do likewise with the sound off, while listening to BBC Radio-1. Then on the third day watch nothing but ITV.
Then spend a leisurely day flicking through all those other channels with names like UK Fudge and MoreHere+178. Stop whenever you see something particularly interesting - a chef laughing as he boils live fish, say, or some 'adult animation', or a pop video filmed in an actual Russian Mafia torture dungeon, or a comedian riffing hilariously on bowel cancer, or a documentary about rape-murderers with helpful reconstructions and scary music, or one of those countdown shows with names like the 100 Best Sitcoms of the Past Two Years. Linger awhile, savour what they have to offer, and then move on to the next delight.
Then on the fifth day, watch only tv programmes made in the nineteen-fifties.
I'm sure then you'll want to come join me on day six, as we round up all the useless celebrities and bury them up to their chins in pig manure. Bring a spade, and a camera of course.
Then, on the seventh day, we shall rest, having remade the world.

What a couple of oddballs

2011-11-22T15:43:00.009Z

This pair of weirdies have just won the National Lottery, and have opted to give a million pounds to the Scottish National Party. No wonder they're laughing.

And while we're in photographic mood, take a squint at this precocious brat.
He wore a skirt to school to protest the fact that girls can wear skirts in the summer but boys are not allowed to wear shorts.
Now, clearly, what the jumped-up little tyke needs more than anything is a good thrashing. What he's in line to get, however, is a human rights award.
The competition's tight, though: also up for Liberty's hilarious 'young person of the year award' is Zin Derfoufi, "a grassroots campaigner with a particular interest in civil liberties and working towards building solid and positive police-community relations", ie: a chippy Muslim journalist who writes articles for the Guardian about MI5 harrassing innocent Islamic students.
But back to the lad in the skirt. Rather than cringe with shame at what he has created, the way you or I might do, the adorable little fellow's father has described himself as "absolutely delighted" about the nomination.
Now, I've never met this man in my life. But here's a tenner that says he still listens to pop music, and looks a bit like Bill Nighy.

When the great depart, only the mediocracy can take their place

2011-11-19T20:09:00.018Z

What would you call a government of entirely inexperienced, entirely unelected academics, businessmen, think tank honchos and assorted other useless amateurs?
How happy would you be to have one foisted on your country?
Technocracy may be the correct dictionary term for them, but it's a euphemism for a whole lot of much more useful ones.

Yet because these are EU-approved interlopers, you'd think from the BBC and the rest of the monkey media that technocracy is the greatest invention since the i-Pod, rather than the creepy, beery blast of hot breath from the past that it so obviously is to anyone without a vested interest in the destruction of national cultures, boundaries, identities and freedoms.
Yet it is not this deeply sinister coalition of the worthless and untried, but rather the departing Silvio Berlusconi that was repeatedly compared to Mussolini and the Fascists - perhaps because he, like Mussolini, was elected by those he governed.

And doubtless there was plenty of rejoicing in the urine-reeking Occupy tents at the news of Berlusconi's resignation, and much concomitant pleasure as the daleks wheeled in to take his place. After all, how less safe can a damaged economy be than in the hands of a proven financial wizard? No, what Italy needs, clearly, is a cabal of talking heads led by an economics professor. Never has a new world order sounded so dull as well as deadly.

Here, though, at the world's least influential social commentary website, I thought Berlusconi was a good thing.
Yes, I know he's a rogue, and if the fact that I would never for a moment have tolerated him as a British Prime Minister makes me a hypocrite then fine, call me Cameron. (Even slippery Dave, the worst Prime Minister in British history, isn't quite the chancer that old Silvio was, bless him.)
But this is Italy. Or was. And Italy is unique, or was. And it says nothing about Italians, and lots about our horrid, not to say absurd sense of superiority, that the fact that they voted for him time after time after time was interpreted here as evidence of the cute idiocy of the Italian plebeian class.
Oh, how adorable! The best food in the world, and so little political savvy they keep voting for that villain! Oh, get me to my summer home in Tuscany, Irony God!

Truth is that Italy is way, way too complex for the British media class to understand, even if they wanted to, which, as ignorant bigots who recognise only skin colour as a legitimate reason for not disparaging entire groups of humans en masse, they plainly do not. Ask the average British trendy about Italians, and they'll reach instinctively for the black face make-up. Oh lawdy, lawdy boss! Yessuh!
The real reason those otherwise wonderful olive-growing and pizza-making folk kept voting for Berlusconi (politically sophisticated though the 'they're all morons' model is, so thanks for bringing it to the table, non-racists) might be that they identified a list of problems facing their country and weighed up who was the most likely to do anything useful about them. They knew that economic reform was its most pressing issue, and in their cute little way decided that a savvy, no-bullshit self-made billionaire might just be the man for the job.
Berlusconi was uniquely suited to save Italy from the implosion that now threatens this most near-perfect of countries. You need temperament as well as talent, and it's no big surprise if foibles come with the deal too. He seemed indestructible because he had the confidence that comes of true purpose, the very thing the modern political class so pointedly lacks here.
Here, where few really know what their elected representatives do except in the broadest possible terms (possibly including the elected representatives themselves) we would be perfectly happy for, for instance, a media-led witch-hunt to oust one defence secretary, and have him replaced with a patently awful one, because of an overheard remark on some temporarily hot-button topic entirely unrelated to the job in hand. Our men grovel and go; Berlusconi just laughed, and got on with his job.
It is the seductive combination of basic ignorance with the superficial display of democratic power that is so intoxicating about the spectacle of leaders being deposed. (The sudden recent preponderance of so many light entertainment programmes that involve a brutal, unquestionable panel of judges shows just how strongly the flame of barbarism still burns in the European heart. Think how much money people waste on the telephone voting systems of these obscene programmes, and shiver for the day when they dust off their guillotines and racks.)
If in its bewilderment and desperation Italy now switches its allegiance to the Left - and in no European country is pure, unreconstituted Communism still such a living, chance-waiting force - then we are about to witness a tragedy as great, and potentially as disastrous, as the so-called 'Arab Spring', that insanely optimistic media class euphemism for the definitive start date of the Islamist apocalypse.

Wrong, of course, and historically illiterate - which is worse - even to think of Italy as a country. It is nothing of the sort. It is a slang name for a conglomeration of autonomous provinces, brought together in more or less mutual interest, but ever mindful of those differences that are far more important and profound than any transitory, opportunistic similarity, and jealously protective of every imaginable cultural signifier of those differences. In what other European country does each town and city define itself by the unbridgeable cultural, behavioural and linguistic chasm that separates it from the next postcode along?
Italy is, in effect, a model of what the European Union should have been, and wasn't, if it had any hope of working in any reasonable, human sense. Willing to work together if there was something to be gained, but always, definingly mistrustful. The only foreign policy that has ever worked, or ever will: keep your distance, and we'll see what we can do.
Nowhere more than Italy were the codenames of politics - left and right, communist and capitalist, socialist and conservative - revealed so nakedly as the games people play. (And I have to annoy you even more now with my certainty that the disproportionate influence of the Roman Catholic Church in Italy may be largely to thank for its ideological honesty and retention of those basic freedoms that once unofficially united all European nations, and have been so relentlessly eroded everywhere else once they were united officially.)

The politics of Italy are and were and - hopefully - will always be the simple war of realists and idealists, the former untroubled, certainly not distracted, by the fashionable pieties of a youth-led popular culture that, through sheer stupidity, reads the very security that nurtures it as the evil it opposes, and presumes the right to dictate the peramaters within which it is socially permitted to operate and even to express itself, despite commanding authority over only the tiniest and least experienced minority, the latter proudly and unapologetically those for whom the means justify the end, no matter how many innocents end up on the tarmac in swelling pools of gore.
Ask yourself to which camp Berlusconi belonged, and how triumphantly he spoke on its behalf.
And then, ask yourself how important to that battle it is that the man himself was no Galahad but an ordinary product of the worst century in human history, with all it inevitable weaknesses and distractions and petty failings. Berlusconi was one of the best of us, rubbish that we are.
I look forward to the biographies.

Come see the parasites

2011-10-24T15:03:00.017Z

Apparently the side-show of the anti-capitalist street occupation fad has been attracting tourists and helping London businesses, according to their own ringleaders at least.
Not sure if this is attempted irony or idiotic obliviousness to it. I'm putting down a fiver each way.
The one notable thing they did manage to do, of course, was close St Paul's Cathedral for the first time since the war, another irony possibly lost on them, or that possibly strikes them as admirable.
(In fact, despite the 'boon to tourism' claims, admissions to the now re-opened Cathedral have halved since the weekend.)

This is, apparently, 'democracy in action', as if occupying public streets and behaving contemptuously of democratic process is a healthy illustration of democracy's purpose and function, rather than a mere exploitation of its safeguards. The truth is that it is the fact that they are still there today, and haven't been chased away by police with big sticks or swept into trucks and taken to Christ knows where that is the tribute to democracy. They themselves are simply wallowing under its protection.
Put 'capitalism - yes or no?' to the electorate in a democratic vote, and 99% will be for, not against, despite the vainglorious banners proclaiming membership of that majority.
But then, referendums are not popular things at the moment, are they?
The real iniquity of the week has been happening not in the business sector but in our supposedly free parliament, with Cameron's failed attempt to bully his party into unity over an issue on which he himself has U-turned (and broken an explicit promise without apology) and over which a full 80% of the electorate he supposedly represents disagree with him.
On this, the protesters are silent, and doubtless Cameron is grateful for the distraction.
For a real test of the protesters' solidarity with the rest of us, I say ask 'em what they think of the EU. I bet you'll get a response far more satisfying to Honest Dave, as befits a circus that purports to represent 99% of the country while at the same time inexplicably earning the support of losers like Billy Bragg and Julian Assange.

Still, there is, if the vox pops be believed, a real cross-section of the country taking part: a sobering reminder that the deliberate political infantilisation of the British, actively sought by the political class and implemented via popular culture, is now most definitely bearing its intended withered fruit.
America too, where this particular caper started, of course.
A 63-year-old woman from Indiana came along to see the show, and apparently opined: "Back home I have a few people in my church who are supporting Occupy Wall Street, so we understand these people's plight."
Plight?
Unbelievable.

In an attempt to get a sense of exactly who is getting involved in this, The Telegraph took to the streets and reported back, noting the presence of "an Irish dancer who had appeared on Britain’s Got Talent and was carrying a billboard that read: “Jesus will come soon and sweep away all governments and politicians,” and someone who told me that he was, in fact, God", while "two middle-aged men with long hair sang a song about world peace".
But there is a far from negligible selection of normal people too, all displaying a bizarre sense of entitlement that would have simply baffled their grandparents.
There's "Lili Wallace, 23, a business student at Greenwich College", who asks us to share her sense of outrage over the fact that “I’ve applied for a million and one jobs, and I can’t get access to funding for the business I want to set up.”
A full 23 years old, and she can't get funding to start her own business? What is happening to the world! Take to the streets!
Then there is "Floella, 35, who has friends in work who can’t even pay their gas bill", a tellingly silly and impossible claim, and "a security officer from Somerset who has three children to feed and “has to count the beans out one by one”."
Whatever you think of these stories, and I have to say they shock me personally in a rather different sense to the one intended, you still have to ponder both the automatic assumption that, as if by algebraic inevitability, one man's misfortune must be another man's fault, and the certainty with which they have chosen their childishly symbolic villains.
The deeply arguable assumption that the existence of very rich people hinders, rather than has no effect upon, or perhaps even promotes, the improvement of conditions for those less fortunate is, it seems, an argument long-settled, resentment always being more comforting to the ego than reason.
“I’m no ideologue,” says "Mina Naguib, a 25-year-old medical student at Nottingham". “I have friends in the City. But just because Marx’s solutions were wrong doesn’t necessarily mean that his analysis was also wrong.”
No, it just makes it incredibly likely.

When you cut away the organisation, which would once have seemed impressive and indicative of genuine grass-roots populism, but in the internet age is a doddle for any faction or minority, you get the usual undergraduate wool and blancmange in place of genuine contributions to political process. Their aims and demands, as issued in a pompous mission statement, include the banning of wars and doing something about the “approaching climate catastrophe”.
Most chilling of all for me were the words of one John McKenna, according to AOL News "a 52-year-old maintenance engineer", who happily explained:
"There's a more socialist way of sharing the money out. The people who want to get on can make their millions so long as they give us some of it."
"The people who want to get on" is a strange but revealing phrase, seemingly contemptuous of aspiration as much as attainment. The implication, it would seem, is that any rewards accrued by those who do want to work for them are an affront to those who do not want to, to a share of which the latter are entitled by right.
"So long as they give us some of it" sounds to me very much like a threat, a conditional guarantee of their future right to exist.

The envy and bigotry underpinning such sentiments are no longer always filtered through a rhetoric of social justice, once deemed an obligatory concession to guarantee public sympathy: now the hatred and stupidity come through naked and proud, impervious to reason or appeal.
And, as I've said time and again, if they really want to address the unfair distribution and retention of wealth, their targets should not be businessmen who work for a living, but the music and TV celebrities whose vile lifestyles they happily allow themselves to be taxed to support, and who in return offer nothing other than the false dream of joining them, that dim pervert fantasy that animates The X-Factor, Big Brother, Britain's Got Talent and all those other depraved freak shows around which our culture now revolves.
But that distinction requires a little too much brain power for an ideology that still thinks oppressors wear bowler hats and pinstripe suits.
They don't. They look like Simon Cowell.

If Libya turns into a functioning democracy, I will listen to “Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)” every day for a year

2011-10-20T18:04:00.012Z

It's amazing how quickly after you stop paying any attention at all to new popular music that its many exponents and sub-trends morph into one indistinguishable sound.
The perennial complaint of our grandparents that it all sounds the same suddenly becomes true and you get an almost mystical insight into how the very essence of what we call reality can be shaped and directed by entirely contingent and external factors.

But every once in a while something comes along so all-dwarfingly terrible that it really does stand out amidst the surrounding chaos.
One such example is the hilariously titled album I Am... Sasha Fierce by the American children's entertainer 'Beyoncé', which I once listened to in a car.

Among its many (and we're talking double-album many) hellish exercises in non-human-generated din-making is the hit single mentioned above, with its nauseating refrain, "If you liked it then you shoulda pudda ring on it / If you liked it then you shoulda pudda ring on it / Uh-uh-uh, uh-uh-uh / U-uh-uh, uh-uh-uh" repeated endlessly over a background noise that sounds like an industrial punch press crushing another industrial punch press while a party of early cave dwellers keep time with a biscuit tin and a big wooden spoon.
It is, truly, the kind of music you can imagine daleks enjoying.

So you know that I make no idle pledge in the heading of this post. I have confidence.

For fully as nauseating as the pictures of Gaddafi's bloodied corpse doing the rounds just now is the simpering naivety of the commentary, much of it emanating from our own political elite.
Others have noted the creepy weirdness of how we were sucking up to Gaddafi one minute, then bombing seven kinds of crap out of him the next, and are now acting as if there was never a moment when he wasn't public enemy number one.
It's a fair point, and I do sympathise, though I can't help thinking that if only Cameron were to say something like, "Grow up! This is how the world works! There's nothing wrong with acting with enlightened self-interest!", I would have to at least concede he had a point, even if, like hanging criminals and cleaning toilets, it's not actually a job we'd want to do ourselves.

But it's the crazy denial that lets you know you're living in a post-Derrida world. That and the breathtaking naivety, which is obviously genuine, because they're all so keen to sign their names to it.

Somebody called Andrew Mitchell, who is apparently something called an International Development Secretary, hailed Cameron as "the key person in ensuring a new dawn", and promised that "the freedom and the future for which Libyans have been fighting all across Libya will now be a reality."
Cameron himself came out with something about Libya having a "strong and democratic future", and how he's "proud of the role that Britain has played in helping them to bring that about."

By "strong and democratic" he's presumably got something like our pals in Saudi Arabia in mind, who recently commemorated pretending to give women the vote by having one flogged for driving a car. Well, we can only hope.

So here's the bet. If Cameron comes back in a month's time, when the public executions are in full swing, and says all that rubbish again with a straight face, I will go to HMV and buy I Am... Sasha Fierce.
No greater sacrifice can any man make.

Westlife to split

2011-10-19T18:24:00.007Z

Well, it looks like the rumours were true: Westlife are calling it quits.

During their 14 amazing years at the top, the chart-busting boy band produced a stunning 26 'top ten' hits, a full fourteen of them 'number ones'.

The split is by all accounts amicable and the individual members of the group are said to be looking forward to new ventures.
They have confirmed that there will be a farewell tour next year, to give fans a last chance to enjoy their many smash hit favourites, including 'Swear It Again' and 'Flying Without Wings'.
In a statement the group said, "Over the years Westlife has become so much more to us than just a band. Westlife are a family."

Originally managed by Louis Walsh, now a celebrity himself for his appearances as a judge on smash hit tv show The X-Factor, the group weathered with ease the departure of founder member Brian McFadden, and the 'coming out' of singer Mark Feehily.
The latter is still considered a commercially risky prospect for groups with a strong female following. But the fans proved loyal, and the band carried on notching up hit after hit after hit.
A 'greatest hits' album has been promised; I'll let you know the track-listing as soon as it is made available.

Guess what these people are looking so proud about

2011-10-18T19:09:00.003Z

Following the smash success of my Wittgenstein competition, here's another puzzler for you. And I'll give you a clue.

It's got something to do with bacon.

I bet that's all you need to know.
All you need to know to have a bloody good guess at least.
Yes, mere weeks after all of London and the provinces were ablaze, this is the kind of gumpish public relations stunt the police think we want, need, will open up, gulp down and ask for more of.

The man in the middle is a policeman, and he's publicly giving an award, a sort of certificate, probably with a gold star stuck to it somewhere, and perhaps an ice cream as well as an extra special treat, to two CCTV operators.
This is to commend them for their contribution to the successful apprehension of a dastardly criminal.
According to this account, they "helped detectives crack the case."
Cool! They 'cracked the case'. All sounds pretty Kojak, eh?
But don't think 'cracking the case' was easy. Far from it.
The case was only 'cracked' "after a dedicated team, including officers from South Tyneside CID and neighbourhood policing teams, was set up."

They were joined by staff from South Tyneside Council’s CCTV camera department, who managed to collect 600 hours of footage from the area by the time of the fifth attack at the end of January. That footage gave officers, who had to watch it in real time, the breakthrough they needed. The team, led by Andy Bailey, CCTV systems manager, has received a special police commendation for their “diligent and professional work”. Coun Tracey Dixon, lead member for leisure and community safety with South Tyneside Council, said: “Our CCTV camera operations work closely with the police, and their joint efforts have resulted in thousands of arrests over the years. The operators deserve great credit for their involvement in this complex case, which earned them a special commendation presented by Acting Detective Inspector Chris Sybenga.”

Fifth attack? Sounds nasty.

Chris Sybenga, he's the chap in the middle, the one looking so very pleased, went on to use the word again, explaining that “without the diligence and professionalism displayed by the team of CCTV operators it may have taken officers a lot longer to bring the person behind these attacks to justice.”
Nice to see the fact that Britain is the most CCTV-covered country in Europe is finally starting to pay dividends.

I'm as squeamish as you about blood and gore, just as upset by violence. But I think it's important to know what these 'attacks' were, don't you? Oh well, then. Let's find out.

These 'attacks' were committed by a 63 year-old man called John White, whose bewildered, toothless face makes plain his obvious mental illness.
They consisted of leaving bacon outside mosques.

