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Sunday, 1 February 2004

Some Observations From Life »

This week’s tip for making oneself massively unpopular is very simple, and not at all recommended. First one has to receive an email with a large attachment which is sent to a lot of other people (70 odd is a good number for this). One then has to complain, and intend to reply to the handful of those one regards as friends, not forgetting to include an obscure joke which makes reference of:

1. One has just bought a Mac;
2. Said computer, according to The Missing Manual Mac OS X, Pather Edition “comes with only one game, but it’s a beauty… Chess";
3. It is very good;
4. It also talks, and would take moves by voice command, but one would have to kneel to use the internal mic;
5. Everyone calls one ‘Dave’;
6. 2001 is one of one’s favourite movies

and, for good measure, being rude about one of the other recipients. One then sends mail not to the chosen few, but to all. One’s excuse for this is that one was still learning to use ‘Mail’ as if that convinced anyone.

Still and all, these things happen.

I can be tactful sometimes. No really.

The Oddbins in town does regular Saturday tasting sessions, which I try to avoid these days as I always end up buying more wine than I need. (Well, any wine is probably more than anyone needs…) I’m an occasional whisky drinker — occasional means a half bottle can last around a year, unlike the 8-year-old bottle of Tequila and 5-year-old bottle of Bacardi still gathering dust somewhere (which I ought to find a home for, but never mind Norman Geras’s question about whether you could have a relationship with a person of a different political persuasion, I know I couldn’t have a relationship with anyone who drank Bacardi) — and I went in yesterday to taste the products of Jon, Mark & Robbo.

We’ll ignore that their little booklet is titled “Whisky Without The Waffle” when, AFAIK, whisky didn’t have any waffle until English yuppies started producing it, and that one of their offerings (two are blends of extant malts; the third is an Irish malt rebranded) is a waste of Laphroaig.

At these tastings (which are, apparently, on a tour of Oddbins the length and breadth of the land), one of the makers shows his face (in this case, Jon), and they do a nose test, which I gave up on — despite having a Pete Townshend-like hooter, I have an incredibly poor sense of smell. I’ll leave the explanation of the nose test to its own page, but it consists of smelling little bottles.

There were two guys tasting and sniffing when I came in, both with Right Said Fred shaven heads, and I’d have thought they were gay if they had had shown any sign of dress sense. “Toffee, is it?” “Dunno.” “I know that one! That’s apple. I remember those.” (They haven’t disappeared off the face of the earth yet.) “And that’s Paki.” “Huh?” “That’s the Paki smell. I’m not racist, but that’s what Pakis smell like.” Jon, to his credit, simply said, “We’ve never had that one before,” scored him zero for that, and threw his results away when he left.

I suppose Richard Littlejohn or Stephen Pollard would look on our plain-spoken friend as being trampled by politically correct opinion formers. They can think that. I was trying not to laugh, because laughing in the “at” rather than the “with” sense is generally considered rude.

These 583 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:33pm GMT Comments.

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Sunday Catblogging »

Kevin Drum thinks that I&J have had their furry mugs displayed often enough anyway. A break would do their swollen feline egos some good, and cuts his usual Friday catblogging feature.

So, in desperation to join the “join the catblogging craze sweeping the nation” and not just the US, I’m posting some pics of Gordon.

Gordon by himself, having a think.

Gordon again, still thinking.

Gordon hides and waits to pounce.

Gordon and the new cat on the block, who wears a collar with a fish-shaped tag (which he won’t let me near enough to read) and a bell. Most of the birds round here are pigeons, crows, or seagulls, and all are big enough to carry a cat away in their talons. So far, I’m calling him Felix (because of his similarity to the advertising cat) Fishcollar — he seems to have an near identical sibling, whom I call Fatima, although Tinkletoes may win out as a nickname. He only comes round to play. Gordon still isn’t sure if this is a good idea (he keeps coming back inside to check with me) but they seem happy chasing each other.

These 181 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:15pm GMT Comments.

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Tuesday, 3 February 2004

Just A Smear »

I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. No man is an island, young lady. To do one unselfish act with no thought of profit or gain is the duty of every human being. Something for the benefit of the country as a whole. “What should it be?” I thought. “Become a blood donor or join the Young Conservatives?” But as I’m not looking for a wife and I can’t play table tennis, here I am. A bodyful of good British blood and raring to go.

Simpson and Galton

Thankfully, Norm Geras has made the obvious joke about Martin Kettle’s Grauniad piece. (Which I first found through the early-rising Jackie D). Like these other bloggers, I agree with what Mr Kettle says. Unlike them, I’m bothered by whom he says it about. The others quote the first paragraph, so I’ll start with the second. Text in square brackets is me.

The reporting of Lord Hutton’s conclusions and of the reactions to them has been meticulous. [What all of it? You read every word, and without exception is was faultless?] The same cannot be said of large tracts of the commentary and editorialising — nor of much of the equally kneejerk newspaper correspondence. [Ah, I see, that was only for rhetorical buildup, it wasn’t to be taken, as it were, literally. And feel free to slag of your readers, what do they know? Shouldn’t even let the buggers vote, etc, etc.] Much of this comment has been sullied by scorn, prejudice and petulance. [Surely some of this comment counts as reaction, so some of this comment has been reported on. Were papers really meticulous in reporting on themselves and their rivals? They were? You surprise me.] The more you read it, the more you get the sense that the modern journalist is prone to behaving like a child throwing its rattle out of the pram because it has not got what it wanted. [Well, that’s an original simile. You get your Orwell award for that one.]

The Guardian has been the worst offender recently for me. Not in its supposedly liberal bias, but in its liberation from editors. Bloggers, however careful we try to be, know about the solecism that sneaks into every post, the unexpected spelling mistake, the ambiguous statement. Blogs are written on water while newscolumns are inscribed in stone because journalists have their prose and their facts checked. Well, they do on the Torygraph whose news pages are admirably even-handed. The current in the editorial columns may be pro-Israel, but the reportage sticks to the facts, no euphemisms, no excuses. No one calls the Telegraph anti-semetic, but no one calls it anti-arab either. They report what happens, and let the larger picture form in the reader’s head, as is right.

“100% British with perhaps just a dash of Viking. But nothing else has crept in. Anybody who gets any of this will have nothing to complain about. There’s aristocracy in there, you know. It’s like motor oil, it doesn’t mix if you get my meaning.”

“Mr Hancock, when a blood transfusion is being given, the family background is of no consequence.”

“Oh, come now, surely you don’t expect me to believe that, I mean after all, East is East and all…”

“And blood is blood the world over, Mr Hancock, it is classified by groups and not by accidents of birth.”

“I did not come here for a lecture on communism, young lady.”

The BBC has been partisan since before I was born. Knocking the conservatives all the time. Blair and co, are just conservatives in disguise. Even when they were supposed to be doing the government’s bidding and pushing propaganda (and there is something about propaganda, like advertising and the stricter forms of metre, that brings out the best in artists), they were making mock.

“How dare you? What are you implying? I didn’t come here to be insulted by a legalised vampire.”

Jackie D seems to have taken to reading the Grauniad, and has found some choice links. Not that Mr Kettle will see the beam in his own eye. I’ve harried the Gruabiad before about opinions without facts to support them, and about totally false stories which happen to suit accepted Grauniad prejudices. Mr Kettle isn’t talking about these. Impartially, he is attacking his rivals (and, presumably, rivals for the next Grauniad editor, the paper being so useless since Peter Preston left). Jackie links to Zoe Williams’s I don’t love Jordan (this doesn’t refer to recent accusations of anti-semitism levelled at the Guardian, but to the page 3 model, but if you read the paper, you’d know that), which is full of ‘feminism this’, ‘feminism that’ which is a particularly spineless to way to say ‘I think’. Hemingway talked about the written part of a novel being like the visible part of an iceberg and I accept that an appendix of learned references and links is not appropriate to quotitidian journalism, but the references ought to be there. And they aren’t. Feminism has nothing to say. Germaine Greer may have, or Sylvia Plath, or other feminists (who include DH Lawrence and HG Wells), but that doesn’t commit ‘feminism’ to their words, any more than Ian Paisley’s being a Christian commits to Pope to agree with him. Is this the journalism Mr Kettle is talking about? Not he. His organ is fine and upstanding, etc.

Also via Jackie, I found this farrago which says “[Radiohead] only became critical darlings on the back of their (ghastly) politics”. I can’t think of anything more Guardianish than liking a band and buying their records because of their politics. My own political journey seems to have consisted of moving from using the word ‘trendy’ to describe an attractive (or ‘fucky’ in my friend DL’s un-PC, but accurate, phrase) girl to meaning ‘a politcal idea idea lacking intellectual rigour’. Even Stephen Pollard, who clearly loathes Harold Pinter’s political posturing admits his greatness as a playwright. Steven Den Beste likes Bernard Shaw. While I’m an atheist (and nearly a Dawkinseque ‘bright’) I’ll admit to loving Tarkovsky, Bergman, Kieslowski, and the metaphysical poetry crowd. I’m fairly certain that Bernard Levin wouldn’t have liked Richard Wagner had they met (and I am certain that RW wouldn’t have liked BL), but Wagner is dead: his music is either well-written or badly-written; Levin, along with a few Israeli orchestras, rather likes it.

“But a pint. That’s very nearly an armful. I’m sorry, but I’m not walking about with an empty arm for anybody. I mean a joke’s a joke…”

Norman Geras quoted Sir Max Hastings’s piece in Saturday’s paper. I agree with Norman: ‘fraudulent’ is used to mean ‘false’, but the word implies artifice rather than accident, a supposition Sir Max takes back at the end of the paragraph. I think a decent sub-editor would have sent the article back, phoned for an explanation, or simply rewritten it. As someone who types fast enough to be prone to typos (and I am occasionally prone to Samuel Johnson’s conceit of sending an essay to print before I have read it myself), I hope they do so. At the Guardian, it seems, they don’t bother.

“To Liddle’s fellow practitioners of punk journalism, it can be excused as sparky, or justified on the grounds that it is what a lot of other people are saying.” I’m not sure what Mr Kettle is criticising here. (I confess to bias. I like the Spectator, Boris Johnson, Rod Liddle are journos, erudite, clever, energetic, opinionated, funny, whom I like. At least the Guardian still employs Nancy Banks-Smith.) News is news. Opinion, at the risk of tautology, is opinion. Get your news pages right, and you can publish what you wish as opinion. At present, the two are a hopeless mush in the Grauniad. The proper fact-checking of the ‘New Yorker’ is a dream elsewhere.

There is one journalist I learned from at school: Tom Wolfe. And one I learned from later — Hunter S Thompson. Both, despite being of the 60s and 70s, are ‘punk’ to Mr Kettle, but they are the real deal. Otherwise, I suggest that he and the other Grauniad staffers take the Telegraph for six months, read it carefully, and learn. Failing that, there is a good journalism school here in Cardiff. If they can pay, I’m sure they are welcome.