Forgive me now while I lapse into default 'don't get me wrong' mode.
If you don't need me to hold your hand over these fairly low and much-vaulted fences, join me in five paragraphs' time. If you are part of that vast legion who know only too well their contrary position will not stand up to the tiniest shafts of reason and so prefer not to be bothered by reality at all, join me, with the exact same truculent look on your face you had when you arrived here, in five paragraphs' time.
If you genuinely need reassurance that the favoured straw man of the Guardian-classes - when he says he opposes the junking of enlightenment civilisation at the bloody altar of resurgent dark age theocracy, what he really means is that all non-Caucasians should be sent to death camps - does not exist, stick around while I drag my weary cart through all this ploughed earth once again.

No, I'm not saying this wasn't unpleasant behaviour.
No, I'm not saying that the intent was not to give serious offence (though anyone who sets any store whatever by reason must first acknowledge the shamingly absurd foundations on which the capacity both to take and give offence in this instance rests, and how much abandonment of common reason is demanded to take it seriously).
I'm not even saying it wasn't necessarily a police matter. In an ideal world it certainly should be, though for the time being you would think, especially these days, that a caution first, then perhaps a fine if he persisted, would in any other circumstances surely be deemed plenty draconian enough.
I can see it counts as malicious behaviour, as harrassment, as a breach of the peace of sorts.

So what am I saying?

I suppose in my usual, hopeless, last-man-left-on-the-logic-boat sort of way, I'm just saying that we live in seriously lawless times. The kind of times when tough decisions have to be taken about police priorities (the kind of tough decisions they make when they refuse to come out if your house is being burgled, or you're being menaced by gangs of feral thugs.)
In the last couple of weeks, a shopkeeper has been stabbed to death in his shop in a busy North London street at three in the afternoon, three teenage girls stood on the street in North Kensington, one carrying a baby, were shot from a moving car, and a 22 year old man has been raped in a public space in Hampshire.
Plenty enough to keep their minds off bacon-dumping fiends, you might be callous enough to imagine.

The three girls, the police speculate, were the victims of 'a botched drive-by shooting'.
Botched? Someone drove by and shot them. Sounds like a textbook demonstration to me.
And yet, so complacently do they now accept the existence of 'drive-by shootings' - totally and completely unheard of, unimagined, unimaginable in London no more than 25 years ago - as a fact of English life, all that has to happen is for the unintended targets to get felled and it's a 'botched drive-by shooting'. (A bit like those 'burglaries that went wrong' - ie: when the householder stupidly tries to protect his property and gets savagely murdered - the only reasonable alternative to which is not no burglary at all but the burglary that goes right.)
With their usual 'Who, us?' approach to crime prevention, police described the fact that the gunman didn't also hit the baby as "fortunate".
(The closest I've seen to moral outrage has been from Karen Buck, Labour MP for Regent’s Park and North Kensington, who rushed to the scene and was sufficiently moved to 'tweet' about it on 'Twitter', a kind of space-age loudhaler for children of all ages, noting with the sagacity and practical resourcefulness we pay politicians for: "Desperately worried about local gang and youth violence. We have to get a grip."
We have to what, you silly cow?
Everybody who lives in North Kensington and voted for this one, lemme hear ya say OH YEAH!)

If you have any information, please come forward.
That's how they always end, these reports, isn't it? Never with a bang, but quite literally with a whimper. Just another case, just another investigation. Defeatism in the face of society's collapse wafts visibly from them like farts in a rainforest.
There's always these pathetic, complacent police quotes: Detective Inspector Weary said "This was a really rotten thing to do and we will do our best to at least find out who it was, even if nothing much comes of it from then on. We appeal to any member of the public who may have actually seen it happen and isn't afraid of the likely consequences of ratting on a yardie to come and tell us who it was..."

Just for once, wouldn't you like to read something like: Detective Inspector Ron Tiger said today, "What in the name of Harry H Corbett is happening to this fag end of a country? We've taken just about enough of this horseshit to last a generation. Who do these bastards think they are exactly? It's not enough to live in a country where such things are unacceptable, we have to get back to living in a country where they're unthinkable. So listen up. I am personally going to start tearing the nuts off the kind of solid matter responsible for such outrages even if they put me away for it."
But instead of that, they're so bloody calm all the time.

The official police statement about the bloke who got raped in a park acknowledges that he is "understandably upset and shaken by what's happened" but would nonetheless like to "reassure" the public "that there have been no other similar reports in the area recently".
Well I don't know about you, but that reassures me no end. After all, who are we to reasonably expect that no 22 year old men get raped in our public parks? Only one this week: I mean, it really could be worse you know.

Irrationally, perhaps, my mind then wanders off again, to the fact that while the law remains as implacable and fearless as the fairy books tell us when the accused is a bacon fiend, Siraj Yassin Abdullah Ali, confederate of the July 21st bombers and graded the highest possible risk to the public, has now been released after being vindictively forced to serve a full half of a pitiless nine-year sentence, and we can't even kick him out of the country in case he gets his bum smacked by the nasty people who live where he actually comes from.
And so, instead, according to the Daily Mail, "he now mingles freely among the Londoners his co-plotters tried to kill six years ago."

Then, because silly things like the shared properties of the mammalian nervous system matter to me, I get to thinking about just how much disgusting bacon that tormented loon must have carted around on his campaign, and I get to thinking about bacon generally, about how it is the stripped and slashed flesh of an animal as intelligent and receptive to companionship as a dog, and how that fact doesn't register one iota in this moral indignation-drenched saga. I remember when animal welfare was a hot topic in this country, when people actually marched about it.
And then, because I'm thinking about bacon in the manner outlined above, I remember another case of bacon in the news, that recent instance of how being accidentally served a hamburger with bacon in it prompted a 23 year old dogma-stoned whacko and his father to start a brawl in a Bankstown branch of Macdonald's, and to beat up a policewoman who tried to apprehend him by smashing her in the face with her own handcuffs.

And of course you're right.
None of these things has the least connection, or makes any difference to the fact that a crime is a crime is a crime and a bacon dumper is a menace and a peace-breacher... I know that you are right.

But then I look at that photo again, and I start to imagine the conversations that led to its being taken, the nasty little overpaid creeps who came up with the stunt, knowing how easily and unquestioningly its darts of banality will lodge in the brains of its audience, the creepy propagandistic purpose of it, the terrifying ease with which it is allowed to do its job by a supposedly free media, how it soils and corrupts, and I'm back to square one.

The job of this photo is to influence you.
Its job is to reinforce a set of opinions that in many cases run contrary to instinct and reason.
Its job is to placate the forces of a militant ideology of which it is plainly and rightly scared.
Its job is to distract you from reality and create an illusory feeling of complacancy and well-being.
It is Stalinistic.

I think of what I know to be everyday reality on the streets of London, and in the underclass estates of every city in the country. I think of every city centre in the country on a Saturday night. I think of the periodic rioting that we must now accept as a fact of life as mundane as daylight stabbings and drive-by shootings. I contemplate a society of serfs queuing for their handouts, and mired in a festering, all-engulfing popular culture that orders their lives and dictates their opinions, a popular culture that wallows in crime and sadism, fetishises pornography, and presents for hero-worship hideous 'celebrities' so retarded you could scoop out whatever is inside their skulls and replace it with Mr Kipling pie filling and nobody would notice the smallest difference.
I think about our political class's cowardice in the face of all of it, and their complacency, and their attempts to rationalise it and defend it, and their vile indifference to the desperate conditions in which millions they purport to represent have been abandoned to endure as best they can.
I think of the cowed, apathetic, neutered masses who know that the apprehension of a bacon dumper in such times as these doesn't matter a zebra's turd, and, while it is a good thing theoretically that it is being done, it is no cause whatever for crowing or backpatting or media hoopla, and yet still don't quite manage to join the dots when they see it happening.
And then I look at that photo.
And I look at their smiles. Everybody, scroll back up to the top and join me, looking at their smiles.

Wittgenstein competition!

2011-10-14T06:58:00.008Z

If you thought that the perfect metaphor for Wittgenstein's life and work was a foundation with no real structure built upon it, you will enjoy the fact that his famous hut in Norway, which the Norwegians have high hopes of turning into a tourist attraction, is now literally that.

According to an interesting article in the current Standpoint he left the house to a local in his will, who promptly knocked it down, transported it down the mountain and rebuilt it somewhere sensible, leaving only rubble where the great man once strutted.
But that's not stopping the Norwegian Tourist Board, who hope that the deeply symbolic rubble will inspire literally some tourists to make the trek through the wilderness to see it. Even more, perhaps, if they put up a cafe as well.
Though I might have thought the extent to which Wittgenstein's name holds any kind of appeal to the international sightseeing community should at least be on the table here, according to the article the big question is: "should the hut be rebuilt with the original materials which are still to hand or should the empty space be left to count for itself? What would the man himself have wanted?"
My own feeling is that it is not a problem concerning a tourist board dilemma at all, but merely one of language.

So here's your chance to help the Norwegian Tourist Board out of their philosophical dilemma: what would the man himself have wanted?
Leave your answers in the comments box, and the most appropriate suggestion will win the right to speak whereof one cannot speak.
If nobody answers at all I'll be even more impressed.

Just this once, believe nothing

2011-10-07T06:57:00.012Z

When it comes to murder cases, I am not usually a conspiracy theorist.

I accept the DNA evidence that proves the guilt of James Hanratty, remain as sure as any armchair theorist can be that Lee Harvey Oswald killed John Kennedy, and know with absolute certainty that Timothy Evans was correctly convicted of the murders of his wife and child.

The Amanda Knox case is different though, in one significant way that may not be obvious, either to the legion who have always yelled her innocence, or equally to those who pointed to the certainty of the evidence against her.
And that difference is simply this: the crime, investigation and trial all took place in Italy.

What this should mean to the rest of us is: if we have not personally been in on the investigation every single step of the way, then all bets really are off. Nothing is impossible.
It is not impossible for Italy to happily imprison the innocent on absurdly fabricated evidence attached to wild theorising. It is not impossible for Italy to happily free the guilty on a similarly quixotic impulse. Just don't make the mistake of thinking the rules of America or any other European country apply here, because they simply don't.

Firstly, there is every legal grounds for accepting the pro-Knox camp's claim that most of her confession and related interview evidence should be considered inadmissible. She really was questioned for hours, denied sleep and counsel, bullied and coached. Why? Because they can do that in Italy. Or, more accurately, nobody knows for sure if they can or not, but they do, and nobody seems to mind.
Whereas in most countries suspects can only be held for a fixed time - 24 hours, 48 hours or in some cases a week - without charge, in Italy, suspects routinely twiddle their thumbs in jail for up to a year while the authorities decide if they can cook up a good enough case for them.
Of course, inadmissible does not equal unbelievable, and evidence overturned on technicalities need not magically cease to compel us as it must the court itself. The evidence against Knox seems damning, and the arguments against its validity (evidence contamination, browbeating and intimidation) seem boring and unbelievable to us because such claims are the standard mantra of those who make a nice living noisily opposing not merely the miscarriage of justice but the right to seek justice a priori.
Here, though, I really wouldn't be so sure.

Anybody who has read Preston and Spezzi's mesmerising book The Monster of Florence, detailing the extraordinarily stupid investigation into a series of murders of Florentine courting couples in the 1970s and 80s will have no trouble accepting that wild conjecture can mutate almost instantly into the most hardened certainty, that the innocent can easily be incarcerated and charged with no evidence and sometimes on the most obviously trumped up charges out of vindictiveness or political expediency, and that the strongest evidence of guilt can go ignored and uninvestigated because it does not fit the absurd scenario already decided upon to account for the crime, and because the preferred suspect is already behind bars.
Also, it reveals a strange, child-like predisposition in murder investigations to leap to the most bizarre explanations as to what actually happened and why, often involving large conspiracies, secret cabals, or black magical rites and rituals. All of these things perverted the Monster of Florence investigation, and many of them reappeared in the Knox case, not least the latter.
And several of the same names re-occurred, not least this fellow here.
The chief prosecutor of Knox and Solecito, Giuliano Mignini, seems by any standards you would care to hold a genuine nut, obsessed with wild satanic rites and Freemasonic serial killers, who relentlessly pursued and charged innocent suspects and his own critics during the Florence murders. In the very best Italian fashion, he remains in his post while under indictment for illegal activity relating to his investigation of the Florence case. The business of Knox killing Kercher at the culmination of an insane sex orgy is pure and quintessential Mignini.

This strange, almost medieval lack of logic, and the undisguised wheel-greasing of Italian law, is frightening because it has life and death impact in a way that most Italian eccentricity does not. But it's all part and parcel of the same thing, and that thing - an intense parochialism, veneration of tradition, and proud independence from the obsessions of the rest of the world - accounts for much of Italy's enviable charm and character. Even the corruption that seems to serve as the glue that holds their social structure in place is nothing like the imposition of injustice typical of Communist or Islamic governments. Most people in Italy are aware of it, but Italian life is still centred on the family, not the state, which many born into a culture of fierce regionalism still refuse even to acknowledge. They know it goes on, but they shrug their shoulders and get on with their day. When was it ever different?
It's still a safer, better country than just about any other in Europe.

Criminal investigation and prosecution is almost a pretence, a kind of theatre, serving, perhaps, to dissuade would-be criminals from falling into its irrational embrace, but just as likely convincing them that it is a kind of game they can outwit, with luck.
The trouble for the rest us of is, because we are so damned incurious and easily convinced these days (except when something is obviously true, in which case we get bored and start conspiracy theorising), there has been a great tendency in this case to trust the verdicts without looking any further. Because Italian courts look and sound like our courts, so we assume they must function more or less like them too. She must be guilty because she was convicted on the evidence; she must be innocent because the evidence has been discredited: but neither need be true, for such an outcome to be possible in either case.

Superficially, the evidence against Knox seems damning and obvious, and its recent overturning merely absurd. Ann Coulter gives a typically emphatic account of it here, here and here, and I have to say that for all these reasons I was at one time equally convinced that here was another postmodern injustice plea, where tiny irregularities in technical evidence was being allowed to outweigh mountains of commonsensically undeniable testimony evidence.
But, truly, this is not America. It is not Britain. It is a country where charismatic Chief Inspector Michele Giuttari - now, with an imperceptible shift of focus, a bestselling crime fiction author - can knowingly arrest innocent suspects in the Monster of Florence case (including a village idiot and two troublesome journalists), ignore the solidest of contrary leads, and claim that a traditional Florentine doorstop, found near a crime site but entirely unconnected to it, was in fact a Satanic totem - an "esoteric object used to communicate between this world and the infernal regions", in fact.

Of course, Britain and America are not immune to tv-psychology-level investigating.
I have documented one shameful example elsewhere on this site, the supposed child killing ring operating from a Jersey children's home in the 1950s. And receding ever more reassuringly into history now, there was of course the infamous satanic child abuse allegations of the 1980s. But even acknowledging that, just imagine a British police inspector investigating the shooting of a young couple in their car, picking up a doorstop found nearby and calling it an esoteric object used to communicate between this world and the infernal regions. Italian investigators, prosecutors and courts simply cannot be counted on to behave in sensible adult ways.
Some of the evidence Coulter cites really has been effectively discredited now, and the parts I still find damningly convincing - not least the evidence relating to the buying of bleach and sterilising of the apartment - still convinces me, perhaps, simply because I haven't yet heard that be discredited too. The evidence that has now been proved useless - like a lot of the break-in evidence - sounds no less conclusive in Coulter's account.

As I said at the beginning, all bets really are off, and there's certainly no reason why a stitch-up of Knox couldn’t have happened in Italy, but neither is it necessarily likely. Sometimes the evidence of guilt simply is there for all to see, as certainly seemed to be the case in the light of Knox's erratic and suspicious behaviour before, during and after the discovery of the crime.
All I can say for certain is that the description of the crime itself sounds to me like the all too typical frenzy of a drug-crazed loon, and one who is male if he is anything – such as the guy who was seen washing blood off himself in a nearby town square fountain the morning after the crime shouting "I killed her, I killed her!" and coincidentally matching the description of the other man Rudy Guede claims he saw in her apartment right down to his blue beret, but who was never arrested or investigated by the Italian police at all, because it wouldn’t fit the account of what happened on which they had already decided.
In the real world, as opposed to the world of The Da Vinci Code and Hannibal Lecter, unexceptional girls like Amanda Knox, with no predisposition to violence, criminal history or history of mental illness, don’t suddenly turn into wild killers on a university study year abroad all that often. Could it happen? Of course, in the strictly Humean sense that all proof must ultimately be reduced to informed supposition. Is it likely? No, not really. The curse of criminal profiling - charlatanry at the best of times - has mated with Italian outlandishness with the usual result: an idiotic but otherwise desperately ordinary American college girl turns into a diabolic savage and with two other men slaughters her roommate during some wild, unpremeditated sexual free-for-all, and people believe it without question. Too much television.
Without that looney tunes scenario, there is no actual case against Knox, only iffy evidence. I know motive is not as important as it used to be, but really! Whatever the truth is about the forensics, if you believe that, you’re an idiot.

On riots, recent and forthcoming

2011-10-06T06:57:00.007Z

My thanks to the American readers who, with their nation's typical generosity of spirit, wrote to me during the recent riots in London and throughout the country to check that I was safe.
They and a few others have also asked why I didn't have anything to say about said conflagrations.
The main reason I didn't comment was simply that I didn't get round to it. I was intending to say something. But actually, it would only have been a repetition of what I said here, on the previous occasion the yahoos stole the streets.
The pretext then was university fees, and though equally spurious was generally taken seriously, which at least was not widely the case in the recent, nominally 'all coppers are bastards'-inspired round of looting and menacing.
The one good thing about it this time, in fact, was that nobody, save the more hopeless brand of opportunist loon (Harriet Harman and people like that), had any truck with claims that it was in the least motivated by genuine grievance.

Aside from that, however, there's really nothing I could have said that wasn't in the earlier piece, all of which I stand by, as I continue to stand by what turned out to be its entirely accurate prediction:

So please do not read sincerity of motivation into the carnival of destruction that descended on London last week. Instead see it as the beginning of something we're going to be seeing a lot of from now on: cynical orgies of mass destruction carried out by adrenaline-fuelled mobs on the pretence of some political grievance.

I'm afraid I'm with Al Jolson on this: you ain't seen nothing yet.

Cocky know-all child brings entire Labour Party to its feet as one

2011-10-05T06:23:00.013Z

Of all the stupid ideas that took root in the 1960s counterculture, to have now blossomed as orthodoxy, perhaps the silliest yet most successful was the cockeyed notion that there is anything remotely useful or interesting about the young.

Middle-class culture, the rads ventured, was definingly middle-aged too, with all its inevitable resultant flaws: it was staid, reactionary, comfortable, complacent, uninterested in radical reinvention.
But the young were different: they were vigorous, questioning, imaginative, bold, fearless - and yet also somehow pure: uncontaminated by the gouty consensus of the ruling elite, more adventurously committed to social justice. In a word they were idealists - and thus, at a stroke, an insult became a commendation.

The effect on its surroundings of the newly-venerated 'youth culture', viewed suddenly not as an indulgence granted the young by their elders and betters on condition they grow up and out of it eventually but as the one truly authentic culture, is obvious for all to see, now that it has chased all rivals from every arena in which it is capable of manifestation, like a plague of grey squirrels. Today heads of state confer honours on the decrepit husks of sixties pop singers, and grown adults speak of graffiti as an art form, write learned treatises on the films of Steven Spielberg, and dress in transient clothes fashions well into what was once deemed middle age (and codified thus by sartorial sobriety and conformity). The sound of crap pop music booms from every car window, restaurant and public space, children are taught about hip hop instead of Milton, and the elderly are as terrified to turn their televisions on as they are to step outside their front doors.

But more ruinous even than the mass acceptance of their crass entertainments has been the vaguely Rousseau-derived notion that their inexperience of life, and the inchoate nature of the opinions they are therefore able to form, represent not the chief obstacle to their being given a stake in adult decision-making but their best qualification for it.
The more simplistic and unrealistic and secondhand their pontifications, the more we admire their precocity and uncorrupted integrity.

Of course, to the political classes the greatest thing about the young's uncorrupted integrity is how easy it is to corrupt.
No voice sounds more ringingly the tones of fierce independence than the one that has been told exactly what to say by someone else. The manipulation of youth movements is one of the most instant giveaway signifiers of Fascism, that is to say of political systems that seek to divide and conquer through the hypnosis of sloganeering, hatemongering and the rigid control of public expression.
The extreme malleability of youth, coupled with its outward show of brash individualism, makes for a uniquely useful tool in the hands of the disreputable, which when allied to the popular trends within the youth culture itself is rendered almost unstoppable.
It is not an historical accident that youth culture when it feigns political expression is inevitably left-wing: youth culture needs slogans and poses and attitudes; there is no room in it for analytical reasoning. Solutions must be instant and obvious, and any idea too complex to fit on the front of a t-shirt has no place. Idealism, the creed that redresses complexity and reason as repression and naivety as heroism, is the inevitable voice of youth protest, and thus of pop music and youth culture generally.
The trick is to have a clearly defined enemy, preferably one that is different from oneself in specifically quantifiable ways (Jewish is often a good one with lefties) and then write off the dry clay of older generations and prime the kids in the joys of fashionable righteous contempt.

So step forward, Rory Weal, cosmetically aitch-dropping star turn of the Labour Party conference.
Could this be a future Labour Prime Minister, asked AOL News? The answer, of course, is yes. Describing the present government as "a vicious, right-wing, Tory-led government" is a fine example of the absurd tribalism of the guesswork-politics in which young people trade, and its endorsement an example of how far it has leaked into adult discourse. It should take the lad far.
An equally intriguing endorsement of social complacency came when he opined, to their unconcealed delight: "I owe my entire well-being and that of my family to the welfare state." A little tug of the forelock might have been in order here. Thank you, Mr Miliband, sir, for letting me live in Britain with you like an equal.

But of course it was the unquestioned ease with which this hopeless deferential subservience to the all-controlling state was reconciled with the pose of confrontational pride in which it was expressed that revealed most about the episode - that and his not mentioning the fact that he attends a grammar school: the single most decisively valuable card the system has dealt him, and the one he presumably values least, judging by the unsavoury company he keeps.

The disease of affectation

2011-07-30T07:32:00.008Z

The death of Winston Churchill in 1965 was a massively symbolic event. Of course, the death itself came as no surprise: he was ninety and had been ailing for a long time.
But it was obvious even at the time that the end of this one life carried a meaning far wider than the obvious and immediate loss of a notable statesman, and a great leader of men.
This was most obvious in the tributes paid to him by his colleagues and fellow leaders.
This programme, preserved in the BBC archives, originally transmitted on 25th January 1965 makes for fascinating viewing indeed, containing as it does the immediate responses of so many of the most notable among Churchill's contemporaries.
There is, for instance, Lord Mountbatten, whose words, even today, bridge the years in their sincerity and depth of insight.
"I can't even breath right now," he exclaimed, the substitution of 'breath' for 'breathe', and his instinctive reduction of the death of somebody else from any wider context to that of its immediate emotional effect on himself while depriving the sentiment even of that meagre degree of meaning by first sieving it through a linguistic fog of cliché and trivialising exaggeration, still retaining the ability to move the soberest of hearts.

And who can forget the words of Lord Avon, his war cabinet foreign secretary and successor as Prime Minister, whose emotion was so great it made punctuation seem not merely unnecessary but even somehow decadent.
"OMG," he wrote, "Winston Churchill dead how sad tragic."

But to my mind, the wisest and most poignant tribute was the one paid so fulsomely by Clement Atlee, the Labour leader whose post-war government so sensationally rose in the shadow of Churchill's shock 1945 defeat. With equal parts magnanimity and insight, he wrote, addressing Churchill directly, weirdly, as if he were not dead after all, and calling him 'dearWinston', as though his dearness was so great it was somehow indivisible even from his given name:
"DearWinston U made a MAJAH impression on this country and throughout the world."

Oh okay: you got me.
These are not the words of the aforementioned men speaking of Churchill. They are among the many similar tributes paid this week to the pop singer Amy Winehouse, by three incredibly famous people: respectively, Kelly Osbourne (the daughter of somebody famous), 'Jordan' (a grotesque breast model), and 'Rihanna' (another pop singer who, lacking even Winehouse's talent for mimicry, opts instead to make a noise like the ground cracking open and the devil rising up out of it).

But the appraisal that's taken the biggest spotlight is the one contributed by Russell Brand, so recently a tabloid hate figure in one of those occasional spasms that the death of dignity evokes in those who know they should know better or do more, but now, it seems, all forgiven from respect for the solidarity of victimhood that glows above the persons of rich drug-users like a renaissance halo.
In that it allows for no distinction between the refusal to give up a superficially pleasurable if dangerous habit out of sheer weakness of character and genuine physiological dependence, I don't much like the word 'addiction'.
Any word that equally covers alcoholism and recreational heroin use is not a useful one.
But a new twist is the attempt to upgrade addiction, even the 'addiction' of heroin users, to the status of a disease.
"The disease of addiction" is just one of many ghastly phrases in Brand's screed. (Another is "a voice that seemed not to come from her but from somewhere beyond even Billie and Ella, from the font of all greatness".)
But it seems to have almost instantly caught on.
Within seconds, socialite Paris Hilton had contributed the almost identical rumination, "addiction is such a deadly disease," and the sentiment is flourishing like crab grass in all those corners of the internet where the shallow come to wallow. (One online commenter was given his virtual marching orders from one such for daring to suggest that Winehouse's achievements might be seen in some sort of clearer perspective by comparison with Britten and Elgar. "Why do you even comment here if you like classical shite?" sounded the outrage of consensus.)

Cancer is a disease. Recreational drug use is a pastime. Any attempt to call the latter a disease insults anyone who ever had a cold, much more the nobly suffering rank and file of the terminal wards.
But there are some powerful people who want you to think otherwise, and even the conflict between their simultaneous desire to upgrade heroin users to tragic heroes and victims of disease and at the same time downgrade drug dependency itself to the level of tea-drinking so as to bring about its legalisation, is not stopping them from this endless, wearying campaign of Newspeak and media intimidation.
With the logical rigour for which Guardian readers are world-famed, one commenter on that newspaper's website takes to task another who nervously suggested that to call addiction a disease may not be in the best traditions of meaningful language-use:

"I believe Russel is right - addiction can be called a "disease" - addictions are often a consequence of mental health issues. Shall we not call psychiatrists doctors?"

On so dizzyingly many, simultaneously operative levels, there is, as Eric Morecambe used to say, no answer to that.

They shall have stars at elbow and foot

2011-07-23T20:56:00.011Z

Here we go, then.
I foresee at least a year's worth of relativist drivel from all the usual suspects.

Of course, the most - you might even want to argue only - important thing to say about the Norway massacre is that it was appalling, and that the person responsible should be strung up by his balls.
But events such as these do not happen in vacuums (or rather they do - in moral vacuums), and so it is always important to look to causes, especially when representatives of those causes may prefer you to look elsewhere.
And that bellowing, righteous section of society equipped to care least about the true human dimension of such horrors, and yet which affects to proclaim the opposite most loudly, will see in last week's events an opportunity they've been longing for for quite some time.
At last, a massacre committed not by people whom they support, or with whose cause they sympathise, or even by people drawn explicitly from within their own ranks, as is usually the case. At last, a killer happy to identify himself as a member of those frustratingly harmless groups they so hate, and have for so long denounced as threatening in obvious inverse proportion to the actual facts.
Yes! He's a nationalist, with links to conservative websites. Yes! He's a Christian. (Or calls himself one rather, a distinction that they will loftily dismiss from all consideration, as completely and instantly as they'd be prepared to accept it if he were a Muslim.)
Oh and yes! That's the best bit of all: he's anti-Muslim.
How do we know he's 'anti-Muslim', whatever that may mean in this instance? Because all the news reports tell us so: a curious bit of information, seeing as how the only social group he deliberately targeted would appear to be young leftists. Why do they all trip over each other in the rush to make so tangential a point?
Because what they're saying by telling us he was anti-Muslim is: "See? It's not always Muslims, is it? Bet you thought when you first heard this that he would be a Muslim. Well he's not. He's an anti-Muslim Christian. So let that be the last we hear about Islam as a menace to civilisation. They're all as bad as each other. In fact Christians are worse, probably, because they don't have the justification that Muslims do..."
This will be the op-ed line all over. Probably already is; I don't know.
That bloody gestures of revolt are alien to the defining principles of conservatism and Christianity, but written into the very fabric of leftism and Islam will count for less than ever.

And while the usual suspects will be free to twist these events into whatever shape they choose, most of us will be happy to let them because our attention has already wandered.
On the search engines the story has been shunted to one side by the death of Amy Winehouse, a pop singer whose self-willed demise is, with the best will in the world, not exactly a lightning-bolt shock.
Those who care nothing for the plight of Britain's elderly but weep rivers when death comes early and to open arms will revolt at any suggestion that we can prioritise our grief over these two stories (just as they will revolt at any challenge to her inevitable promotion to the ranks of the eternal artists, such as the observation that she was a great artist only in the sense that Mike Yarwood was a great Prime Minister).
Like most ignored maxims held dear by generations incalculably better than ours, I actually set much by de mortuis nil nisi bonum.
But we live in age of death, and of trade-offs of death, where we happily calculate acceptability in policy or act not by the possibility of deaths caused but by calculation of their maximum number.
We know that next year will not be any different from last year or the year before, in that many hundreds will be killed by cars whose necessity we calculate in full knowledge of the fact that they can and will destroy families. And we know that many hundreds more will be senselessly murdered for no reason by strangers, on streets that forty years ago would have reverberated with shock and dismay at even the thought of such things. (Mostly, the stranger will be one of the myriad thugs and gangsters in which decadent cultures abound, but every once in a while, as this week, will be another attention-grabbing maniac, rarer but just as inevitably spawned by a society that reneges on its fundamental responsibilities.)
We also live, of course, in thrall to a youth culture that glamorises death, especially when premature and in the noble cause of dissipation and aimlessness. Death is always terrible, but its allure as an artistic gesture has never been stronger or less qualified by reason, neither has a society's professional jesters found it quite so all-consumingly hilarious as ours, now.
I myself find death neither hilarious nor erotic, which is why you never see me performing at Glastonbury or appearing on Mock the Week.
But it is also a fact of life, and its fetishisation reflects, among all those other things, an infantile fear of it quite alien to the stoicism instilled in my parents' generation by a surrounding culture infinitely wiser and more robust.
So many people die terribly, and so may of them die nobly too, in the face of disease or old age, in ends that come not willed, after lives of self-sacrifice and generosity. And those who shared those lives bear the absence and the sadness without ever assuming for a single second that others must feel some obligation to bear the burden with them. The leftist media could see that point more than clearly when the tears were for a mere Princess: I wonder if they'll remember it now.
There is tragedy in being allowed to cause your own death through sheer lack of responsibility and isolation from the need to fend for oneself in even the smallest degree. But it's a different kind of tragedy.

Oh, how even the fallen have fallen!

2011-07-12T07:55:00.008Z

The only thing that surprises me about British depravity is that people are so constantly surprised by it.
We live in a society in which every imaginable crime is routinely committed, and routinely goes un- or half-punished. Can't we toughen up a little, rather than start passing round the smelling salts when we learn that journalists have been illegally hacking the telephones of the day's biggest newsmakers?
I mean, the idea!

Even scandals aren't what they used to be. Bob Monkhouse once joked of VD in the age of Aids, "my God it sounds adorable now, doesn't it?" Same with our outrage.
I had a friend who, several years ago, was complaining to the elderly lady that cleaned the offices where he worked that he was soon to be compelled to perform jury service.
"Oh, I had to do that once," she replied, "back in the sixties."
She was clearly not about to add anything, so he asked her if it was an interesting case. "No, not really."
Then, just as he was debating whether to press her further, she added as an afterthought, "The Profumo thing. You know, that tart."

I've always loved this story, mainly because it contains a fine example of the lost art of understatement, but also for the woman's heroic lack of prurience, a characteristic that was once quintessentially English and is now quintessentially not so.
For a certain kind of English sensibility, the thing to do with the Profumo affair was forget all about it, as quickly as possible. It may or may not be important, but it certainly isn't interesting.
It was a milestone moment indeed. On the one hand it was the beginning of the end: a sign, like the Brady and Hindley murders, that the brave new world our social engineers were engineering for us was going to be worse than the one we had been born into in every conceivable department, including those imperfect ones it was implemented to address. It ushered in a new age of sleaziness and the veneration of sleaziness.

But on the other hand, it was also the end of something. In the first place, the crime for which Profumo forfeited his position and respect was by modern standards a rather footling one. All he did, basically, was share an illicit sexual encounter or two with a woman who looked like she sold fish for a living when he was already married to the lovely former film star Valerie Hobson. This now happens routinely, without any embarrassment on the part of those involved.
The point of the scandal was that there had been a risk of a security breach, because the dowdy siren for whom he fell had been simultaneously sharing her favours with a Russkie. But to the tabloids it was all a matter of sex, ushering the age of hypocritical scandal-mongering that is now an unquestioned part of our daily lives.
Yes, Profumo had behaved badly (and bizarrely, when you compare the two women), but just look at how he behaved following his exposure. He resigned instantly, and devoted the rest of his life to relentless, anonymous charity work.

Compare that with the revolting Sharon Shoesmith.
Imagine if you were director of children's services of one London borough, for which you were paid £133000 a year, and your department somehow managed to miss a child on your 'at risk register' being slowly tortured to death over a period of months. Not suddenly beaten to death in anger, beyond anyone's prevention, but slowly and painstakingly tortured to death while you are being paid £133000 to head a department that exists to keep an eye on him.

Would you have to feel personally responsible in order to want to resign? I think I wouldn't be able to resign fast enough.
Shoesmith is made of stronger stuff than we, however.
First she has to be kicked out by the government. ("I'm not in the blame game," she explained repulsively, adding redundantly but with even viler linguistic impoverishment, "I don't do blame.") Then she goes to court for lost earnings, wins of course, and emerges beaming (with what one newspaper - remember them? - beautifully called "the million pound smirk") and declaring herself "over the moon."
Go and re-read exactly what happened to that child and ask yourself if, were you Shoesmith, you would ever again describe yourself as "over the moon" about anything, much less your big cash pay-out for refusing to accept any responsibility for the very department that contentedly arranged its diversity awareness weekends while the crime was taking place.

The Profumo affair became the Profumo scandal because it was exposed by a free press, and it is a free press that does its periodic best to get its drooling, tv-drugged consumers to forget about The X-Factor for three seconds and rise up against the culture that allows the despicable Shoesmiths to run free.
Yes, the rest of the time, which is most of the time, the British press is a tragic mirror of its constituency, but for these occasional, vital services to democracy, hard won and still a rare thing in the world, it is far too valuable to allow as untrustworthy a character as David Cameron to start tinkering with it.

Of course what the News of the World is alleged to have done is pretty rancid, but journos are pretty rancid people, thank God. Knowing that they are out and about their grisly business is the price we pay for the service they bestow upon us that one vital time in a hundred.
Nobody who has seen Hecht and Macarthur's masterly The Front Page, well on its way to being a century old, has any business feigning the vapours at evidence of their deviousness or lack of empathy. But like the army, however much you may want to turn up your nose at them, they keep us free.
Far creepier are the promises of Cameron's band of crooks to put a tighter reign on them, to protect us from all that unfettered freedom.
Whose side do you think they're on, then?

“It’s upsetting to be described as chocolate”

2011-06-07T17:19:00.026Z

Naomi Campbell.

The very words, the very sound of them, are to my ears as sweet water is to the lips of one who has walked from one end of the Sahara desert to the other.

Naomi.......
Campbell.....

Say it soft and it's almost like praying.

This is of course not true.
Say it soft, loud, backwards, or as an anagram (Amebic Pan Moll is a good one; Blame Complain an apposite one) and it makes no difference. Wherever the sane and sensitive illicitly gather, a second's contemplation of the hideous bat has long been sufficient to induce that violent downward contraction of the diaphragm muscle that invariably precedes an hour or two of helpless and debilitating vomiting.

Campbell is a woman whose vileness of temperament is a byword even in the circles in which she moves. A model by trade, she has failed spectacularly in every attempt to spice the futility of her daily round - even in those secondary career options ideally suited to models and others cursed with fame and talent in inverse ratio. Attempts to extend herself as a trashy novelist and trilling pop harpy were both shot in the paddock.

Then, mark her spotless record of public service, and patent and obvious humility before a public that has enabled her to make a literal fortune on account of her accidental gift for putting on clothes and walking about in them with a facial expression pitched somewhere between cud-chewing vacuity and opiate stupor.
These include not just her positive mania for physically assaulting the people who work for her, or anyone who dares to detain her from doing whatever she wants to do whenever she wants to do it. There is also her distinction as being to date the only overpaid cocaine-using clotheshorse to have ever been subpoenaed to appear at a war crimes trial.
This was just last year, when she was called upon to explain what she was doing accepting blood diamonds from former Liberian president Charles Taylor.
Like many another innocent concerned only to clear their name, she at first refused to testify, then when forced, huffed to the court that the trial was "a big inconvenience" for her. She eventually claimed she had given the diamonds to charity.

According to Wikipedia, my first port of call whenever I want to find out something trivial, she was accused ten times between 1998 and 2008 of physically attacking the poor sods who work for her, usually by throwing her mobile phone at their faces.
She pleaded guilty to this in 2000 but was spared punishment on the agreement she went to 'anger management classes', and "in exchange for her expressing remorse".

.............................Naomi expressing remorse

But the remorse obviously wore off in time for her to slap, punch, kick, scratch, abuse and throw phones at a further eight employees, her 'drug therapist', and someone, apparently an actress, called Yvonne Sciò, who Campbell punched in the face and left "covered in blood" in a Rome hotel. Another guilty plea in 2007 led to more evidently fruitful anger management and five merciless days of community service, which she undertook in furs, silver-sequined gowns and a fedora, and during which she was paid by a magazine called W to keep a 'diary', which yielded such gems as, "I keep on sweeping. I'm getting very protective of my pile of rubbish—kind of the way I feel about my Hermès handbag."
The following year she spat at two policemen at Heathrow for detaining her a bit too long and earned another distinction to tell her grandchildren about, along with the war crimes trial: a life ban from British Airways.
She has since proudly announced to the press that she had discovered the cure for her unfortunate compulsion to attack people who won't give her a good hard smack in the mouth straight back: it's to take a luxury holiday every six weeks.

You might have thought such a record was sobering enough to dissuade its bearer from making facile trouble about chocolate adverts, and doubtless in one slightly less unspeakable it would have done. Not our Naomi.
Naomi has just received this grovelling apology from Cadbury's:

It is not our intention that this campaign should offend Naomi, her family or anybody else and we are sincerely sorry that it has done so. We have been in discussions with Naomi's solicitors and can confirm that they have accepted our apology on her behalf as a conclusion to this issue.