“This is just a smear.”

“It may be just a smear to you, mate, but it’s life and death to some poor wretch.”

These 962 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:58pm GMT Comments.

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Manifesto »

British Spin suggests

Surely the chance to write your own personal manifesto is irresistable?

Indeed it is. My own manifesto gets mixed up with my plans for the BBC — which ought to constitute the next post. So where to start? I’m against capital punishment, apart from the desire to see most of the government swinging from the lamp-posts of Westminster. Only kidding guys, the unexpected bullet in the back of the neck is far more socialist (from Darkness at Noon, by — are you listening David Blunkett? — a man actually sentenced to death — and one who was trying to destroy the government of the time, (Franco’s) rightly, as I believe history shows, though; naturally, they did not agree).

First off, I agree with Gore Vidal and whichever Roman said, “the more the laws, the more corrupt the state”. Government has, for the whole of the last century, gone mad for passing laws. Ban this, ban that, condemn this, and so forth. Repeal the lot of them, and start again. Everything is legal, guns (reluctantly), prostitution (on condition of state health checks), drugs. All of these may ruin personal health, but there is no one better placed to make the decision that the individual involved. For the next five years, personal responsibility is all. It will no use going to court pleading that because they build a McDonald’s in your town you had to eat 20 burgers a day. You unadventurous bastard, we legalised LSD, if you had any appetite, you’d be dead, now fuck off.

Statues of George Best in every conurbation larger than 2,000. Ditto Gazza for towns of 50,000 or more.

£100 “race hate” tax on every copy of the Daily Mail. I’ll take 50, but no lower.

£20 “Dark Ages” tax for every newspaper with a horoscope.

The BBC to be compelled to repeat every episode of Seinfeld at a reasonable hour. Frequently. Likewise (on normal TV), Curb Your Enthusiasm. I don’t care if there are complaints, it’s television, there’s an off-switch, read a book, you sanctimonious prigs.

The BBC licence fee to be granted provided it complies with John Peel’s suggestion that every popular music station play “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, every hour, on the hour. No complaints, or I’ll add Beefheart.

The division between real and mock universities to be recognised. Graduate tax for science graduates from the former to be negative (ie they pay less than equivalent earners), and +50% of total income for media, marketing, sociology, etc students from all institutions.

Schools to teach Latin from age 5. (Baudelaire learnt it younger, and Yeats wanted his kids taught Greek first, but Latin is more practical, and it makes grammar easy.)

Slough has a terrible name (see “The Office”, “Pilgrim’s Progress”, “Come friendly bombs”, and that Will Hay film where he’s in Germany, and teaches the Nazis to pronouce it ‘Sluff’ and give the two-fingered salute); rename it in honour of Derek Jarman.

Abolition of nuclear ‘deterrent’.

You think I’m not serious? I’m just following Paul “The Thinker” Richards’s example; manifestoes are merely largesse to keep printers in work, or something. I’d vote for all of these.

These 517 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:07pm GMT Comments.

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Thursday, 5 February 2004

You’ve Got Western Mail »

I should know better than to actually read the Western Mail, rather than just buying it for jobs. I got surveyed by the Western Mail the other week. Did I recognise their adverts? Yes. Was I likely to buy it? For anything but jobs? No. Did I think it was a serious newspaper? No. Did I think it should cover sport? Yes, but not on the front page: sport is not news. Do I prefer newspapers which are ‘serious’ or ‘fun’? I think serious is fun, trivial is edadly boring. Hence contempt for most of the Guardian and Channel 4 these days. Do I like the tabloid Independent? No. Do I think as ‘serious’ as the broadsheet? No, because important stories get knocked off the front page.

Anyway, this is a Western Mail front page story. Note that there is no fact-checking, no independent witnesses. It may be reasonably upsetting, but beyond that, and the observation that some people are stupid and vocal with it, but a total non-story.

Further in the non-story category is the paper’s obsession with “I’m a non-entity etc.” In the print edition are various punters expressing ignorance, boredom, or addiction to the show, all appended to this remarkably stupid piece. All, from rent-a-quote Lib Dem Lembit Opik to a doctor who hasn’t sworn since he was 15, seem to disapprove.

I’ve tried watching, but my attention span is too short or something, and as John wasn’t on — and he’s the only one I’ve heard of or care about — I switched off after a couple of minutes. (I know he’s had the sense to leave.) At least Mike Read, the man who tried to ban Frankie, got kicked out. He was just the worst of them. All the rest, the Western Mail staff, and their reactionary readers, are a bunch of fucking cunts.

These 313 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:19am GMT Comments.

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Panic »

Panic on the streets of London
Panic on the streets of Birmingham
I wonder to myself
Could life ever be sane again ?

…

Hang the blessed DJ
Because the music that they constantly play
IT SAYS NOTHING TO ME ABOUT MY LIFE

…

Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ
Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ, Hang the DJ

Panic, Morrissey/Marr

Where now for the BBC? The first thing the incoming board of governors should do, if they want my support (and they probably don’t), is to move Larry David from BBC4 to BBC2 from next week, and bring back Seinfeld (but they probably won’t).

Never, ever bring Noel Edmonds back (you’d get a lot of support for that one).

Ditto Tony Blackburn, and the rest up to Mike Read (ditto here too).