Now why would anyone want to apologise to Naomi Campbell? If I had somehow managed to offend her I'd be dancing on air. Why aren't Cadbury's?
Blame that new measurement of success: five percent inspiration and ninety-five percent litigation.
Cadbury's, you see, produced an advert which dared to mention Naomi without her permission. It showed a bar of chocolate, and to illustrate its status as a luxury item, accompanied it with the tagline:"Move over Naomi, there's a new diva in town."
Clearly, the reference is to her reputation for demanding and unreasonably aristocratic behaviour, though in terms almost outrageously favourable given the horrendous nature of how she actually behaves.
But - and this is where her case suddenly leaps from absurd to one that Cadbury's just had to take seriously, such are the pathological priorities of our age - it used her name to sell a product which, as most of you will know without my telling you, though it is possible than many thousands still retain enough sanity to need the relevance of it spelled out for them - is brown.
Got it yet? Why of course!
As surely as night follows day, dark ages follow periods of enlightenment and flies follow the lorries that drain off the lavatory pits at French camping sites, the advert is therefore 'racist'.
Suddenly the laughter stops, the voice of sanity is silenced (in this case a comically bewildered statement of the obvious from Cadbury's: "[The advert is] a light-hearted take on the social pretensions of Cadbury Dairy Milk Bliss... We would never produce any type of marketing we felt might cause any offence to any section of society"), and the tills start ringing for those who need to hear their symphony least.
In a statement drenched in sincerity and reason, Naomi weighed in with: "I am shocked. It's upsetting to be described as chocolate, not just for me, but for all black women and black people. I do not find any humour in this. It is insulting and hurtful."

You heard her right. Being "described as chocolate" (which she wasn't, of course) is not just upsetting to her, but to all black women and black people. A 'campaign group' called 'Operation Black Vote' proved they existed by offering their support and urging a boycott on Cadbury products. (They have a dream.)
Needless to say, the stupid cow's threats of legal proceedings caused Cadbury's resolve to crumble quicker than a Spanish hospital, and after she had supped full of grovel, Naomi magnanimously responded: "I'm pleased that Cadbury have made a sincere apology in regards to their Bliss ad campaign. The advertisement was in poor taste on a number of levels, not least in the way they likened me to their chocolate bar. It is also a shame that it took so long for Cadbury to offer this apology."
According to AOL, she also "hoped" other multinational companies would "learn from this", and that a "greater diversity at board and senior management level" may help to avoid such problems in the future.
Forget the sentiments being expressed here for a minute and just savour the linguistic drivel in which they are encoded: "The advertisement was in poor taste on a number of levels" and "not least in the way they likened me to their chocolate bar". And "a greater diversity at board and senior management level" may help to avoid such problems in the future. Really and truly, what utter bollocks people do come out with these days.
Now straight back to the sentiments.
Note that the arrogance on display here is not merely colossal, it is also grossly offensive in that it poses as victimhood, and deigns to speak on behalf of the genuinely disadvantaged: in a sense, it takes their cause in vain. No black person who has ever suffered genuine oppression and subjugation is being represented here. This is an exercise of grotesque power, of a sort lavished solely upon the least deserving, and even today beyond the wildest dreams of those in whose name it so repulsively affects to speak.
And the question, as ever, is: are you happy to live in a society that permits this or are you not?
If not, as I'll keep saying whether you want to keep reading it or not, all you have to do, for starters, is to turn your televisions off, and turn your back to the celebrities whose lifestyles it taxes you in order to subsidise. They are the parasites a rotting society cultivates, and the great thing is that they have no resources or talents of their own to fall back on when the plug is pulled. If you do not feed them, they will surely die.

A postmodern wedding

2011-05-02T18:13:00.008Z

Always trying to look on the bright side as I do, I have to acknowledge with thanks the fact that Stephen Fry did not get an invite to the Royal wedding.

Still, Veruca Beckham and Stilton John did manage to wangle one, so either they were just pulling names out of a big hat, or the invite list got mixed up with the nominations for Britain’s Most Obnoxious Celebrity.
How does Stilton John qualify as a suitable guest when so many people who actually did something at some point in their lives did not? Take your pick from an endless list. Stephen Hawking, Simon Weston, Googie Withers... whoever you like. What edged this preposterous berk ahead of that company? His obnoxiousness? His hippopotamus-sized ego? His brave decision not just to wear a ludicrous vanity wig in public but to have it actually stitched into his head? The fact that he looks like an enormous baby peering out from under a cocoanut?
If he's a personal pal it's news to me. So far as I know he had no connection with the royal family whatever until he transformed the already terrifying Diana memorial service into a mawkish pop concert with a hastily rewritten dirge in which he explained how she lived her life like a candle. (A candle, what’s more, that had to withstand the buffeting of a strong breeze while simultaneously not fading in the sunset during a rainstorm: a non-image that in its own grotesque way summed up its moment better than words that mean anything could ever do.) But there he was all the same, smug as a bug in his rug, gamely trying to remember the words of Jerusalem.

Not much I can say about Royal weddings, really; indeed this was the first one I had seen even a second of since a memorable 1981 afternoon spent in rivuletting spasms of boredom at my grandmother’s house when, as a precociously republican brat, I endured the splicing of the Prince of Wales to that defiantly plain and – in every imaginable sense – profoundly ordinary young woman with an ennui so acute I genuinely feared for my ability to survive the ordeal.
This time around I enjoyed the affair a little more, partly because I shook off my republicanism along with most of my other osmosis-acquired leftist affectations around the time I went to university and realised at claustrophobic quarters just what an insufferable bunch of pseuds and frauds academic socialists really were, and partly because the bride was, for once, a genuine looker.

Still, I remain one who passionately supports the institution of the monarchy while retaining my right not to find anything about the incumbent set remotely interesting.
As for the big do itself, the pomp and tradition – the very things I once thought most objectionable and now most support – were all too obviously tempered by the signs that postmodern triviality is now as deeply ingrained in the very viscera of British society as can be imagined, as evidenced by that guest list – which found room not only for Stilton and the crocodile skin cretin, along with her professional bladder-kicking spouse, but also Mr Bean, who in a previous existence made his living as a sneery anti-establishment sketch actor called Rowan Atkinson. (He’s a friend of the Prince of Wales, apparently, who either has a forgiving heart, or a short memory, or really is as big a nutcase as he seems, or else just enjoys the company of people who made their fortune attacking institutions they reserve the right to dress up and ponce off of when they make their fortunes.)

The unavoidable but still tragically symbolic presence of his Grace the Cowardly Lion only underlined this superficiality. (And did you notice how the old goat faced booby stumbled over his lines? If you suck up to Islamic extremists AND can’t even do the spiel without tripping over your furry tongue, surely it’s time to hang up the robes and make somebody else Archbish. My vote goes to Rowan Atkinson, who certainly looks the part now, and doesn’t seem to be doing anything else these days, unless that cameo in Scooby Doo the Movie wasn’t as long ago as my claret-addled memory tells me it was.)
What busted, rudderless fragments of the old order remained on view were more depressing than reassuring, particularly the military uniforms, starched and anachronistic as if borrowed from museum cases for the occasion.

But my interest was outside - where Britain once again confounded its ideological establishment and raised its index fingers to its cultural enforcers, directing its raspberries not at the young couple but at the country's real decadent aristocracy - of tv comics and numbing lefty pundits. Thought we hated the Royal Family did you? Thought you spoke for the majority? Have we got news for you, then.
I love it when the Blackadder set are left stranded like this: it doesn’t happen nearly often enough, but I suppose it is that very rarity that leaves them so unprepared every time. It wasn’t just the absence of what I had thought would be the inevitable publicity-robbing terrorist outrage, or even of any sign of that palsied fool Chris Knight who had been all over the BBC threatening to "raise hell" with his naff ‘street theatre’ protests. (The reason being, I learn subsequent to writing the above, that he had been arrested with his wife and some other dipshit the night before, intending as they were to behead effigies of the happy couple outside the cathedral.)
No, it was the sheer overwhelming good will, and the complete absence of cynicism, the noxious religion of BBC Britain.
Because the civilised majority work to entirely different codes from the minority that control the culture it is all too easy for them to be underrated in their capacity to resist indoctrination. Having denied them a voice, the leftist establishment frequently makes the mistake of thinking they don’t exist at all. This mistaken belief is only strengthened by the good people's refusal - perhaps suicidal, but admirable all the same - to revolt whenever they are fresh oppressed. Since the Left like nothing more than a good riot, and will seize even the absurdest excuse to have one, they make the mistake of thinking that when real people don’t go out throwing fire extinguishers at the police with each new instance of totalitarian oppression that must mean that they are in agreement, or so cowed that they no longer know their own minds.
Not at all: it is because those who cling to the last tattered fragments of civilisation know that part of what makes one civilised is the innate reluctance to make noisy protest until the proverbial camel’s back is fnally snapped by the last proverbial straw (which just might be any day now, but still).
What does bring them out on to the streets, though, is not the chance to fake displeasure and smash a few windows but things that make them happy.
So suddenly there they were: still alive, and still among us, terrifying the establishment with their heretic decency, good-naturedness, enthusiasm for tradition, and refusal to be embarrassed by their nationality or their flag. Like plague rats they came, swarming over leftist consensus, their weapons the steadfast refusal to hate anybody, or to view monarchical privilege as an injustice crying out for blood. As for that 68 year old adolescent prat Chris Knight - what price now your little street theatre protests? I hope you woke up in your cell next morning with a bad back and the certain knowledge that you are the most obsolete man who ever lived, but I doubt it, somehow. Almost certainly he’s still going on today about ‘how much it’s all going to cost us’, the moron.
Most amusing to see the BBC coverage, with dimwit presenters (a female pop music expert and a man who – I confirm from personal experience – makes a drunken nuisance of himself on trains) interviewing these strange alien lifeforms and – for the only time in their lives – forced to choke on the repelled incomprehension their values engender in their trendy young breasts and honour this one-shot corporate obligation not to mock but to feign endorsement.
These are the people they at all other times dismiss joyfully as blimps and bigots, and defame and demonise in any way they can, as vomiting harpies in sub-cretinoid tv sketch comedies, or as loony Christians intent on the burning of poor downtrodden homosexuals in village squares. (BBC definition of a blimp: one who does not passionately loathe his country and everything it stands for.)
But today the world was watching, so the corporation had to fake respect, and instruct its gang of bullies and brutes to do likewise. They couldn’t quite pull it off, of course, but they tried – oh how hilariously they tried.
Fearne Cotton, I won’t forget the fun you gave me this week.

Life in the funhouse mirror

2011-04-20T05:56:00.017Z

Absurdity, when unchecked, unquestioned and in control, is terrifying.

The greatest evils - and here choose your own favourite: Nazism, Islamism, whatever - are fundamentally absurd. Petty hatreds and injustices are complements of the human condition, but in periods of social health and benevolence they remain private pathologies, held down by stigma and robust consensus. It is when society itself is sick, from the head down, that absurdity becomes orthodox, the good are cowed and look the other way, and the masses march to the beat of madness.

The point is that madness need not be subtle to find recruits. It may even be that the opposite is true. Nothing could be stupider than the central tenets of Marxism, Freudianism, Nazism or Islamism, but these movements will be what our epoch is remembered for.
Those who cling to reason can only marvel as true, unabashed, confrontational insanity becomes the dogma of supposedly free nations, and the endless circle turns again.

It's not like it even takes all that long. Many hundreds who fought the Second World War are still alive, and must feel like they're in a Road Runner cartoon, as the invincible coyote of anti-semitic totalitarianism returns to have another crack at the insolently meep-meeping freedoms of European civilisation, as fresh as ever, bearing no scars from its previous pounding, and as optimistic and unashamed as on the first attempt.
I was looking at a children's book called Annexed by Sharon Dogar, a novel retelling the Anne Frank story from the perspective of Peter Van Pels. I understand it has been uneasily received in some quarters, but there's no doubting the sincerity of its intentions.
However, on reading through the epilogue, in which Dogar explains how the narrative utilises real events and people, I was shocked to read the following note on Anne:
"Her work and beliefs are protected and continued by the Anne Frank House and Foundation, who research into all forms of racism and genocide, including the recent rise of Islamophobia in Holland."

It was partly the shock of seeing this grotesque propaganda term being deployed without qualification in so sensitive a context, but it also prompted the question: does the Anne Frank Foundation fund research into 'Islamophobia'? The answer is: yes, it really does.
And just what recent outbreak of ‘Islamophobia’ in Holland is this? The one that got Geert Wilders standing criminal trial? The one that means Ayaan Hirsi Ali can never again live a normal life free from round the clock protection? The one that got Theo Van Gogh murdered in the street in broad daylight? Seems to me that effective measures are well in place for dealing with such ‘outbreaks’, without the assistance of an organisation that, if it does anything, must oppose anti-Semitism wherever it be found. (And in Wilders’s case those measures are fully above board and institutional, operating with the support and respect of every media class commentator in Europe.)

To attempt to penetrate the combination of human agency and historical contingency that has led to this almost complete collapse of reason in public discourse, and the enshrinement as substitution of a proud and unquestioning insanity, is to peer into a funhouse mirror, where all that should be tall is short, all that should be straight is curved, and each thing becomes its opposite.
Here is another example.
None of my American readers will need me to tell them that this year saw the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Ronald Reagan. But many if not most Britons probably will, since the anniversary went completely unnoticed, much less celebrated, here.
Fair enough, you might say. He was after all an American leader, not a British one, and there was always a tendency to think of the Cold War as not really our problem, and to therefore not notice overly when one man stood up and ended it singlehanded, simply by talking tough and refusing to back down - that elusive, now virtually heretic combination of principles and vertebrae.
But that won't wash as an excuse when you remember that a packed audience at the Royal Albert Hall recently enjoyed a concert in honour of the eightieth birthday of Mikhail Gorbachev - the very opportunist sad sack loser that Reagan kicked into touch.

Ask any Brit what caused the end of the Cold War and they will like as not tell you, and in all sincerity, that it was brought about by the emergence in Russia of a leader fearless and farsighted enough to set himself the task of bringing communism down from within. That, after all, is the way the BBC sold it at the time, and the way the school textbooks play it now. The interventions of Reagan, what they would probably call sabre rattling, were at best a sideshow, and perhaps a genuine obstacle to this heroic process. Whichever, Gorby was the hero of the hour: Reagan just a hopelessly out of his depth B-movie actor promoted to high office because the Americans are cute like that.

Reagan and Gorbachev rehearsing on the set of the Andy Williams Christmas Show

Like all the most successful tyrants, Gorbachev had a keen understanding of how the west really worked – he knew not only the temperature and rhythms of its rhetoric but also where its more sensitive sides were, and the precise nature of the ruptures between its masses, its government and its intelligentsia. He was pragmatic enough to see that the defeat of communism was inevitable with an opponent so implacable, but astute enough to realise that if he held onto Reagan’s coat-tails, and acted not as the chief barrier to Soviet collapse but as its willing agent, he would earn the undying affection of the Western academic and media classes, who would otherwise be forced to acknowledge the major contribution to history of an American Republican.
His artful shifting had precisely the effect he envisaged because he knew who he was dealing with, and from that moment this weekend’s concert was as foregone a conclusion as the knee-jerk reaction of the undergraduate idiots who decide who to give Nobel prizes to.

Gorbachev looks like what he was: a typical, creepy Communist, fully signed up to his creed's distaste for individual freedom and right of conscience, and tendency to conceive of people as chess pieces. His full and active complicity in much of the non-Western world’s aggression against Europe and America is a matter of record.
Reagan faced into the wind; Gorbachev let it blow him along: an infinitely less noble position to adopt. But the way the western media class would have it, he was a kind of double agent from the first, who steadfastly and patiently worked his way up the gore-clogged ladder of Soviet influence and power, enduring with gritted teeth the various horrors he would have to sanction or ignore en route, waiting for the day when he would achieve the ultimate goal of supreme leadership, only then to reveal his true colours and bring it all crashing down, no Reagan required.

But at least he got the line-up he deserved for his big concert. I’ve rarely seen a shabbier assortment of waifs and has-beens. Someone even dug up Bryan Ferry, a comedy crooner of my childhood whose chief claim to long-forgotten fame was an ability to whine with his bow tie undone. Then there's the Scorpions (hoping for the Status Quo slot, no doubt, with their halfwit dirge Wind of Change), the Spice Girl you think of last when you try to name all the Spice Girls, and, believe it or not, Paul Anka. Actually, the thought of special guests Sharon Stone and Kevin Spacey fixed-grinning through a performance by Paul Anka makes the whole thing worthwhile for me.

Sweep it up, forget all about it, watch TV...

2011-04-19T06:02:00.024Z

... because it's all about priorities.

1.
This month in Florida, a man burned a book. Then, in Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, a mob stormed a United Nations compound, killing dozens and decapitating two. That the two events were connected you perhaps saw coming, but for bonus points: which of the two was viewed as the most despicable by western media outlets?
The same week in the Washington National Gallery, a 53 year old woman attacked Gauguin's Two Tahitian Women, explaining: "I feel that Gauguin is evil."

2.
John Redwood's all for library closures.
For one thing, they're too middle class. In fact, that's the only reason.
He even visited one, and saw how middle class they were with his own eyes.
‘I lingered over the non-fiction shelves,’ he said. ‘The books seemed oriented to middle-class hobbies like antiques and foreign travel. I guess the book buying had been well judged to cater for the demand of a fairly affluent local community. Some defenders of every public library imply they are for a different clientèle. They conjure images of children from homes living on low incomes developing a passion for reading serious books borrowed from the local library. The library is seen as a force for self improvement and the pursuit of knowledge. I fear that in many case this is no longer true, if it ever was.’
Oriented to the middle classes? Oh no! Save us!
As someone who thinks the middle class is the second best thing humans ever invented (after morality) the tendency to yell 'YEAH? AND SO WHAT?' is almost overwhelming.
Doubtless this is entirely unconnected to the fact that I recently overheard a school teacher say: Lewis Carroll? I know the name. What did she write again?

3.
In news that will doubtless come as a profound shock to the entire western media, two Palestinians have confessed to the massacre of the Fogel family. Even more stunningly unexpectedly, they told the IDF that they “received much support from family members and friends in their environment.” Several suspected accomplices have also been arrested, and not a single Mossad operative amongst them. Bang goes that article Robert Fisk's had ready to go all month.
Israeli transportation minister Yisrael Katz spoke wearily to the world on army radio: “To those Palestinians who said 'it can't be one of us', well it turned out to be one of you.”
Meanwhile in Britain, a 65 year old woman - old enough to remember rationing, the Festival of Britain, Ealing comedies on general release, no random murders of passers-by on the streets, children playing snakes and ladders at home rather than being sent out by their parents to get raped in thongs and padded bras and kill each other with guns in chip shops, Life With the Lyons, the elderly being respected by the young rather than casually murdered by them for fun and small change, popular entertainment striving to lift the spirits rather than enforce state ideology and assist in the rounding up of undesirables, and murder, anti-semitism and fascism being generally thought of as bad things - chose to appear on the most repulsive talent show in human history looking like this:

Putting a commendably brave face on the collapse of civilisation and the fact that it is no longer safe for most people of her generation to venture out after dark, if at all, she explained: "I'm a wild woman. I'm the dancing queen. I'm 65 and I wear all the young men out. When I'm dancing I'm on another planet. It's all about the hip action. I've got the energy of three people. I know that for a fact. I'm like a volcano waiting to explode."