Popular music stations to play “Teenage Kicks” by the Undertones, on the hour, every hour. If people wanted news, they’d listen to Radios 3 or 4 like grownups.

Take away the piles of money you give to Radio 1, any idiot commercial station can do most of the same stuff, so what if there are ads every 2 minutes, anyone stupid enough to listen won’t remember the last ones. There have only been a handful of decent DJs ever on the radio: Peel, Kershaw, Alexis Korner, and Marc and Lard. Just fire the rest and employ robots.

Don’t lose the old black-and-white archive. Films still get made in monochrome. Viewers understand it just as well. Good writing — the old Hancocks, Play for Today — doesn’t date. Cycle through the complete Shakespeare you filmed every few years. Let’s compare Warren Mitchell’s Shylock to Al Pacino’s and Patrick Stewart’s.

Capitalise on your news assets. Put MP3 versions of Paxo’s interview with Michael Howard on iTunes pay-to-download, same with Robin Day interviewing Mrs Thatcher, or that woman on Nationwide asking Thatcher about the Belgrano, or Thatcher elbowing whoever it was broadcasting to camera (Robin Oakley?) out of the way to make her resignation speech. Remind us why adversarial interviewing is so necessary. Release a DVD of Thatcher’s biggest embarrassments. I’d buy it.

Meanwhile, I emailed T to ask if she was taking part in the pro-Dyke demonstrations.

The Union were outside handing out leaflets, however, I won’t personally be demonstrating, on Tuesdays and Thursdays I’m attending a Welsh class at the WJEC,… 12-2, I haven’t missed a session yet and would prefer not to.

Also, I do not agree with the statement “popular and dedicated top manager who had demonstrated a solid commmitment to BBC programme making”. I am a union member and normally would take part, however, I believe that he took money out of programmes to create a feel good factor. He was very good at selling himself, not necessarily the best thing for the BBC. I’m not happy with some of his decisions, so would prefer to have the get out clause of going to Welsh.

Ouch.

Still, director generals have one thing in common with regular office managers and DJs. They’re all fucking cunts.

These 326 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:34pm GMT Comments.

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A Journalist Makes Up His Lies, And Takes You By The Throat »

To live outside the law you must be honest

Absolutely Sweet Marie, Bob Dylan

Since I forget these in my last post, two more things for the BBC. Don’t become commercial, like US sports stations (although note joke at UK print journalism), and never employ someone like Henry Kelly “I am an, an ig, igno, there’s an awfully long word in this script.. does that say ‘anus’ at the end, that means ‘bottom’ doesn’t it?” to play Beat-hoven. Stick to the crowd you have.

As a mob, journalists are a pretty poor lot. Marginally nicer, more sane, and intelligent than politicians, but the choice is between being bitten by a python or a cobra, and neither is pleasant.

I gave up listening to Radio 4’s The Moral Maze when Hugo Gryn died, otherwise it’s the pompous ramblings of puffed-up pontificators, and the only person with a sense of humour, irony, or perspective is Michael Buerk.

You know the sort of thing, even if you can’t get the show. My friend DP was talking about Touching the Void, and how no one in the climbing community condemned Simon Yates until some journalists (I’ve never climbed myself, but I’ve been upstairs on an open-top bus before, and I’ve done the builders thing twice already this year…) heard about it, five years late, but then they’re called ‘newspapers’ in the same spirit as Paul “The Thinker” Richards’s sobriquet.

“Pick of the week” had an extract from an exchange between Howard Marks and Melanie Philips. Marks won, having facts as well as honesty (see epigraph) and so forth on his side. But then these moralists are all fucking cunts.

These 261 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:24pm GMT Comments.

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Rushing To Judgement »

1 The world is all that is the case.

1.1 The world is the totality of facts, not of things.

1.11 The world is determined by the facts, and by their being all the facts.

1.12 For the totality of facts determines whatever is the case, and also whatever is not the case.

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

I meant to weave into earlier posts references to Ted Barlow’s excellent idea, which seems to have upset several right-wing ditto heads. Yes that’s right, solicit anonymous scandal stories, and print them without checking. That is good journalism, isn’t it? Andrew Gilligan was wrong, so it’s fine to a) censure him, and b) print what you feel like.

Private Eye has a brilliant cover this week. (OK, using the pic isn’t exactly kosher, but I recommend you buy it and all of that, so it’s free advertising.) Says it all about the whitewash. (Found through Sarah.)

Judges, like the rest of the legal profession, are all fucking cunts.

These 110 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:31pm GMT Comments.

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Friday, 6 February 2004

Changing My Mind »

I didn’t know there was enough money in poetry to support a chappie, even in the way in which Rocky lived; but it seems that, if you stick to exhortations to young men to lead the strenuous life and don’t shove in any rhymes, American editors fight for the stuff. Rocky showed me one of his things once… [T]he thing was printed opposite the frontispiece of a magazine with a sort of scroll round it, and a picture in the middle of a fairly nude chappie with bulging muscles giving the rising sun the glad eye. Rocky said they gave him a hundred dollars for it, and he stayed in bed till four in the afternoon for over a month.

The Aunt and the Sluggurd, in Carry on Jeeves (1925), Wodehouse

Norm Geras links with approval to Grauniad reader’s appreciation of Martin Kettle (What ails the media? — what sort of louse uses an deliberately anachronistic word like ‘ails’?) I don’t understand his comment,

Either there are more dnoc-readers out there than I thought with, ummm, a better class of viewpoint, or the letters editor has decided to be more liberal than he or she sometimes is in letting in ‘the opposition’.