4.
Ken Okaniwa of the Japanese embassy in London wrote to The Spectator to complain about the use of the word 'Jap' in an article.
"At a time when many people in Japan have had their lives devastated by the earthquake and tsunami, while others are working tirelessly to secure the safety of the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima at considerable risk to themselves," he wrote, " I find the gratuitous use of a word reviled by everyone in Japan utterly inappropriate."
Is it just me, or does not the thought of Ken feeling sufficiently ruffled by meaningless abbreviations to take up his pen at a time when many people in Japan have had their lives devastated by the earthquake and tsunami, while others are working tirelessly to secure the safety of the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima at considerable risk to themselves, make the old weirdometer ring out somewhat?
Surely if ever there was a set of circumstances that lent themselves to putting a temporary hiatus on that sort of stuff it is those outlined by Ken. At such a time, the very last thing on anybody's mind should be the use of colloquial language in contexts that are clearly not intended to offend in any way whatsoever, as was the case with the article in question. No single word is as offensive as the noting of such petty offences in so terrible a wider context, or equating the two, or implying that the awfulness of the one is somehow made even more burdensome by the other, or the suggestion that anyone truly affected by the first would even notice, much less care two shits, about the second.
There is nothing intrinsically offensive in shortening the name of a country or its nationals to one syllable – to abbreviate is a linguistic convention that amounts almost to instinct. No Briton is offended by being termed a Brit, any more than a doctor is offended by being called Doc.
There is a grey area here, of course, incorporating words like 'Paki' – which, though merely an abbreviation of Pakistani nonetheless does have a history of specific use in contexts where the giving of offence is intended. (But even this is very different from words like 'nigger', and similar nouns expressly created for the specific purpose of giving offence.) And even here, the remedy is surely to increase, rather than proscribe, its use. Just as the word queer has been ‘reclaimed’, to borrow the unspeakably pretentious jargon of victim culture, so Paki could be easily neutralised if it were used as randomly and inconsequentially as Brit. Making it illicit and unspeakable only increases its cachet among those who want to offend.
'Jap', however, does not even belong in this latter ‘grey’ category. The use of Jap as a term of opprobrium, rather than innocuous abbreviation, dates from the second world war. During that conflict the Japanese army rightly became synonymous with atrocity, brutality and sadism. For many, the war is still living memory. Unless Ken himself wishes to gratuitously offend, it is far too early to do this kind of namby pamby westerner stuff. Wait till all the veterans are long dead, Ken, and their children too, just to make sure. Then start up your whining again.

5.
And lastly, spare a thought this Easter for poor Victoria Beckham, who will either be clubbed over the head with a baseball bat before being skinned alive, or else forcibly inflated with air to make her skin stretch and then nailed to a tree by her head before being skinned alive.
Oh no, sorry; my mistake. I was getting her mixed up with the crocodiles and snakes used to make her new range of fucking handbags.

Cowardice dissected

2011-03-16T06:15:00.011Z

This is what BBC News had to say about the recent massacre of a sleeping Israeli family:

'Palestinian' kills five Israelis in West Bank

Israeli troops have launched a manhunt after five members of a Jewish settler family were killed in the West Bank.
Officials have blamed Palestinians for the overnight attack, which left a couple, two children and a baby dead in the Itamar settlement, near Nablus.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said the government would do everything possible to protect its citizens.
The incident comes as peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians have ground to a halt.
The family - including three children - were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Israeli media reported.
Army radio reported that two other children had been spared, while a third had discovered the killings when she arrived home.
A statement on behalf of Mr Netanyahu said: "Israel will act vigorously to defend the Israeli population and to punish the murderers.
"The prime minister demands that the Palestinian Authority and its head find and punish the authors of this attack."

International law
The Itamar settlement was the target of a previous attack, in 2002, in which five Israelis were killed and several injured in an attack by a Palestinian gunman.
US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stalled last year over the issue of Israeli settlement building.
Palestinians have refused all direct contact with Israel until construction is frozen.
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

If there were an Alice Miles Award for the most inventive use of disingenuous moral cowardice, this report would surely take the highest honours going.

(Alice Miles, in case you don't know, is a Times columnist whose response to the discovery that the Islamist loons who tried to explode a car packed with nails outside a London nightclub and drive another into the check-in of Glasgow airport were doctors was not to abandon the Left's desperate creed that such behaviour is caused by economic deprivation but rather to mount a torturous rescue mission for the idea, based on the notion that even doctors could be moved to resentment when they compare the medical crises of their home countries with fat western women moaning about not having enough pillows in Britain. [See last few paragraphs, here.] This claim - as well as unutterably vile and cowardly in its refusal to admit the obvious - is also spectacularly bizarre in its desperation to rationalise the irrational. What is the point of finding a reasonable, sympathy-engendering motive, if the act you are attempting to reconcile with understandable human emotions is an attempt to blow up innocent people with exploding cars packed with nails? No normal or decent person would ever do such a thing under any circumstances whatever: only religious fanaticism could ever account for such behaviour. In refusing to accept the obvious, the media help frame the terms in which such issues can be addressed and contribute to further and greater atrocities.)

There is surely no question that the poisonous view of Israel promoted by respected western media outlets, especially the great and impartial BBC, and their ludicrously about-face perspective on the Palestinian issue generally, has helped embolden Israel's enemies and enabled them to pursue their campaign of genocidal hatred with ever-increasing confidence.

The 'boldness' of this latest outrage may well have been stoked by the general tide of anti-Israel hatred foaming from the West, and their confidence will have been boosted still further by the unspeakably mealy-mouthed manner in which the BBC reported it.

Let us examine it, point by point, beginning with that title.

'Palestinian' kills five Israelis in West Bank

Now, if you were reporting that story, is that the way you would describe it in the title? Is that, I am wondering, the natural or instinctive way of phrasing what happened? Or does it, on the contrary, speak of long and complicated efforts to circumnavigate the instinctive formulation?
'Kills', rather than 'murders' or 'slays'? 'Five Israelis in West Bank'? What, five random Israelis, in the street, in a fair fight? Not 'Israeli family'? Not 'sleeping Israeli family'?
Then there's those troublesome quote-marks. Many my age or older will remember when they were to be found nowhere in news reports: newspaper headlines used to state allegation, supposition and proven fact with equal quote-free authority. The rise of litigation culture is probably the original reason why those sneaky little squiggles first began to appear, but their ubiquitousness now is surely the result of the media class's discovery of just how useful they can be.
Quote-marks automatically cast doubt, and provide a suggestive meta-narrative running parallel to the official account. These ones are especially interesting because, some time between when I saved the report and when I settled down to write this, they changed position.
As it reads now, it just looks like typical BBC partial impartiality: the crime was committed by a 'Palestinian' rather than a Palestinian because he has not yet been apprehended and nobody knows for sure, and until we can say for certain that other Israelis didn't do it, it would be irresponsible to imply that blah blah blah. (Thus bias is promoted not in spite of but under the very cloak of impartiality.)
But when I first read the report it said something very different:

Palestinian 'kills five Israelis' in West Bank

Now this, at first, seems so bizarre that the more naive among us could almost be justified in assuming that the change was the purely technical substitution of a meaningful sentence for a meaningless one. Is the BBC seriously trying to claim that there is any doubt, or ambiguity, about the suggestion that five Israelis have been killed?
The point of these quotes, I would suggest, lies in this later sentence (emphasis mine):

The family - including three children - were stabbed to death by an intruder who broke into their home, Israeli media reported.

The very first sentence of the report states the killings occurred for certain, so what the quotes actually do, then, is suggest a more wide and general doubt about the reliability of Israeli sources per se. Because the report is coming from Israel, the quotes seem to suggest, it is only our duty as an impartial broadcaster to put quotes around it.
This, I suggest, was opted for over the more expected present formulation - the murders occurred but we're not going to do the Zionist propaganda machine's work for it and say anything more than that a Palestinian has been claimed as responsible - because the natural way of expressing that sentiment - putting the quotes around 'Palestinian' - could in turn be construed as implying that the concept of a Palestinian is a nebulous one, a purely political designation that does not actually exist in reality. Being true, this is eminently to be resisted.

Israeli troops have launched a manhunt after five members of a Jewish settler family were killed in the West Bank.

Again, notice what they choose to prioritise, and what they choose to downplay. Why lead not with the fact of the murder, which is after all the point of the story, but with the fact that Israeli troops have launched a manhunt?
I think they want their favourite word to pop into your head here, that word they use whenever Israel retaliates against the goading of the genocidal maniacs trying to destroy it: disproportionate.
Look again at the sentence. The crime itself is still being downplayed. We have to wait until the next paragraph to learn that the family were stabbed to death in their beds, and that two children and a baby were among the five killed. Here, in the leading sentence, we are still being told only that five members of a Jewish family - no, make that a 'Jewish settler family' - have been 'killed in the West Bank'. (This conveys a set of images entirely different from those of an intruder breaking into a family's house while they sleep, and cutting the throats of babies and children.)
But even before we get to that, we are told that 'Israeli troops have launched a manhunt'. Not Israel, but Israeli troops. A typically disproportionate militaristic reaction! Just like when they retaliate against those cute little rockets those brave resistance 'militants' keep firing at Israeli civilians. A doubtlessly tragic but nonetheless small-scale atrocity, and the Israeli response is to get the tanks out and go blazing through occupied territory with their disproportionate army boots on, probably rounding up innocents by the dozen as they go.

Officials have blamed Palestinians for the overnight attack, which left a couple, two children and a baby dead in the Itamar settlement, near Nablus.

Again, very odd and unnatural phrasing - an 'attack', which 'left a couple, two children and a baby dead' is ordinarily how one would describe an indiscriminate, generalised assault on a wider area. Setting off a bomb in a residential area, or a drive-by shooting, for example, are the sort of things one might more sensibly be described as 'attacks', which 'leave' a certain number of people dead, in their wake. The phrase implies an element of randomness, imprecision, and, crucially, of military impersonality. Attacks 'leave' their victims dead when those victims have not been specifically targeted but just happen to have been there at the time.

This, however, was a case of a man stealing into one house where one family was sleeping and stabbing them to death in their beds. Not an attack that left people dead, but a multiple murder. Clearly, the more impersonal formulation removes a great deal of the sadism and evil of the act, and replaces it with something more along the lines of a gesture of resistance, better fitting the popular western and BBC-endorsed view of Palestininan terrorists as a subjugated and desperate people, whose very aggression can be reframed as evidence of persecution. (In reality, of course, this act of profound and tragic desperation was celebrated on the streets of Gaza the following day, where unspeakable perverts were to be seen handing out sweets.)
That's if it was a Palestinian who did it, of course. The sentence also reminds us that this is only an allegation: in yet more telling words, officials have not even merely claimed that a Palestinian was responsible, they have blamed a Palestinian for it. Well, they would, wouldn't they.

Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu said the government would do everything possible to protect its citizens.

Are we not supposed to take this as a vaguely sinister statement? Not a quote, notice. Just a nice, vague precis, planting the seeds in our minds of the prospect of vindictive (and of course disproportionate) retaliatory measures.

The incident comes as peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians have ground to a halt.

Interesting. And doubtless true. But so what? This is only the fourth sentence in the piece, remember.
So far we have been told:
1. Israeli troops have launched a manhunt after five Jewish 'settlers' (ie: illegal settlers) were killed;
2. Officials have blamed Palestinians, plus ca change, after the 'attack' which, perhaps inadvertently, 'left' three children dead;
and 3. The Israeli PM made veiled threats of disproportionate retaliation.
And now, from nowhere:
4. The incident comes as peace efforts between Israel and the Palestinians have ground to a halt.

To suddenly announce this, rather than any of the infinite number of other things that the incident comes at vaguely the same time as, is obviously to posit a connection. And since we are dealing with conscious human agency, it follows that the connection must be causal. In other words, the implication is clearly that the stalling of the peace efforts is a contributing factor in the act. And since this is a case of a Palestinian hideously slaughtering Jews, presumably the BBC is stating, and endorsing, the opinion that it is Israel that is responsible for the breakdown of this process. Only you can decide to what extent the writer of the piece feels that the subsequent gesture is merely accounted for by this, and to what extent exculpated.

Army radio reported that two other children had been spared, while a third had discovered the killings when she arrived home.

Spared?

This is the sentence that most leapt at me when I read the piece for the first time. It is, of course, possible to use that strange, old-fashioned word simply to mean 'were not killed', though in such a context it surely carries distinctly non-BBC connotations of a conscious providence. In everyday language, however, it surely means one thing above any other: that the two surviving children were spared by the killer, in an act of mercy. Otherwise, why not just say that two other children escaped? 'Spared', here, strongly implies 'knowingly unharmed', and serves to humanise - and, again, exculpate to a degree that only the individual reader can decide - an act which was in fact about as blackly and irredeemably evil as is possible to imagine, and therefore a potential stumbling block to those efforts to create peace that Israel keeps frustrating.

International law

The one and only bold-face subtitle in the whole piece. The eye is led straight to it. But I thought this was a report of a murder? What is the great significance of this in the context of this story, that it should be so isolated and highlighted? (I'm now at the stage where I merely ask the questions: you know the answers.)

US-brokered peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians stalled last year over the issue of Israeli settlement building.
Palestinians have refused all direct contact with Israel until construction is frozen.
Nearly half a million Jews live in more than 100 settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
They are held to be illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.

The end.

This is the last line of the piece, the message that the BBC want you to take away from it.

Scarcely a word, throughout, about the appalling nature of the crime, and every possible tactic of misdirection, suppression, false prioritising, innuendo and relativism deployed to keep your mind off the central and only fact: that on Friday night a terrorist stole into the house of an innocent Jewish family, and while they were asleep in their beds stabbed the mother, father, two young children and a three month old baby to death in a frenzied and sadistic assault.

The BBC is a worldwide organisation, with a totally unjustified but nonetheless ironclad reputation for impartiality and reliability. Where is the line between mere irresponsibility and genuine provocation, and on which side of it does this miserable institution reside?

Britain's unloveable eccentrics

2011-01-28T07:59:00.016Z

I knew yesterday was going to be good fun, when it started with me receiving an unusually amusing email of the 'I have five billion dollars from my late husband's will to transfer from an African bank and need your loving assistance' variety.
I get several of these damned things a day at the moment, but this one tried a refreshingly novel approach, being titled "Assalamu'alaykum!!!!!Assalamu'alaykum" and then, having thus grabbed my rapt attention, beginning: "I know that you will be surprised to receive this letter."
The great African art of understatement alive and well, I think you'll agree. I won't bother you with the rest of it, but to cut a long story short I expect to be a very rich man very soon.
Later I found myself in a bookshop behind a woman wasting her time, the shop's time and my time by complaining about the fact that some of the children's birthday cards were coloured blue for boys and pink for girls.
It makes you wonder where some of these chumps have been living for the past forty years. Talk about looking behind the fridge and finding a little Japanese soldier still fighting the war. And this woman was in her sixties. How old does she have to get before she grows out of this kind of thing? How much more of the world does she need to see; how much more experience needs to be trowelled into her grotesque little bobble-hatted head before she thinks, "Hey! maybe I'm not right about everything after all! Perhaps that idea I once drunkenly entertained for two seconds after the Dunblane Massacre that there could be some merit in revising the opinions I settled on in my 1970 summer term actually had some legs to it! Maybe there are more important things to devote my tired, nasty, mean-spirited indignation to: post-sexual revolution free spirits who rape babies and torture their own kids to death; war veterans being stabbed to death in the street in broad daylight for 75p; my own assumption that all such outrages are matters for the authorities only and nothing to do with me; that kind of thing..."
In reality of course, there's more chance of a Beatles reunion than of any such epiphany shaking this kind of sealed unit from its absurd certainties. Such weird confidence, too, not only in her sour, mouldy old beliefs themselves but also in her own eminent suitability at being their agent. What she knows, of course - the bedrock that her vaulting self-image is built upon - is that the best way to feel like you're winning an argument is to go and harangue someone who works in a shop. Suddenly, then, you'll stop being an obnoxious carbuncle with the charm and demeanour of the killer from the end of Don't Look Now that nobody in their right minds would consider even acknowledging other than with a rueful expression and an outstretched handful of small change, and you'll feel like Mark Twain. And why? Because they can't answer you back, and they can't end the conversation before you do. You may as well start an argument with a battery hen.
Shop workers have to be polite: that actually is their job, and they know, and they know that you know, that if they do tell you what a prat you are, what a vomit-inducing idiot homunculus with the most laughable imaginable views you happen to be, and how disgusting is your self-confidence in the right to spray them with festering 1970's-vintage anti-Darwinian grievance-mongering, you'll magically transform as if by hypocrisy from hideously confident to grievously outraged, and immediately go and find somebody with a bigger name badge to whine about how insulted you've been.
And even though you both know it, and you even know they know you know it, still you stand there and annoy them, and playact as if they have even the smallest chance of responding on your own terms, while they in turn stand there looking at you with a fixed smile and occasionally nodding their heads as they wonder if you really do have nothing more serious to worry about, but hoping that you do, and fantasise about how many different ways there must be to kill you, because you are the essence of everything that has reduced Britain overnight from a rather cute little country with an enviable culture and a high international reputation to the crime-infested, hate-ridden, terminal ward laughing stock of the western world that it now so assuredly is.
And still, all these years later, as you proudly survey the wreckage from beneath your bobble hat in those few daylight hours of relative safety while the droogs are asleep, and breathe the stench of decay through a face irresistibly reminiscent of the sort one sees leering out from under bridges in old woodcut illustrations of Grimm's fairy tales, still it has not dawned on you that pink is not an inferior colour to blue, merely a different one.
Incidentally, if you wait until the shop closes and then try to pick your little cretin's argument up again as they're walking home after work, you may find you'll have an altogether livelier debate.

Speaking of the essence of everything that has reduced Britain overnight from a rather cute little country with an enviable culture and a high international reputation to the crime-infested, hate-ridden, terminal ward laughing stock of the western world that it now so assuredly is, on the train ride home I read in the free paper the following little morsel about the Livingstein Monster:

Ken Livingstone was today accused of showing “a lack of judgment” after it emerged he has been paid thousands of pounds to front a programme on Iranian state television.
He has presented seven shows on the English-language Press TV channel, three of which have been broadcast since he became Labour's London mayoral candidate in September.
The government-funded international news network was launched by Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2007 and is run by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting.
The broadcaster was investigated last year by Ofcom after interviewing a jailed Newsweek journalist who was allegedly under extreme duress at the time in an interrogation room...
Human rights campaigners condemned the channel after its report on Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani. In a report on its website, Press TV said she had accompanied a film crew to her house “to recount details of the killing of her husband at the crime scene”. Activists, however, claim her apparent confession was coerced.
The criticism of Mr Livingstone follows calls for his expulsion from Labour in October, after he campaigned openly alongside Tower Hamlets mayor Lutfur Rahman, who had been deselected by the party over alleged links to extremism.
Mr Livingstone first appeared on Press TV in March 2009, standing in for former Respect MP George Galloway. Previous presenters on the channel have been paid about £500 per show. Books reviewed on his
Epilogue programme include Zionist Israel And Apartheid South Africa, The Invention Of The Jewish People, and Israel And The Clash Of Civilizations: Iraq, Iran And The Plan To Remake The Middle East.
Conservative MP for Chelsea and Fulham, Greg Hands, said: “This shows a lack of judgment on the part of Ken Livingstone, to be working for Iranian state television at a time when press and other democratic freedoms in Iran have been completely destroyed by the regime there, and at a time when Londoners will want to know if he will ever return to the political mainstream.” (...)
A spokesman for Mr Livingstone said: “A wide range of people of different backgrounds in politics, academia and other walks of life have appeared on the channel and this is an occasional book review.”

For some reason, what you always hear about the Monster is:
Love him or hate him, you've got to admit he's a character. British life would certainly be duller without him. At least he makes a change from all those faceless, autopilot politicians. Hate him or hate him, British politics need more mavericks like that. He's a true English eccentric, that's what he is. Anybody see The X Factor last night? One Tru Vizzion were robbed, I thought.

Well, yes: but Hitler was a bit of a character too, and British life was presumably duller after the Bubonic Plague died out, but we survived the boredom somehow.
I wish people would stop portraying this ghoul as some kind of loveable eccentric in the great British tradition of such things.
In the first place, he's not British: he's a politician from London. And he's neither eccentric nor loveable. He's not a maverick, or a 'character'. He's a hate-spewing, morally depraved, anti-civilisation little smarmy Fascist toad, rooting for your destruction and mine.
And he didn't even make the trains run on time, which is exactly the kind of excuse he'd make for Nazism if only Hitler was generally perceived as the Left-winger he in fact was. (I'm not joking. Here's Ken on Mao: “One thing that Chairman Mao did was to end the appalling foot binding of women; that alone justifies the Mao Tse-tung era.” Justifies? Justifies!)

Even to the Left - and I don't just mean what remains of your grandfather's generation of honest and decent Labour voters, but even the actual modern clinically insane heartless robot-opinioned Labour party itself - this Iran tv caper is blatant madness.
The only possible reason for a Leftist to suck up to the government of Iran is because it hates the West. That's it. Nothing else: no anti-foot-binding measures, no Cuba-style fake Western socialist fantasy amazing health service; nothing. There are no possible grounds, even for someone whose idea of a sound political gesture is to follow Hugo Chavez round hoping for the privilege of wiping his bum for him, to admire any one single thing about the Iranian government, other than its professed hatred for America, Britain, western values and, of course, Israel. In other words: it is the old student radical's pose of rooting for the enemy at its most open and undisguised.
The Iranian government is a usurping medieval theocracy, imposed by force on its people, that could not do more to alienate Leftist sensibilities if it tried, pursuing with ruthless hatred and prejudice a campaign of tyranny against religious and political freedom, homosexuality, female equality and right of conscience.
So on the one hand we have Miliband the Even Younger urging the full weight of international diplomatic pressure on the country (asking them nicely) to try to stop them stoning women to death in public for apostasy, being seen in the company of men, getting raped, 'having a sharp tongue' and other picturesque crimes, and on the other we have his party's official London mayoral candidate fronting Anti-Semite's Book Week on their state tv channel, in between the pro-celebrity stoning finals and I'm a Homosexual, Get Me Out of Here.

How about we turn the temperature under this turd up a little now? Do we think it's time yet? Or are we still finding him just a little bit cute, still? No, Greg Hands, it's not "an error of judgement". It is a blatant provocation from a man who gleefully puts himself on the wrong side of the eternal struggle between good and evil. Put him in a sack and throw him off a boat. Problem solved.

My God, we really have come to something if this creepy bastard is the best we can offer by way of English eccentric. In my day the loveable eccentrics were people like Patrick Moore and Magnus Pike and that nun who likes Renaissance paintings. Now we go all gooey and patriotic over clapped-out old Nazis who pose for photo-ops with people who think the only difference between Jews, women and homosexuals is the number of rocks it takes to kill them. Oh how loveable! How eccentric!
The other thing that stops Ken being an English eccentric is that he so clearly wants to be one. With his provocations and his unanswerability and his newts and his guest appearances on Blur albums, he clearly fancies himself the most refreshingly unusual politician you ever did see. First rule of English eccentricity: nobody who consciously aspires to it qualifies.
Actually, as far back as you can go, you find for every loveable eccentric at least one unloveable eccentric, an equally valid English archetype, but a lot less fun for the rest of us. They just try a bit too hard, or else are just that little bit too alienatingly weird, to ever inspire that bemused tolerance in the British breast that turns, through the passage of time and the reassurance of familiarity, into something like love.
Jimmy Saville, for instance. I mean no disrespect to the man, but I think the majority would agree that he's just a bit too peculiar, in ways you can't precisely put your finger on, and a bit too aware of his own idiosyncrasies, and pleased with them, to measure up to true loveable eccentric status.
Chris Eubank is another. Tries too hard; bit of a berk. And Nigel Kennedy, aitch-dropping social descender and classical music's answer to the question nobody asked in the first place.
And creepy Vivienne Westwood of course, who both looks and sounds like being hit in the face with gravel. Wacky dressers are often mistaken for eccentrics. At least Westwood looks silly for a living, making her shilling as she does from that most sociobiologically profound evidence of man's essential triviality, fashion. (This is mitigation, at least, if not in any meaningful sense an excuse.)
But note that wacky dressers are not eccentrics: they're wacky dressers. True eccentricity is the expression of anomalous instinct, and rarely recognised as eccentric by the person who displays it. Unconventional dress, like the deliberate cultivation of coarse manners by those whose true instinct is to gentility, is merely an assertion of self, a mildly provocative gesture that announces little more interesting than massive self-confidence.
True eccentricity is a skin, when the eccentricity is transposed to a suit of clothes we may rightly scent eccentricity's younger cousin: cocky individualism. As a statement, made to a world that is presumed without question to care, a confrontationally unusual appearance is also something of a deception: it achieves the pretence of disinterest - that is to say the rejection of orthodox or prevailing standards of sobriety or conformity - but at what a mere second's thought shows to be the cost of enormous care, consideration and preoccupation. Far from not caring about their appearance, such people care about it very, very much, to a degree that one who merely appropriates the standards of his friends and neighbours never approaches.
Not that conformist clothes fashion is itself above this tactic - the desire for the wealthy to look poor, the clean to look dirty, the well-groomed to look scruffy and untended is now standard and unquestioned, so that few even remark on the cultural journey that has taken us from even the poorest being ashamed to be seen in torn clothes, to even the richest wearing clothes that have been torn deliberately, in just a few short decades of lobotomising by popular culture. But the old line of 'these are the clothes I feel comfortable in', asserted defensively by pop stars or renegade aristocrats alike, can only be true if one is so confident and aware of one's own uniqueness to draw comfort from its vigorous assertion, and pleasure from the constant attention of others.
Such individuals announce their presence at all times: the opposite of the traditional business suit, which though smart and able to convey status, still retains an expression of the far nobler desire to become as one with the rest of humanity.

This goes double in the case of absurd pop stars like U2's Bongo, who enjoys considerable political influence yet in choosing to remain 'himself' at all times aggressively announces the assumption that he is the obvious exception to every rule. In circumstances where custom ordinarily demands a measure of sartorial sobriety, such continued assertion of personal exceptionialism is merely an exercising of monarchical privilege.
Say what you like about Victorian values, but at least Dr Barnardo never turned up to a charity dinner looking like a dipstick. There is a world of difference between Gandhi adopting the dress codes of his people as a gesture of solidarity, and Bongo visiting a head of state looking like he'd spent the night in a leper colony.
The modern certainty that serious people in positions of genuine influence and importance must acknowledge these pathetic child-men in the first place, let alone accept them on their own terms and refer to them by their idiot code names, is a form of revenge enacted by the latter upon the former, willingly submitted to by the victims for reasons I genuinely do not understand.
The politician who calls Bongo 'Mr Hewson' before asking him to leave the room because the grown ups have got important things to get on with certainly has my vote, and probably millions of others too.

It Happened Here: At Last! Britain eradicates sexism

2011-01-26T06:40:00.009Z

Hmm. Not sure how that picture ended up here.

This is a post about our casual tolerance of the commodification and depersonalisation of women.

It has nothing whatever to do with how great it is to live in so enriching a world of religious and ideological plurality from which we all benefit so much (copyright: BBC/Tory/Lib-Dem/Labour Alliance: Your Conformity Is Our Delight).

Turn your thoughts instead to those corners of Britain where, sadly, few women are as liberated and free of the taint of second-class status as this proud celebrant of a faith so manifestly noble that only a bigot could possibly find anything worth criticising in it (copyright: Baroness Warsi).

That's right: I'm talking about tv sport.

Sky Sports is a British television channel that shows nothing but sport - in such profusion, and of such variety, that it has felt compelled to add an 's' to an already plural noun simply in order to convey the fact. ('Sports' is in reality an American word of course; the 's' is the one that fell off the end of 'maths'.)

Andy Gray is, or was, some sort of presenter on this channel: the AOL News report calls him a 'veteran pundit', which presumably implies he's been doing this for a considerable time and commanded a degree of respect for so doing. (It takes all sorts to make a world, after all.) Now he's been fired for "unacceptable and offensive behaviour."

First, he and another pundit, not a veteran but no less adept in his punditry UNTIL NOW, were heard speculating while not on the air as to the likelihood of a female referee not knowing 'the offside rule'.

Have we learned nothing from all those suffragettes?

Actually, it was quite a witty comment: the off-side rule is notoriously and widely misunderstood, and its articulation is a long-standing means of separating true football fans from dilettantes. (I for my part have no idea what it even refers to, though I gather it has something to do with a bladder being kicked through one of two hoops at either end of a lawn.) That women in particular do not understand it is a long-standing joke. (When tv presentress Zoë Ball was made the official World Cup correspondent of The Sun she was light-heartedly asked in a tv interview if she knew what the offside rule was: she didn't.) To therefore repeat that old saw about female football fans in the context of a female referee is, I'd have thought, rather witty in its way, and scarcely outrageous.

Not if you're Sky Sportss. Despite the fact that the pundits made their observations off-air, that is to say in private, that is to say while not in the pay of Sky Sportsss, that is to say in a context that is absolutely and inarguably none of Sky Sportsss's' business, their foul and outrageous calumny was deemed completely unacceptable, and they were forced to apologise like little boys caught taking a whizz behind the bouncy castle. They have, a spokesspeaker stated, "expressed their regret", a phrase that may ring bells among readers old enough to remember the great days of the Soviet show trials. (Or last month, if you're Mikhail Khodorkovsky and Platon Lebedev.)

According to AOL News, outrage over the comments was "wide-ranging", a euphemism for 'nebulous', meaning that what condemnation there was emanated entirely from within the media itself, and real people couldn't give a toss.

But they should do, as Sky Sportz was so right to realise. There is no reason why sexism should survive in any form, just because it has been so successfully chased from every other corner of British life.

Now that the incessant sexualisation of women and young girls is but a distant memory in Britain, and pornography has never been less popular, widely accessible or foul, and roaming gangs dedicated to the sexual exploitation of young girls do not exist, especially not among Britain's Pakistani community, and prostitution has never been more roundly condemned by social progressives and less glamorised by popular culture, it is important to wage war on the one bastion of female oppression that still remains: the suggestion that they may not know a famously obscure rule pertaining to a ball game.

But that is not - quite - what got Andy Gray fired. Horrifyingly, in the wake of his apology, further appalling evidence of off-air nobody else's business sexism has emerged. And this time, a Sky Sport's's spokeshuman has been forced to announce, nothing less than the peteran vundit's head on a platter will suffice. The sacking comes "in response to new evidence of unacceptable and offensive behaviour" following an "off-air incident that took place in December 2010".

According to AOL News:

New footage was shown on Sky News [sic] of Gray asking a female colleague to help him tuck his microphone into his trousers. The former Everton striker, who reportedly earned £1.7 million a year, is shown asking Charlotte Jackson: "Charlotte, can you tuck this down here for me?" She ignores the remark.

You will perhaps recall the recent test case that proved that one does not get fired for screaming "'E fucked yer granddaughter!" into an old man's answerphone on-air, but puckishly request the assistance of a female employee in the application of a trouser mic in your own time and your career is finished.

And quite right too.

Today a line has finally been drawn in the sands of vague gestures of sexism taking place in private, and that most shining of dreams, truly gender-blind sport, is one step closer to becoming a reality. Then, when that golden day finally dawns, we'll have a chance to do something about pensioners being tortured to death in their homes by intruders looking for drug money.

One day, maybe. One day.

It is not easy to become sane

2011-01-12T06:30:00.021Z

.
O'Brien held up his left hand, its back towards Winston, with the thumb hidden and the four fingers extended. 'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'Four.'
'And if the Party says that it is not four but five - then how many?'
'Four.'
The word ended in a gasp of pain.
(George Orwell, 1984)
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The shooting in Tucson has brought forward the moment that a choice has to be made. If Mrs Palin does want to mount a serious run for the White House, she needs to turn to the political centre.
(Times leader, January 11th, 2011, my italics)
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'You are a slow learner, Winston,' said O'Brien gently.
'How can I help it?' he blubbered. 'How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.'
'Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane."
.
Of course, placing gunsight logos on a map of congressional districts, as Mrs Palin did during the midterm elections in November 2010 is not a direct invitation to a lunatic to take the symbolism literally. Nor did she quite mean what she said when she declared that the task for Republicans was not just to retrench but to reload.
(Times, ibid, my italics)
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'How many fingers, Winston?'
'Four. I suppose there are four. I would see five if I could. I am trying to see five.'
'Which do you wish: to persuade me that you see five, or really to see them?'
'Really to see them.'
'Again,' said O'Brien.
.
Within a very few minutes of the shooting, bloggers and Tweeters were putting out links to an ad published last March by Sarah Palin's political action committee, which showed a map of the United States, dotted with 20 vulnerable Democratic seats in Congress, each identified by cross-hairs in a gunsight. Giffords's seat, in Arizona's 8th District, was one of these. The legend above the map read: "We've diagnosed the problem... Help us prescribe the solution."
It would be absurd now to claim that the proposed "solution" was death by assassination. The gunsights were intended as an eye-catching metaphor in the metaphor-stuffed rhetoric of the Tea Party movement... But Gabrielle Giffords made great sense when, in March 2010, she discussed the Palin map with a TV interviewer, saying: "Sarah Palin has the cross-hairs of a gunsight over our district – and when people do that, they've got to realise there are consequences to that action."
('Gabrielle Giffords is the victim of a debased political culture', Independent, January 1oth, 2011)
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'How many fingers am I holding up, Winston?'
'I don't know. I don't know. You will kill me if you do that again. Four, five, six - in all honesty I don't know.'
'Better,' said O'Brien.
.
Loughner seems to be an uncomfortably familiar figure; one of those juvenile megalomaniacs with guns, who show up in the news at least once a year for having carried out a mass shooting at a US high school or college, nearly always remembered, as Loughner has been, as "quiet" and "shy". This time, though, the shooter entered the hyperbolic culture of American politics, where his action appears to fit almost seamlessly with the prevailing rhetoric of the day.
Independent, ibid (my italics)
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'There are five fingers there. Do you see five fingers?'
'Yes.'
And he did see them, for a fleeting instant, before the scenery of his mind changed. He saw five fingers, and there was no deformity. Then everything was normal again, and the old fear, the hatred and the bewilderment came crowding back again. But there had been a moment - he did not know how long, thirty seconds, perhaps - of luminous certainty, when each new suggestion of O'Brien's had filled up a patch of emptiness and become absolute truth, and when two and two could have been three as easily as five, if that were what was needed...
'You see now,' said O'Brien, 'that it is at any rate possible.'
'Yes,' said Winston.
.
******.........**************************************************
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How often do you pick up a British newspaper, or watch a pundit on British tv or radio, and think to yourself: "Wow, that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard!"
Every day, probably. And if experience has taught you anything, it is that only the desperately naive would ever assume they have no surprises left.
But for sheer black-is-white muscle-flexing nonsense, the tenor and tone of the general response to the recent Arizona shootings really are - I'm sorry, I can't help myself - the stupidest thing I've ever heard.
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I'm a little staggered at how everybody seems to be pretending that the real issue behind this terrifying Arizona shooting isn't, yet again, gun control. Because it is. Patently. I mean, sure, the tone of political debate in America is infantile and terrifying, and sure, Sarah Palin and her supporters are largely to blame.
(Hugo Rifkind, Times, my italics)
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The unreasoning idiocy and smirking, confrontational nastiness of the British response is not unique to Britain, of course. That powerful but discrete section of America's own free media that advances the same views, and speaks with the same warped voice, as the entirety of Britain's stagnantly caged media, has been saying roughly the same thing.
But America enjoys the liberty of opposition, and nonsense is freely lanced. (American political discourse is quite the opposite of Rifkind's biliously anglocentric fantasy. What is infantile and terrifying is the ease with which debate can be stifled here: it's not so easy over there.)
The American media, compared to Europe at least, is one in which all voices are heard: it's one of the cornerstones of a free society and one of the things the Left most hate, which is why they've cooked up this insane angle on the recent tragedy in the first place.
The American Left resents having to share its media with people who disagree with it, hence its envy of Europe, where the battles it is fighting are all but won, and the desperate tone of its recent attacks on the likes of Sarah Palin and tv pundit Glenn Beck.
In Britain these same ideas are stated more confidently, and tinged with anti-American mockery over the fact that Palin et al are allowed any kind of oxygen at all.
This recent tragedy gives we English sophisticates two good points on which to smugly condemn that comic, knuckle-dragging nation of hicks and cowboys: they can just walk into a shop and buy a gun, and they can just pick up a paper and flick on the tube and encounter people who disagree with the media class consensus, speaking freely! What kind of advanced democracy is that?
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If this were just another daytrip for the gun control lobby we could have glossed over it in a paragraph. Those arguments are so tired, so illogical, and have been out-reasoned so many times (yet always bounce back fresh because they speak to an ideological certainty to which mere sanity cannot stick), that it would serve very little purpose to honour them further.
(Just quickly, then: Nations who restrict the right of their citizens to own firearms are rare and, for obvious reasons, usually totalitarian. Strict gun laws in Britain are a recent innovation: in the Victorian age they were freely available, but despite the large degree of civil unrest that characterised the era, never used for assassination rampages. America does not have more guns now than at any other point in its history; what it has more of than it used to is maniacs. Gun massacres are relatively recent, and so it is reasonable to propose that social change of some sort is more to be blamed on the boom in maniacs than the free availability of weapons that have been freely available at every other stage of the nation's history. Since the golden age of the gun massacre began in the late sixties, I'll leave you to conjecture as to whether the ideology of those who make this ill-informed noise about it is largely to blame, or entirely to blame. As to cultural influences, which aren't relevant somehow (please don't take our crappy video games away!): yes, there have always been guns in American popular culture, but only in the hands of criminals or law enforcers, and with the latter always prevailing. The glamorisation of the gun in the hands of criminals in movies, and by pop stars... now when did all that begin again?... )
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This time, though, they've added a new flavour to their souffle of madness and bile. Their boiling hatred for the voices of America's popular Right has finally gone psychotic, with outright allegations of culpability in what, it could not be more painfully obvious, was the un-politically motivated action of a total whackadoodle with no political agenda or affiliations. The idea that this 22 year old loser, whose widely published ramblings and all anecdotal evidence show to be a typical counter-cultural internet conspiracist, and as far from the Republican stereotype as can be, might have been inspired by political reactionaries would be laughable if it were not released into a culture capable of taking it seriously.
As to the idea that there is a uniquely, and dangerously militant character to conservative political commentary - I'm afraid it's time to bring out my favourite Theodore Dalrymple quote again:
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In my study of communist societies, I came to the conclusion that the purpose of communist propaganda was not to persuade or convince, nor to inform, but to humiliate; and therefore, the less it corresponded to reality the better. When people are forced to remain silent when they are being told the most obvious lies, or even worse when they are forced to repeat the lies themselves, they lose once and for all their sense of probity. To assent to obvious lies is to co-operate with evil, and in some small way to become evil oneself. One’s standing to resist anything is thus eroded, and even destroyed. A society of emasculated liars is easy to control.
.
Not only do the Left use the same martial imagery as the Right (look - h ere's that nitwit Polly Toynbee doing it), a fact which doesn't deserve comment or condemnation, they openly and repeatedly demonise their opposition, speak in the most unguardedly aggressive way, and happily tolerate and inspire blatantly murderous, self-righteous wrath in their fellow travellers, which does. (This is one of the best concordances I've seen of the routine bloodthirstiness of Leftist rhetoric in America.)
Like the supposed right wing bias in the media they're always going on about, the Left know damned well that the idea of militant conservatives inspiring violence is not merely untrue but the opposite of the truth, and that it is from their ranks, not those of their opposition, that the overwhelming majority of political assassins and whackos are drawn.
This is only to be expected, since theirs is the worldview of the revolutionary, the impatient, the idealist and the uncompromisingly passionate. Conservatism is the political philosophy of the reticent, the cautious and the pragmatic. Of course when some Leftist loon does pop up and shoot someone, it suddenly becomes outrageous to implicate the informing ideology. (This is hypocritical, but still factually correct, by the way: two rights don't make a wrong, and we should be careful not to stoop to playing their idiot games. Nonetheless, for a beautiful example of how the angle mysteriously switches when the mayhem is being done in a good cause, see here.)
Oddly, this seems to hold good even for Islamic terrorism. For the Leftist media it is criminal to suggest any correlation between an Islamic terrorist doing exactly what his holy book tells him to do and the book that tells him to do it, but perfectly sane and reasonable to suggest a link between martial metaphors in political debate and a murder spree by a mentally ill young man with no interest in oppositional party politics. The question is: How much does it bother you that this crazed and mendacious fantasy is taken seriously by the London Times?