All the letters agree with the paper: the problem is other journalists, not us, mate. (Or in the style of “What ails the media?” “prithee, good sir, ‘twas not us, forsooth, they all lie like someone who tells lots of lies, etc.") To put it another way, what’s wrong with being a punk, you fucking cunt?

I’m close to agreeing with Peter Cuthbertson. (Shock!) I mentioned earlier that I don’t get the Grauniad idea of liking music (or whatever) because of the supposed attitudes of the artistes. Mark Holland comments on this too, but he thinks U2 are good. Fah! I saw them in 1980, on the back of (as Mark would say) an NME interview and “11 o’clock tick tock” when the hardcore punks in Edinburgh still spat. (I saw them again in 1983 and they were disappointing.) If I had been Bono, I’d have called the audience “fucking cunts”. (He didn’t, though John Peel may have on earlier occasion in the same venue when someone spilled their lager in the mixing desk. Whatever he actually said, he used a lot of words you wouldn’t expect a dinner-jacketed BBC announcer to even know.)

Identity politics as Peter uses the term (and only as he uses the term, to mean some sort of sheep and goats badge wearing tribalism; Bobbie’s criticisms in the comments are cogent to me) seems just silly to me. I’ll lay claim to certain credoes. I usually answer to being an eliminative materialist, and have been, and probably still am, a sort of existentialist. I’m also an atheist, but I don’t regard that as being a philosophical position, being bloody obvious.

Above all, I don’t believe there is any demand for role models or leaders. If political manifestoes really are rubbish, as Paul “The Thinker” Richards insists, then politics is just a beauty contest. This would suit me (apart from the fact that I think that voters choose the policies, and mandate politicians to see them through, in the way that a lawyer handles a house purchase, or a plumber installs a bathroom, they’re not there to lead, merely specialists with certain skills), and is one reason why I don’t want an American style cap on the number of terms a premier can stay in office. If she was good the last time, chances are she’ll be good again. This is also why I don’t understand J Webb’s point, in the Guardian letters mentioned earlier, that “the culture of contempt towards politicians and judges … also shows contempt for the people who vote”. Picking a poor plumber from Yellow Pages doesn’t reflect on me at all, apart from my lack of initative in not training as same.

If politicians were selected on something tangible, like their record in office, then the only possible leader for the Tories, and possibly for the country, is Kenneth Clarke. It’s not just that he can handle the media — like a lifeboat, he never gets upset — he can hold his drink, and he’s funny, he also was the Chancellor who bequeathed to Labour the steady economy that they took credit for. (This seems to assume that economic centrism works, which is, I admit, a political position. But I consider economics to be near enough the whole of politics; moral positions, where they do not indicate economic ones, are as important as the choice of font on the dials on your hi-fi.) Scientific American this month asks why crime fell during the 1990s (you have to read the print edition for the whole thing). I could answer “Clinton” — and I consider it a shame that he couldn’t stand for a third term. Who cares what he got up to away from the Senate and the Oval Office? John F Kennedy was probably the most impressive president to date, as well as the most priapic. Though you have to be impressed with his shagging Marilyn Monroe.

I’ve been a logical positivist, indeed I’m not sure why I’m not one now. Whatever, I believe most arguments come down to semantics. The government is called the ‘state’ when its actions are perceived as bad, and the ‘people’ when good. Limiting the powers of the former is always good; of the latter, always bad. Too much newspaper punditry is limited to fings ain’t wot thy used to be and the country is going to the dogs — the irony is that these idiots support the government; it’s the governed they think lets the side down. So we agree on one thing, the country does not deserve the government. Pity they can’t all decamp to start their millenial utopia somewhere like the Antarctic, appropriately as cold as their hearts.

But then I’m waiting for one of David Blunkett’s more callow speechwriters to slip a little ancient history into one of his speeches about immigration. After all, why not? Here is Melanie Philips

As was entirely predictable, the reaction from parts of our unintelligentsia to the carnage in Istanbul was the claim that Britain was only attacked because of its support for America. As was even more predictable, the most ludicrous version of this was promulgated this morning by John Humphrys on the ineffable Today programme . What was less predictable was that the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, actually called a spade and spade and got the better of him….

In other words, as Straw said, the whole of the civilised world is under threat and has to fight this fascist terror. The idea that taking out Saddam created a threat to Britain where none previously existed is risible.

So perhaps we could say of the anti-war crowd:

Above all, people are disposed to mistake predicting troubles for causing troubles and even for desiring troubles: “If only,” they love to think, “if only people wouldn’t talk about it, it probably wouldn’t happen.” Perhaps this habit goes back to the primitive belief that the word and the thing, the name and the object, are identical.

Here speaks a voice even Ms Philips cannot class among the “unintelligensia”. After all,

The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future…

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children. I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else.

Oh, go on, skip to the good bit,

As I look ahead, I am filled with foreboding; like the Roman, I seem to see “the River Tiber foaming with much blood.”