The other point is how childish this caper reveals all of us to be. Not just the wrongness of the attack, or the outrageous hypocrisy informing it, but its shaming evidence of our collective mental decline after a century of infantilising by Freudian popular culture and self help and self expression. Here, in the twenty-first century, we are taking seriously the notion that there is possibly something dangerous, and certainly something offensive, about the innocuous use of military metaphors in politics. Yes, it's wrong; yes, it's hypocritical, but more than those, it's stupid.
Military metaphors (and they are military metaphors: the 'guns' that rival ideologies 'train' on each other are metaphorical cannon, not handguns) have been a staple of political discourse since the beginning. (And as Ann Coulter pointed out this week, where do they think the word 'campaign' originates?) To suggest otherwise, and to propose that they represent some dangerously divisive new low in public debate is utterly silly to a degree that is so shameful it's actually more frightening than the mere illogicality and cynicism of it.

It's vitally important that the Palins and Becks and Coulters are silenced because they have given the Right a new voice: unapologetic, unashamed and ruthless in its attention to Leftist hypocrisy and absurdity. Through their stridency, a traditionally patient and suicidally polite majority has drawn a line against the tidal wave of hatred, unreason, personalised abuse and daily exhortations to murder spewed by the cocky Left.
Something similar may at last (but too late, I'm sure) be stirring in Britain, and they don't like it up 'em here, either. Cultural May Day parades that would once have passed silently by the cowed masses are finding it harder to get through the crowd. Tolerance of the very fact that crime, rampant depravity and the threat of terrorism are not the overriding priorities of the political elite seems at last to be wearing thin. When public safety is clearly not being defended, the essential decadence of Progressivism becomes clearer. The electorate that meekly swallowed the Scarman report is not the one that rose as one in rejection of Richard Curtis's fascist global warming video.
The same wholesale rejection, not of this point or that point but of an entire informing worldview, will hopefully follow this backfiring stunt, as more and more of the truth about the shootings emerges in America's open courts (notice how close the British left is to abolishing those, by the way). And if the killer continues to pose for 'grinning madman' photographs as obligingly as he has been, it's going to be harder still to sustain the Leftist fantasy version, and the more plainly will the despicable ideological underpinnings of that fantasy be revealed.
.Or if you'd rather, look at it this way.
If we want to avoid further tragedies like the Arizona shootings, we somehow have to force the rubes and straw-chewers of the American Right to bring the debate back to the kind of metropolitan, sophisticated, civilised level evidenced by the charming young lady above. Look at her face, by the way. Look how pleased she is.
This reading of last week's events is the one favoured by the London Times and virtually every other British media outlet.
How many fingers, Winston?

Saying what they don't want to hear

2011-01-05T07:04:00.009Z

Looking through my files, I found a couple of things that I meant to comment on last year and never got round to, but which, I think, make useful points that extend further than the original, ephemeral news story itself.
So I'm going to blow the dust off them, and you in turn must please forgive the aroma of last week's fish that accompanies the next two or three posts. I would try to sell them back to you on a kind of 'review of the year' ticket but you'd know I was bluffing.
So here's the first in my exclusive selection of some of the things you might have read a few months ago if I wasn't too busy to write them in time.
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Firstly, let us recall the revealing reaction to the interviews given by George W. Bush - good guy former President that the Left will never, ever forgive for the two crimes of a) putting the safety of his own people first after the most devastating terrorist attack ever perpetrated on US soil, and b) doing it successfully - following the publication of his book, Decision Points.
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In an interview with the London Times Bush was asked to respond - that's respond; remember that word - to the claim, made seriously by adult humans who earn their living saying daft things in newspapers, that the tactic of waterboarding, as used on a dear little chap called Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, seen above in the outfit he wears to job interviews, is - firstly - a form of torture that could never be condoned no matter what the gain, and - secondly - unreliable and self-defeating even in its own immediate aims.
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First, note that these are two entirely separate claims, the first ethical and the second empirical. Then, come join me in having a laugh at the dunderheads we all take our orders from.
.
So, Bush is asked to respond.
There's that word again: respond. It means 'listen to what is being said, take on board the claims being made, and address them in your answer'.
It doesn't mean 'pretend to listen, ignore what has been said and then just repeat your standard line regardless of whether or not it has just been specifically addressed in the previous comment' (the latter being the definition of 'debate' in the Leftist Dictionary).
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As to the moral question, all anyone can do is give their own opinion. Which Bush does (he's a-okay with it). Note however, that he does give a justification - the robustly utilitarian one that nobody in their right minds (that's you excused, entirety of the British media class) truly thinks that a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people should not be subjected to a bit of a dunking if it encourages him to yield information of similar outrages being planned for the future.
This, it seems to me, addresses the counter claim - that there is some mysteriously (that is to say almost certainly non-religiously) absolute and enshrined moral law which says quite the contrary: that even a man responsible for the deaths of thousands of innocent people must never be subjected to a bit of a dunking even if it encourages him to yield information of similar outrages being planned for the future - with almost superhuman patience and respect for a position which is even more absurd than it is revolting.
The reason given for it - and given not just freely but proudly, you'll notice - is that to do so reflects badly on us.
They make no secret of this. They will happily and openly tell you that the potential of avoiding future terrorist outrages with the possible resultant loss of thousands of innocent lives, however reliable the information obtained may be, is outweighed by their own right to feel comfortable with themselves in some abstract, national-identity sense.
Here we see, more nakedly than is usually the case, the fundamental evil of pacifism.
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And that, of course, is why they lean so heavily on claim 2, the empirical one, which states - as fact - that evidence obtained underwater is not just difficult to read, because the ink runs and the paper gets soggy, but is also so unreliable that any course of action that makes use of it may cause more problems than it solves.
And why?
Because - altogether now - they just say what you want to hear.
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So Bush responds to this, not in the abstract, with bland pre-rehearsed counter-rhetoric, but with reference to the specific cases of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri (thank God for cut and paste).
He told the Times that "three people were waterboarded and I believe that decision saved lives," and writes in his book:
"Their interrogations helped break up plots to attack American diplomatic facilities abroad, Heathrow airport and Canary Wharf in London, and multiple targets in the United States."
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Not, you'll have noticed: "We extracted some information that proved to be a useful start point for subsequent investigations."
Not: "They told us a few things that may come in handy in the future, who knows?"
Not: "At least it showed them they can't kill thousands of Americans without getting wet."
Not: "It may not have done any good but it sure gave me a kick to see them upside down in a barrel."
Not: "Yeeeeeeee-haaaaaawww!"
.
None of those things.
.
What he said was: we got actual information that led to the actual foiling of actual plots that were actually being planned against actual targets in London, America and elsewhere.
And to this, then - this empirical assertion - the great and the good of British opinion were asked to respond. To respond. (See earlier definition of 'respond'.) From here on it's every man for himself.
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Amnesty International's UK director Kate Allen, seen here looking humble and unsure of herself, claimed in response that Bush's claims were "self-serving and misguided."
Not only that - and could we have a little light piano accompaniment here please, Mr Music - but also, she added, evidence obtained under duress is "notoriously unreliable and inadmissible".
I rather like the idea of evidence being notoriously inadmissible, as opposed to inadmissible, but focus your attention on that 'unreliable' claim.
David Davis, the man who practically defines the term ' former Tory shadow home secretary', feels the same.
"That's the problem," he explains. "People under torture tell you what what you want to hear. Apart from being immoral, apart from destroying our standing in the world, it doesn't deliver."
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It's unreliable. It doesn't deliver. They just say what you want them to say. Detailed information of actual plots all over the world that are then foiled because of the information obtained. Lucky guess, Sheihky!
I mean what are the odds? He's groping desperately for something, anything, to say, that'll get him out of that wet vest and into a nice dry one, and whaddayaknow! He comes up with detailed information of several actual terrorist plots that the good guys then go on to foil. It must be a million to one shot.
Bush says: he gave us reliable information.
They say: reliable information is notoriously unreliable.
But it doesn't matter. Because whatever the result, the tactics are immoral and they spoil our standing in the world.
Just you remember that, when you're leaping from the top window of the world's largest building because the thought of plummeting to certain death thousands of feet below is better, somehow, than the prospect of whatever unimaginable hell is being made manifest inside.
At least you weren't spared having to make that decision at the cost of losing your standing in the world.
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The Amnesty point of view, if I may roguishly so define it, is one worth making, of course.
But it is worth making for reasons alien to those making it.
That is to say, the essentially Christian notion of doing unto others as one would hope to be done by should be the guiding principle in all human endeavours, but - and this is one of those big buts that you have to be ever so brave and grown up about - with this vital and essential codicil:
except in circumstances where the greater good demands it.
The blanket denial of this codicil's validity, as if the rights of a man who masterminded the worst terrorist outrage in US history, was in the process of planning attacks on Heathrow, Big Ben and Canary Wharf among 31 other plots, and admitted involvement in the 2002 Bali nightclub bombings and the beheading of Daniel Pearl, should by logic override any other possible consideration a priori is not just insane and dangerous and the sort of thing that could only be countenanced by people so stupid it's a wonder they can tie their shoelaces without falling over. It's also in itself a kind of tyranny, a pervert form of moral relativism exactly equivalent to that indulged by the real monsters in this neverendingly awful saga.
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Remember that next time some smug moron asks you to donate to Amnesty International's Blame The Jews Fortnight.

Every idiot who goes about with 'Happy New Year' on his lips, should be boiled in his own lager, and buried with a roman candle through his heart

2011-01-01T09:24:00.013Z

The world is a terrible place, and some people enjoy themselves too damned much in it.

And not in a fatalistic, Sun Also Rises kind of way. In sheer, liberty-addled, pig-ignorant oblivion.

And New Year's Eve is their holy day.

Do you know when New Year's Day first became an English public holiday?

No?

Go on, guess.

What do you think? On the signing of Magna Carta in 1215? With the restoration in 1660? In recognition of Queen Victoria's Jubilee in 1887? Surely not as recently as 1945?

Wrong.

It was 1974.

It is not some ancient, enshrined tradition. Unless you were Scottish or something, the idiot notion that there is anything worth celebrating in the act of throwing away the Megan Fox calendar you got last Christmas, and replacing it with the Babes of the Fire Service one you got this time, began then. In my lifetime and possibly yours.

The nocturnal possession of British streets by rowdy, violent, vomiting yahoos is scarcely a once-a-year event, I know. But at least they exude some vague awareness, most of the year, of the mechanistic tragedy of their existence, and exhibit a kind of fugitive stealth that recognises their anti-social status.

The trouble with New Year's Eve, as well as the sense of proud entitlement that comes with official sanction and dares you to object when they take a piss against your bicycle, and the sodding fireworks of course, is the added dimension of hideous forced merriment.
As well as the usual sounds of glass breaking, fist hitting jaw, vomit hitting kerb, men screaming advance warning to their girlfriends of violent retribution for some imagined gesture of disloyalty in the pub three hours previously, and that harder to define noise that sounds like a constipated ox being forced into the back of a Mini Metro and would appear to be just the noise they make while walking about, there are actual, frequent shouts of "Happy New Year!", as each superficially humanoid walking tragedy recognises another of its own kind, and feels the tender need to share the joy that his lifestyle gives him, and the hope that, next year, fifty two weekends spent face down in a car park while everything except his intestines leaves his body through the mouth and nose will be even more fun and rewarding than it has been in the past.

And not 'happy new year', either, the way you and I might say it, but for some reason 'happy new year', the way Americans say it.

So what are they so happy about, if it so clearly cannot be anything in their own lives, or anything about the general concept of getting older and closer to death?

Perhaps they are so carefree and joyous because we live in such a wonderful world, so safe and secure, so well-governed, with so tight a leash kept on its maniacs and perverts. Because Armageddon is so unlikely a contingency. Because the freedoms that enable them to spend their free time attacking strangers and having sex behind bus shelters have never been so secure and impregnable against assault by rival worldviews. It could be because they know that the British political system is in such robust working order, and that the principles of adversarial democracy ensure that the views of the people are heard and voiced by their elected representatives, and that the necessary divergence of opinion exists between rival political parties. Doubtless the obvious and humbling integrity of our present government reassures them also. Or perhaps it is the joy of living under the benevolent, protective umbrella of the United Nations, who in 2010 helped slam the oven door shut on the world's homosexuals and Jews and will presumably top that this year by exuding an even more toxic cloud of sanctimony while consigning further innocent undesirables to the flames of Leftist ideological cowardice.

The future's never looked brighter.

The obsession with the New Year, to me, has the tang of May Day parades and the Horst Wessel Song. It is a day to celebrate the triumph of state control and the propaganda that enforces it; its purpose is to distract the ignorant and intimidate the wary.

The supermassive black hole

2010-12-12T14:43:00.016Z

Funny, isn't it, the things that strike some people as sufficiently outrageous that they choose to go out on bitterly cold evenings and violently protest about them.
As opposed to the things that don't, I mean.
Like the erosion of civil liberties, the menacing creep of Fascism, the ever-tightening stranglehold of the European totalitarian project, the collapse of civil society. These things excite only the non-violently protesting classes: the thoughtful, the humane, those who prefer to think of themselves as individuals rather than gang members.
On the Strand this weekend my attention was diverted by that odd jungle whooping by which public protest is invariably announced, and was startled to encounter that rarest of novelties: a protest against something worthy of protest. Some people, maybe a dozen or so, had gathered in the cold to decry the West's continued appeasement of Robert Mugabe.
None of them, from what I saw, were young, white or trendy. The earnest, supposedly politically engaged student classes had somehow failed to get behind this one. There's a surprise. Well, it was the X Factor final that night, I suppose. Plus the fucker's black.
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So shall we just make it easy on ourselves and pretend that increasing tuition fees really is the most outrageous development in British politics in recent times? It must be, because nothing else this year has inspired the youth of Britain to such passionate engagement with political process. It would make it easier to believe that than to acknowledge our own collective responsibility for the rush to oblivion, so long predicted, that is now visibly beginning on the capital's streets. Admitting that it was mere tribalism, as an excuse to have fun smashing things, would be too uncomfortable for all of us, I guess.
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The truth, as anyone who ever had the misfortune to have been young some time in the last thirty years knows, is that the young get their opinions pre-packaged, along with their pop music and idiot clothes fashions. I say 'knows' rather than freely acknowledges, because for many of us, frank admission of the fact would involve too much of the confessional. But which of us was so well-formed and impervious to ideological fashion as to deny intimate knowledge of the existential comfort that uniformity of opinion, dictated by tribal identity, can bestow?
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Give this transitional, foolish tribalism respectability, mistake its naivety for integrity, and give it no incentive to give way to a maturer consideration of human affairs, and it will soon storm all spaces in public discourse that quieter, wiser worldviews are constitutionally incapable of defending.
Next thing you know, the little twit caught defiling the Cenotaph in his fervid commitment to affordable higher education might turn out to be the son of millionaire guitarist Dave 'We don't need no education' Gilmour.
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The only thing that rang true about him was his attempted defence: that he didn't know it was the Cenotaph, or quite what the Cenotaph is exactly. That I can believe.
The pretence of political fervour I find hard to swallow, but no leap of faith is required to imagine the modern British teenager, proud and grateful recipient of twelve years compulsory education and passionate advocate of their right to still more, simply not realising that swinging from the flags of the Cenotaph might expose their bovine insincerity nakedly and beyond doubt.
The same basic ignorance doubtless informs the defacement of statues of Churchill and, most poignantly of all, the attempt to destroy the Trafalgar Square Christmas tree, briefly set alight during all the fun and games. If all present were asked the significance and source of that tree, how many do you think would know the answer? One in fifty? A hundred? None of the bastards?
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So please do not read sincerity of motivation into the carnival of destruction that descended on London last week. Instead see it as the beginning of something we're going to be seeing a lot of from now on: cynical orgies of mass destruction carried out by adrenaline-fuelled mobs on the pretence of some political grievance.
The will to combat them, still less the guts, has long vanished from the political class. Imagine if the heir to the throne had been attacked in his car during the Brixton riots, or the Poll Tax riots! Do you think the Prime Minister's response then would be to call it a regrettable incident and announce that enquiries are underway to account for the inadequacy of the security, as if the problem were solely in the response to, not the fact of, the outrages committed? Such is the supine cowardice - and, in fairness, quite reasonable fear - of the modern elected politician.
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What has now started cannot be stopped. The collapse of civilisation cannot be reversed. It must run its course. Then, when complete - and only then - the rebuilding can begin. That's why our job is to act as custodians of culture, to defend and preserve all that is worthy of defence and preservation and reject all agents of decline (and that's why you should stop watching television); to ensure that it is handed to your children, and by them to theirs. (And that's why I call myself the Venerable Bede.)
Civilisation-building is a long, hard, messy, often unjust, cruel and unhappy process. Only a deeply foolish people would risk having to do it twice. Once achieved, it is easy enough to defend, but easier still to throw away. The reassurance of an ordered society breeds complacency, and arrogance, and the certainty among the less imaginative that the checks and balances that maintain that order are obstacles in the path of the very freedoms they guarantee. Slowly, they are all dismantled, and even as their necessity is confirmed, the Utopian mentality refuses to acknowledge its own inadequacy and concludes that the only problem is that they have not gone far enough.
Like modernist architects inserting square peg buildings in round hole living environments, Utopians believe that the kiln is more important than the clay, that ideas can trump instincts.
The ordered society that once made Britain the envy of the world was not an idea, still less an ideal. It wasn't proposed, debated or voted for. It grew, from the soil of lived experience. It was codified by tradition first, statute second. It just happened. It adapted and shaped itself to the contours of those who lived within it, always open to modification, but a modification that was at all times organic, and incremental.
The trouble with Utopians is that their systems are not shaped to fit people, instead they compel the people to reshape themselves to fit their schemes, like the contestants on that game show, forced to assume weird contortions so as to fit in the pre-made hole in the wall advancing towards them.
The inevitable outrage and resentment that enforced Utopian systems create, therefore, is the reason why they are historically hard to sustain. It was Gramsci's genius to propose the long slow march through the institutions; to capture the culture, not the town hall.
And the real stroke of genius was to ally youth culture with a wholesale redefining of moral priorities, so that any who attempted to oppose their programmes were not merely countered but demonised into silence. The arrival, now, of the day in which these prejudices are openly enshrined in English law is indication that their campaign is at in its very final and most triumphant stage.
In this Orwellian nightmare world freedom can be rebranded as oppression and oppression as freedom; the good as wicked and the wicked as good; civility as brutality; decency, manners and consideration for others as hypocrisy. The true freedoms, the safety and the contentedness and the cohesion, that characterised Britain just fifty years ago can already be dismissed without objection as pernicious conservative fantasy.
By this means - the seduction of the young by the propaganda of a base and mean-spirited youth culture, and the cowing and demonisation of the gentle and good - a triumph of which Stalin could only dream is close to realisation: the complete and organic reshaping of a society in accordance with Utopian idealist principles.
The young do not even see the contorted positions they are assuming, because all they have ever known is the hole in the wall that fits them, their only commitment to the prescribed priorities of a decadent popular culture that attacks and discredits bourgeois propriety, and renders the masses compliant and apathetic with narcotic pornography and pitiless simulated violence and torture. (So much more defensible and easy to defend than the real thing in the Roman arena - yet in terms of purpose, effect and meaning totally indistinguishable from it.)
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How now to restore the older, better shape? It no longer fits in the spaces of modern Britain. The Gramscian media class have seen to that. Around every corner, behind every bush, lie brilliant conceived obstacles to the tiniest reversal of cultural direction.
Look at something as simple as film censorship, or the containment of licentiousness, brutality or vindictive attitudes in popular culture. What chance now of such a thing happening by consensus? The most watched programme on British television last week was a celebrity game show in which the winning contestant ate a kangaroo's vagina. We found it hilarious.
Decency is not a fighting force: it is the end result of years of hardship and confrontation, the glorious goal for which wars are fought and walls are built and ideals upheld. Once gone, it can no longer be voted back to life. It can be restored only by decree, which would mean by force. This would defeat its own purpose and automatically generate savage opposition, supported by every branch of the media.
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From the first manifestations of that cultural decadence, ignorance and apathy that always presages the collapse of civil society and the triumph of anarchy, there have been bodies and individuals who have sought to draw our attention to the peril they represent. The easy option is to laugh at them, or vilify them, and that is what we chose to do.
And that's why it is not my business, still less my obligation, to propose solutions to the problems I identify, as is sometimes demanded of me by those who comment here. There are none.
I sympathise with the reader who recently spoke of the "supermassive black hole" in my writings, "where solutions and cures should be". I share his frustration, but lack his faith. 'Should' does not equal 'must'.
Sometimes causes really are lost, and that moment arrives when the only way of defending them is to betray their motivating ethic, and this is where we find ourselves, now.
There is nothing inevitable or necessary about the ordered lives we have enjoyed for the last two centuries. They are profoundly unnatural, un-Darwinian. The natural world is pitiless and indifferent to appeal, a vast chaos of competing organisms promoting their own self-interest in a hideously symbiotic circuit of brutality and exploitation.
Rising above this, and inventing morality and charity and fairness, was a one in a million shot. We did it, but we didn't defend it robustly enough against those who turned their intellect against it. Now it's too late to.
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Not in front of the police