But if Blunkett said something like that (and the build-up is so impressive) and “John Humphrys on the ineffable Today” wanted to ask questions, that would be a misuse of journalistic freedom (as someone alleged [I use the word in what I hope is its proper meaning: any uncorroborated statement is an allegation] to be Chinese, I can’t remember where I saw it now, claimed that, having grown up with censorship, it saddened him to see freedom misused). Again, this is an argument I simply fail to understand. It seems like saying that if you have lots of money, there is a right thing to do with it (like Bill Gates, or, less charitably, Monty Burns), and a wrong thing (like Keith Moon, spending his days outdrinking Ollie Reed and jumping his motorbike over the garden wall into Steve McQueen’s swimming pool; and I think Tom Cruise crashes a beamer or a merc every so often — provided he gets away unscathed, the cost is nothing to him), but if you asked people, I have sneaking feeling which they would prefer. They could always resort to ironic punk journalism, interviewing taxi drivers and the like, “Cor, couldn’t disagree with a word there, Guv. Bring back the lash, and thumbscrews and the oubliette. You know that Ugolino, Princes in the Tower bit in Dante, that’s what I’d do with Swampy/Tariq Ali/Harold Pinter/Robin Cook/Jermey Paxman, and all of them.” And Blunkett on Newsnight, saying “you see, I have the people behind me.” Jeremy Paxman: but we interviewed idiots… one of them had a mohawk, and told us he was going to kill the president. Blunkett: we picked him up already. One of our helicopters picked up his threats. Paxman: but he was going to free this teenage prostitute. Blunkett: you don’t want to listen to these deluded people. The streets are quite safe while we’re around.

No, for Ms Phillips and the rest, the right thing for the BBC would be the old deferential interview “Thank you for consenting to be interviewed, minister. I understand that the proposed gas chambers are of a most exciting design…” What exercises me most about the like of Cuthie and Paul “The Thinker” Richards is that (Cuthie anyway) they can believe in legalising guns, etc, but don’t like the odd peaceful protest. Bizarre. The lily-livered James Lileks wouldn’t have cared for the Boston Tea Party, and as for that nasty revolution thing… The reason we don’t have the boot stamping on a human face right now, is the willingness of a brave few to riot on a regular basis. You’d think women got the vote through petitions and cake-baking. I remember from Arthur Koestler (who was no fan) that Ghandi was a sergeant-major in the British army.

Anyway, I meant to write about, as the title says, changing my mind. The identity politics isn’t a playful diversion: it’s the core of the matter. Kevin Drum’s blog works for me because the comments all seem to bring something. Like the loaves and fishes miracle, it works because everyone contributes. Ditto Crooked Timber. But there are many blogs (and they seem to be on the right), where all the comments come down to “right on”. Baa. Sheep — the lot of them. The more hortatory and hectoring the essay, the less persuasion is intended. John Quiggin quotes J. M. Keynes:

When the facts change, I change my mind — what do you do, sir[?]

Like any intellectually proud individual, I fight the nastiest rearguard action I can manage. But I do change my mind; just not to print journalism. Nietzsche always felt like “nature to advantage dress’d” to me, but Wittgenstein opened more doors in my mind than acid. Arthur Koestler’s “Reflections on Hanging” (I can’t find a decent link) convinced me that capital punishment is absolutely (as much so as anything can be) wrong. I even revised my ideas about thinking after reading In Broken Images by Robert Graves. But oddly, the line with the most effect on me ever was:

There is no such thing as society; there are only individuals and families.

I certainly don’t believe in society in the sense (pace Hobbes) that it resembles the human body, with a head and needing purgatives, etc. Hence my objection to this:

We are repeatedly told in the Torah that murderers — and certain other miscreants — should be put to death so that the community can be purged of their contaminating presence.

I have two problems with this, one is that ‘purged’ seems to mean something more than ‘removed’, and the second that murderers contaminate. Are we to understand that, say, a novel about a starving but talented student who murders two moneylenders so he can eat (and to prove he is a Napoleonic superman) has started a crime wave of similar murdersin Moscow? Clearly, innocent passengers are being tipped off French trains every day, while blameless Arabs are being shot on the beaches of North Africa by office workers bored by the sea and the sun. The purgative society sounds more like the H. G. Wells story “In the Country of the Blind” where the traveller thinks he can conquer the blind by having a talent they don’t have; in the end he joins them, and they blind him.

Given my eliminative materialism, my scepticism about society isn’t all that surprising. However, I do believe that society exists; there are useful predicates from postulating it (this is where I slip into a sort of instrumentalism), just not in any sense where metaphors obtain. A second objection that occurs to me is that this purgation applies to the body politic, and so a man who murders his wife (like Dr Crippen) is less of a contaminant than a threatening Hype Park speaker (imagine, say, Lenin, or Bingo Little). The result seems to be a sickeningly conformist society, which is anything but civilised, being based on fear of deviance. Society, as far as I am concerned, started some time in the 70s, when Johnny Rotten walked down King’s Road spitting at people. Read Heidegger if you don’t believe me. Brilliant, but unbearable, vision. He was, of course, like Enoch Powell, and all those who agree with the latter (there is much that is great in Heidegger), a fucking cunt.

These 1870 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:49pm GMT Comments.

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Saturday, 7 February 2004

Objection: Sex Stained »

Just like a matress balances on a bottle of wine

Brand New Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat, Bob Dylan

Apart from the clear resemblance between Green Fairy’s place and mine, I was struck by a couple of items in her junk:

One scrap of paper, the beginning to an article in a woman’s magazine that runs thus: “Do you know where your bloke was last night? Why he was too busy to pick up your calls to his mobile? Could it be that he couldn’t reach it as he writhed around a sex stained mattress with one of the 80,000 sex workers currently trading in the UK?”

What is “sex stained"? Being clumsy, I’ve tipped a full pot of tea over a mattress having breakfast in bed, and my girlfriend once fell asleep over a post-coital cigarette. Do these count, or do they mean semen?

And how can Chewits be “ice-cream flavoured"? Ice cream is a base, not a taste.

Christ. I remember a detective novel reissued by Penguin because it was supposed to be well-written that had “fish-coloured” on the first page. If I wasn’t bored by the idea already, I’d ask, “are they all on drugs, these fucking cunts?”

These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:47pm GMT Comments.

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Sunday, 8 February 2004

Music To Shave By »

Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth with forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.

The Waste Land

A. E. Housman (or it may have been Thomas Hardy) said somewhere that he knew when a poem worked because the hairs on his chin stood up if he recited it while shaving. (Sorry for being a bit vague here, but it’s that kind of Sunday morning. Ezra Pound, I think in his Guide to Kultur implies that culture is not what you remember, but what you forget. Which may very well be true, but is of no use, although it also reminds me of John Locke’s lovely dismissal of the unconscious with something like, “if a man has thoughts, but knows not what they are, then I call that a most useless kind of thinking…")

Whatever, when the hairs stand up, you know the real thing. And the real thing is Angels In America, It came highly recommended, Arthur Silber loved it, Sully (sorry no link, I’m not prepared to suffer that much this morning, I’m in a good mood) and sundry talentless hacks hated it.

Arthur is very, very good on the themes. He’s also seen both the stage and tv versions as well as lived the life, so he’s far more qualified to comment than I am. All I can say is that in its humane generosity, its anger, its humour, it gets as close to portraying life as I know it as anything I’ve seen in a long time. One common theme of my favourite movies is that they are all, to some extent, expressionist. It doesn’t matter that the speech is rarely naturalistic, all attempt to express the ineffable, the real inner, emotional lives we all lead. Angels is stuffed with objective co-relatives, and that’s all to the good. Does anyone care that the background to the Mona Lisa couldn’t have been the backdrop that Leonardo actually saw? We all know stuff, through memory, association, and so on, and literal depictions don’t let us into that. Trying to shove more into the picture that the eye alone can see is a trick with a noble artistic history. Renaissance portraits have skulls, globes, books and other devices to suggest the full life.

As with all art, the artifice can go wrong. There’s a very good portrait of Dame Iris Murdoch in the National Portrait Gallery (or it used to be there). As I never met her, I can’t say whether it captures her, but it does suggest the spirit behind the books. When I saw it, an old woman was looking at it too. She turned to me and asked, “Is that a man?”

These 428 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:23am GMT Comments.

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The Prophets And The Loss »

Madame Sosostris, famous clairvoyante,
Had a bad cold, nevertheless
Is known to be the wisest woman in Europe,
With a wicked pack of cards.

The Waste Land

I like Francis Wheen. His biographies of Karl Marx and Tom Driberg are very funny. (I notice that Paul “The Thinker” Richards can’t spell the latter’s surname, but I suppose that’s to be expected.) I suppose there is a danger that I may read his latest book, even if David McKie’s review in the Grauniad puts me off.

Wheen’s thesis is simply stated. Reason is on the retreat. The values of the Enlightenment — “an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, a loathing for bigotry and persecution, a commitment to free inquiry, a belief that (in Francis Bacon’s words) knowledge is indeed power”

Anyone who can think that really doesn’t know their history, or read the Autobiographies of William Butler Yeats for example. While I’m pleased at fresh evidence that Blair is soft in the head, I doubt the same can be said for Margaret Thatcher: she at least had a science degree before her law qualification, and while lawyers (like Blair) have faith in precedent and authority, scientists still have at least “an insistence on intellectual autonomy, a rejection of tradition and authority as the infallible sources of truth, … [and] a commitment to free inquiry.” If there was ever any truth in C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”, it was this divide.

We’ve been irrational for most of history. It may be nearly out of fashion now, but there’s a popular delusion called ‘god’ which still leads people to push commuters under tube trains or Presidents to invade faraway countries. There is no known cure.

I also think there is a difference between

the Reagans taking guidance from their astrologers; and the Clintons with their woolly advisers and their conversations with the late Eleanor Roosevelt[.]

Astrology is absolute tosh; wooliness is merely weakness of expression. It’s a matter of kind, not of degree.

Here are pedlars of Nostradamus, and writers of newspaper horoscopes, and academics preaching the End of History…

Hmm. That last first saw print in the UK in the pages of the Guardian, I remember. (I read the first few paragraphs; enough to be able to talk about it if I had to, and, as I almost always do with long newspaper articles, gave up.)

The annus horribilis in this process, he says, was 1979: the year when Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran dedicated himself to recreating the middle ages, and when at home, Margaret Thatcher, flanked and egged on by a bizarre collection of economic and philosophical mentors, set out to re-establish what she imagined to be Victorian values.

These are two unconnected events. At the time, I supported the Iranian revolution: better to suffer nutters of one’s own kind, than those who are foreign as well. (Naturally, I changed my mind over Salman Rushdie.) I’m not as postive as Mr McKie that the enlightment ever shone on Iran in the first place, nor do I understand how we are affected by what happens there. Anyway, the middle ages was the great intellectual flowering of Islam. My iPod wouldn’t work without algebra.

All economics is voodoo to some extent, and a lot of Thatcher’s advisers were thrilling eggheads with real (if usually barmy) ideas.