2010-12-01T06:46:00.018Z

The English Defence League are a puzzle.
All newspapers agree they are a 'far right organisation', except they don't put those weaselly quotes around the phrase (as they now do around virtually everything else they say that hasn't been explicitly proved in a court of law.)
One reason why they don't feel the need to put quotes around 'far right organisation' is that it is an undefinable allegation, in that it doesn't mean anything (the term is an oxymoron, always assuming that by 'right' you mean 'conservative', since one of the central tenets of conservatism is that it is anti-extremist.) Newspapers in fact use 'far right' as a synonym for racialist, or sometimes just for 'nasty and we don't like them'.
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From what I gather, the English Defence League deny that they are any of those things. Whatever - not my problem. I have no wish to defend them of anything, though I must note in passing that it is somewhat bizarre for a pressure group to conceal its aims and opinions. (The BNP are a political party seeking political power, so it is in their interests to hide their innate sliminess behind a gossamer veneer of spurious respectability. Surely it makes no sense for the EDL to conceal their message, though, since the transmission of that message is their sole aim and reason to be?)
I do think that the emergence of something like - or much worse than - the EDL has long been inevitable, just as we have been warning for years. But the kind of people who use phrases like 'far right' chose to ignore us, and so here we are. This needn't make their existence any the less to be regretted, it just shifts a little of the blame to the media, where it fits more comfortably.
They may well be nasties - nastiness is not in short supply in Britain, and 'nasty until proved nice' is a pretty good rule of judgement for just about everything as far as I'm concerned. But anyway, as I said, not what I'm here to talk about.
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However instinctively I distrust all pressure groups, the following news story is important:
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A man has been fined for making offensive comments about Allah during the English Defence League protest in Leicester. Lee Whitby was found guilty of using racially aggravated abusive words during the protest in the city centre on Saturday, October 9.
During a trial at Leicester Magistrates' Court yesterday, the 27-year-old pleaded not guilty to chanting "threatening, abusive or insulting" words that were likely to cause "harassment, alarm or distress."
Although he admitted making comments, Whitby said he did not believe they would have been heard by anyone other than police officers or fellow EDL supporters. However, magistrate Rick Moore ruled that officers were likely to have been alarmed by the defendant's words. (...)
The defendant told the court he was leaving the protest site in Humberstone Gate East and was being ushered towards the train station when he uttered the offensive chant. Whitby, who chose to represent himself, said: "I went to an EDL demo and was in an area which was isolated away from everyone else. The only people that would have heard were the EDL. I was not aiming it at anyone. No-one around would find it offensive. Otherwise, I wouldn't have said it. I was just voicing my opinion at an EDL meeting with just EDL people around."
Alexandra Blossom, prosecuting, said the comments made were bound to cause harassment, alarm or distress because of Leicester's multicultural society and the fact the words were said in the city centre.
She said: "A number of people present that day were likely to be offended. It was a high-profile event and members of the public would have been in the city on a Saturday. The remarks are even offensive to police. A clear message needs to be sent out about using such behaviour in a multicultural city." (...)
Mr Moore said: " (...) there is no evidence of non-police officers within hearing distance. It is likely that a police officer or officers hearing the words would be likely to be alarmed and for that reason we find you guilty of this offence."
Whitby was fined £200 and ordered to pay a further £200 in costs, as well as a £15 victim surcharge.
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I appreciate that the old line about 'I disagree with what you say but I will fight for your right to say it', which I was taught as the cornerstone of western civilisation, is now utterly dead in the water, and I make myself look silly even reminding you of it. (Here's another good one: 'sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm me.' Imagine!)
But surely you can see that 'he's nasty, I don't agree with him, therefore you can do what you like and it doesn't matter' sets a dangerous precedent. Let's follow this account again, step by Orwellian step.
First, note that the offensive chant - the exact words of which it is not deemed necessary to make clear to us - insulted not Muslims but Allah, thus by definition the only offence that could possibly be caused is offence to religious sentiment, exactly analogous to insulting Christ, or any other fictitious deity. But as we all know, gratuitous public offence to Christ is more likely to take place in an art gallery than a demo, and to result not in a £200 fine but a government grant.
What it most certainly would not incur is a charge of "using racially aggravated abusive words". Religions are not races, and nor are deities, so what the hell is going on here?
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Next, we have the absolute and unquestioned acceptance, in a court of law, that causing offence is sufficient to warrant a criminal charge.
The leftist-totalitarian dream has been realised! Complete control of what we say and think!
This Blossom character says, in response to the defendant's claim that only police and supporters would have heard the chant, that "a number of people present that day were likely to be offended"
And even if the fact that there were no people in earshot means that the related bit about it being offensive because "the remarks were made in the city centre" is almost hilariously stupid, she swiftly adds - and this is I think the most beautiful line of all - "the remarks are even offensive to police."
First, note that giveaway 'even', revealing clearly the contempt in which the institutional left truly hold the police, how much happier they are when it is the police having to defend themselves of thought crime, but how willing they are to use them when necessary - perhaps, even, how pleasurable it is to pervert their true function and divert them from their never more vital true purpose. Even they can be offended. If you prick them, do they not bleed, Blossom?
Then address the utter absurdity.
The police, whose job it is to maintain order and patrol the line between what is and is not acceptable in society, can now have the offence that their proximity to that line may cause them used as evidence in assessing the criminality of the behaviour itself.
Presumably, just about every crime they encounter on a daily basis offends them, but it's rarely added to the rap sheet in cases of murder, rape or bank robbery (not even as that creepy little bureaucracy-speak 'victim surcharge' that is inexplicably added to the defendant's fine here, and may in its own tiny way be the creepiest part of the whole story: a robust, English £200 fine, and then an unspeakably slithery, lizardy, Hitlery little £15 'victim surcharge' on top. Yuck.)
So we expect the police to accompany the EDL on their demos, but give them leave to prosecute them if they are personally offended (by a remark about Allah!)
The magistrate - who appears in all seriousness to want to be officially known as 'Rick' - could not make it clearer, even when rejecting Blossom's cute idea that it is possible to offend a city centre, stating explicitly that "there is no evidence of non-police officers within hearing distance" but "it is likely that a police officer or officers hearing the words would be likely to be alarmed and for that reason we find you guilty of this offence."
From such precedents are precipitous descents into the abyss taken.
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Oh, and here are some encounters that didn't alarm the police enough to result in prosecution:
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And here's a crappy collage showing the 7/7 London bus with the four terrorists represented as kitschy angels:
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This is, perhaps needless to say, on display at a London art gallery, a sensitive mile or so from the scene of the atrocity itself. The artist, who used to to express his artistic greatness via that celebrated renaissance medium of tube graffiti, expressed the reasoning behind his masterwork thus: "I want to shock".
Admirable honesty, but an obvious newcomer to the London art game. The correct answer is that the picture is intended to explore, challenge, question and/or interrogate notions of something or other.
But the point is this: a frivolous celebration of an act of atrocity gets you exhibited in an art gallery; a reckless comment about the fictitious deity in whose name that atrocity was committed gets you in court.
That's the trouble: one man's hate speech is another man's freedom of expression. It can get really tricky. Luckily the people who are so kindly mapping out this wonderful new territory for us, and then making and enforcing such decisions, are a bunch of cowardly fascists no more capable of displaying integrity or intelligence than they are willing to. Sleep tight.

Is this hate speech? It's certainly criminal vandalism, sprayed on the door of a mosque in Canada:
. It refers to the passage in the Koran that reads: “O believers, do not take the Jews and the Christians as your friends and protectors, they are friends of each other. And whoever makes them a friend then he is from amongst them. Verily God does not guide the unjust people. And you will see that those (Muslims) in whose hearts is a disease run towards them saying ‘We fear that a calamity may befall us.’ So God will soon bring victory or a decision from Him, causing them regret on account of the thoughts they harbored in their hearts.”
This is apparently the fourth time that the vandals have sprayed references to passages from the Koran urging the slaughter and subjugation of non-Muslims on the exterior of the building. The Mosque's president says the quotes to which they refer are being taken 'out of context'. One of the congregation said that quoting the words they had gone there to venerate is “damaging to the sentiments of the people who attend the mosque, and also damaging to normal human beings.” Canada's Multiculturalism Minister says, “To come and violate their mosque, their place of worship is totally unacceptable and it’s un-Canadian. Whoever did this should be ashamed of themselves.”
Violate?
So here's the problem. Leaving aside for the moment the obvious criminality of illegal graffiti per se - which is obviously not what is causing such consternation here - can the simple, un-annotated citing of passages from a book that a religion believes to be the sacred word of God somehow constitute hate speech against that same religion?
A tough one to call. But don't worry.
Our finest minds are busy making a decision on your behalf about it as we speak, and you can rest assured it'll be the wrong one.

Takes one to misidentify one

2010-11-28T14:52:00.009Z

Laugh of the decade came last week, from perhaps the most annoying TV personality in history, early-rising chirruping dingbat Lorraine Kelly.
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I watch no television and might perhaps have assumed that she had disappeared from British screens aeons ago, if it were not for my wife's odd desire to accompany her morning rituals with the sound of what was once called 'GMTV' but is now called something else, and is presented by a man with a circular face who looks like he's just wandered in off a building site and an Irish woman with a voice like un-anaesthetised dentistry.
Kelly, who holds court over this lengthy programme's final stages, usually directs her laser-beam intellect at weighty subjects like nail varnish and the sort of music children listen to. But this week, I just happened to pass by as Kelly played a clip of Sarah Palin accidentally saying North Korea instead of South Korea or South Korea instead of North Korea, I forget which.
Cut back to Kelly, who points her Jurassic budgerigar face directly at the camera and shrieks:
"SHUT UP, YOU MORON!"
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I shouldn't be shocked by anything anymore, I know. But I honestly didn't realise this was now par for the course among these kind of blandovision presenters, who I had always assumed were required to keep their opinions private, the better to cultivate that stultifying morning tv atmosphere of utter vacuous conformity.
Insult, still more insult that might be construed as politically partisan, I honestly thought, was still out of bounds.

But Palin is, of course, on the media's prohibited list, one of those worryingly successful and popular individuals in whose tarnishing it has so vested an interest that no breath of reality is permitted.
But still, that Lorraine Kelly - a woman who earns her salary talking about Justin Timberlake by satellite to Jackie Brambles - should be flinging the word 'moron' in any direction other than towards a full-length mirror is the icing on an already inedibly rich cake.
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What Palin made, of course, was a slip of the tongue, something we all do occasionally and some among us do more often than others. The idea that such a thing may be linked to intelligence is both unintelligent and vaguely sinister. Ex-president Bush made several; you may have noticed the press mentioning them occasionally. You may not have spotted the reason why they did that, which was to make you think what they want you to think, but then, we can't all be as sharp as Lorraine Kelly and it's folly to try.
Two myths are being peddled here by supposedly objective media, in order to control the minds of their drooling consumers. One is to imply that slips of the tongue betoken stupidity. The other is to pretend that their favoured politicians don't make them. But they do, and they're often hilarious - we just never get to hear about them.
But with admirable resilience, Palin has responded to the latest round of this most tedious game by doing what Bush was never at liberty to do: come back swinging. She has published A Thanksgiving Message To All 57 States on her Facebook page, a blistering, hilarious concordance of Obama howlers:
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My fellow Americans in all 57 states, the time has changed for come. With our country founded more than 20 centuries ago, we have much to celebrate – from the FBI’s 100 days to the reforms that bring greater inefficiencies to our health care system. We know that countries like Europe are willing to stand with us in our fight to halt the rise of privacy, and Israel is a strong friend of Israel’s. And let’s face it, everybody knows that it makes no sense that you send a kid to the emergency room for a treatable illness like asthma and they end up taking up a hospital bed. It costs, when, if you, they just gave, you gave them treatment early, and they got some treatment, and ah, a breathalyzer, or an inhalator. I mean, not a breathalyzer, ah, I don’t know what the term is in Austrian for that…
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Brilliant.
Now back to Lorraine, who I believe has something interesting to tell us about handbags.

Better late than never

2010-11-27T21:54:00.008Z

Great to see Melanie Phillips's report that the London Review of Books - that weird, weird journal in which people who despise the civilisation that enables them to live without working get together to share their hatred of reason and their love of pointless novels - has at last been professionally exposed as the worthless repository of goose-stepping rubbish it so assuredly is.
But in the absence of anyone else offering to, can I be forgiven for saying that I did make the same points just under two years ago?

Please don't force them to fake sincerity: they do it too well already

2010-11-12T18:40:00.035Z

First, my apologies for this horrid picture.
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I assume, more in sorrow than anger - oh I don't know, though... no, let's say in sorrow and anger equally - that you don't need to be told any more than I do that it is a photograph of perhaps the most beloved cultural figure in the country, the multi-talentless convicted thug Cheryl Cole, wearing a jewel-encrusted armistice poppy and simply radiating sincere appreciation of what it represents. If this is the world you want to be a part of then by all means hold your nose, put your brown suit on and dive on in, but if it's all the same to you I'll stay here - where I find myself somewhat unexpectedly in the company of Channel 4 newsreader Jon Snow.
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I don't mind telling you I was vaguely interested and mildly impressed when I heard of Snow's refusal to wear a poppy on air. And it's not often that I'm vaguely interested in or mildly impressed by the kind of people who earn their fortunes acting as intermediaries between the elite and the serfs, and helping to ensure the latter are obeying the former (a bit like that chap who always used to show up at the beginning of Robin Hood movies, parading through the villages with fancy livery and a big parchment scroll, announcing a massive tax hike and compensatory big-prize archery contest).
I was also amused by his description of those who relentlessly urged him to behave otherwise as 'poppy fascists', a phrase wrapped unintentionally but exponentially in endless levels of onion skin irony.
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But forget if you can what you might personally think about Snow, or the sincerity of his position (he doesn't wear Aids ribbons either, he rushed to assure us, in case we had some kind of ethical objection to the stance), or about that casually fathomless self-indulgence with which such characters always rush to explain that generations better than ours in every way willingly embraced death not in the hope that we would feel any obligations towards them but for freedom.
(Yes, nothing quite like an abstract idea to inspire the fighting Tommy to throw down his life. And even luckier for us that this freedom they got blown up and shot down and tortured for was - but of course! - the freedom not to wear poppies as much as to do so. You can just hear them being lectured before going over the top at the Somme, or crashing their gliders on the Normandy beaches:
"Now listen chaps. We've all got a job to do, and not all of us will be coming back. But just remember this: because of us, in years to come, there are generations yet unborn that will be free to spend their whole lives at the emotional level of adolescents, and posturing, self-applauding leftie toads the length and breadth of England will be free to refuse to even acknowledge us. Now let's go!"
It brings a lump to the throat, I know.)

A poppy-fascist preparing to intimidate defenseless left-wing newsreaders

Personally, I much preferred it when the left, and their media robots, were all like Snow. Once a teenager myself, I clearly remember the glow of self-righteousness that not wearing a poppy can engender in that community that is permanently, indeed institutionally, teenaged. How well rehearsed and confidently delivered were those slippery retorts: the mere donning of a piece of paper-and-plastic kitsch no more proves reverence than its absence should suggest disrespect... they died for our freedom to remember them as we choose, not to demand gestures of mass-conformism that are the very last way we should celebrate their sacrifice...
The real reason for our abstinence of course was the real reason that teenagers do anything: to draw attention to ourselves, to feel a bit radical and deep and moody and outsiderish, and to be glibly confrontational for no particular reason other than the thrill of it.

Lately, however, the media-left have learned a new trick. Suddenly, they can't get enough of poppies, and every tv, kids' music and sport celebrity wears them at all times: on catwalks and chatshows, pinned to t-shirts and dresses, days too early and too late. The wheeze is then, once the gesture is made, to behave exactly as they would if they were not wearing one, exactly as they did last week and will next week; to rule out any accusation of disrespect while aggressively asserting their lack of any obligation to temper their behaviour, or the triviality of the culture they sell and inhabit, or reflect upon the gesture they are supposedly making.

In other words: to make exactly the statement they once made by not wearing it at all. After all, it's all about freedom, right?

You can't outsmart these people, so it's best not to press them into superficial displays of humanity: there's nothing they like to hide behind more. Better to make them stand up and be counted. Snow's stand is a relic of olden days, (how delicious that it has been Channel 4 itself that has been pressing him to behave differently!) and oddly commendable. Integrity always counts higher than its absence, even when it is a savage's integrity in its savagery.
Better that than for the streets of North London to be suddenly and unaccountably filled by people seemingly professing endorsement of such profoundly old-fashioned ideas as the belief that military action is sometimes necessary and always to be respected, that there are such things as nobility and honour and sacrifice and that they are not necessarily things of which we are equally capable, that indebtedness does not expire, and that the present has a duty of respect to the past - and all of this indicated by a small paper flower nestling in the lapel hole that last week housed a Boycott Israel badge, and will doubtless soon blossom into Re-elect Ken.