Some of the evidence Wheen quotes here goes way beyond parody: Hillary Clinton, for instance, telling the New York Times she was seeking a theory which would “marry conservatism and liberalism, capitalism and statism, and tie together practically everything: the way we are, the way we were, the faults of man and the word of God, the end of communism and the beginning of the third millennium. Crime in the streets and on Wall Street, teenage mothers and foul-mouthed children and frightening drunks in the parks, and the cynicism of the press and the corruption of the press and the corrupting role of television, the breakdown of civility and the loss of community.” All part of the search for simple one-sentence answers to what reason tells us are the tangled and complex truths of the real world.

I’ll have to check with the book, but this doesn’t seem to follow (perhaps Mr McKie’s expression is ‘wooly’). Just because the question is one sentence, why should the answer be? Such a theory exists: it’s called evolutionary psychology, but it’s much mistreated to the point where it can give whatever answers are desired.

And here is the cult of Diana, whom Blair called the people’s princess, the date of whose death Gordon Brown proposed should become a national holiday, and in whose honour, William Hague suggested, London Heathrow should be renamed Diana Airport: the ultimate yielding up, in Wheen’s analysis, of the values of how you think to the values of how you feel.

Why should the two not co-exist? (Anyway, it was Campbell who coined the the phrase “the people’s princess”. ) I can like Beethoven, who is nearly pure emotion, but I’ve probably read more philosophy and science than Mr McKie and Mr Wheen combined. I imagine them shaking their heads at the irrationality expressed by Einstein or Sherlock Homes scraping sensual music on their violins, and — for a while — neglecting monuments of unageing intellect.

Next time I go to a funeral, I must remember to stay dry-eyed and remind everyone present that all of kick the bucket sooner or later so as not to be thought to be surrendering to the values of how I feel.

What gets called “mumbo-jumbo” here ought to include Murray Gell-Mann’s attempts to use Chinese philosophy (the eightfold path) and poems from dense Irish novels ("Three quarks for Muster Mark") to clarify physics, or Robert Oppenheimer’s adoption of Indian philosophy ("I am become death").

As the book develops the mood grows darker. Here now is Tony Blair listening not to lifestyle advice but to political guidance every bit as frothy and vacuous. Here too is Blair condoning the wholesale rejection of overwhelming evidence in favour of mumbo-jumbo: his support for schools where creationism is taught alongside or even ahead of Darwin.

Now we’re getting warmer, though I don’t need a book to tell me the man’s an ignorant fucking cunt.

Academia (outside the real sciences, where rationality goes on) has been in thrall to complete nonsense for almost the whole of the last century, or we wouldn’t have, and wouldn’t need, books like The Poverty of Historicism (which is properly brutal on Marxism).

The tragedy of irrationalism occured when George H W Bush and Clinton’s administrations ingored the arguments in Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory. (I’ve been meaning to do a ‘top 10’ of non-fiction books and the Popper and the Weinberg are two of the must-haves. Weinberg is also one of my intellectual heroes; when not winning the Nobel for coming as close as anyone a Unified Field Theory, he’s writing on American military history in the highbrow reviews, a feat only trumped by J. M. Young, who translated the Rosetta stone in his summer holidays, and spent the rest of the time disproving Newton’s particulate theory of light. A Freudian or a Marxist would never have dared.) Weinberg’s book is, amongst a lot of other things (the chapter on how he won the Nobel should be required reading for anyone who wants to understand how ideas take off), a polemic in favour of the construction of a massive atom-smasher in Texas, similar to, but larger than, the one at CERN in Switzerland.

It ought to interest George W. Bush that when Richard Feynman worked on the Manhattan Project, he patented the nuclear rocket, the nuclear submarine, the nuclear reactor, and a nuclear plane. He sold all these to the government for a dollar. He had to fight for the dollar. (Source: Surely You’re Joking, Mr.Feynman) At CERN, a researcher meddling with a way to share publications happened to invent the world wide web. These things happen when you put a lot of great minds together, but governments (because most of them are made up of lawyers, always looking over their shoulders at the past) never consider these projects to be worth funding.

(I wasn’t kidding when I suggested that the socially useful, like science graduates receieve incentives like life-long lower ttax rates, while any course in media studies or which involves studying Marxism receives a penalty in the form of a 50% basic rate of tax.)

Still, the print edition of the Guardian has a nice large advert on page 33 for the Barefoot Doctor holistic medicine book, so we know what they really think of mumbo-jumbo.

Actually, that sounds good, but I can’t stick by that. Because I regard this letter to the paper (reproduced by Norm) to be just tosh: “I thought the Guardian had made up its mind [that] Blair was wrong to go to war…” But papers don’t have minds. Minds are secreted (I think I prefer distilled) by brains; or mind is the verb of brain. I don’t see how a paper can make up its mind. (Even this is unfair. I do think papers have minds in the sense that “the Guardian thinks” and “Ian Paisley thinks” are legitimate English constructions in that both mean “expressed this opinion": how they thought it, however, are quite different processes.)

These 1138 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:44pm GMT Comments.

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So, How Do We Deal With This? »

We’re making $64 billion a year. By far, the most money in the information-technology business is being spent with us. The problem is that it’s costing us $69 billion to do it. So, how do we deal with this?

Lou Gerstner

Following Matthew Turner’s assiduous research (and Polly Toynbee), I’m toying with the idea of starting a “David Aaronovitch lied, British soldiers died” campaign. Since Lord Hutton has concluded that, whatever they do, politicians, are, like the Calvinist elect, free from sin, and since collateral damage, such as harmless children, women, and reluctant conscripts must be accepted in time of war, targetting journalists seems the best way forward.

There is no point arguing that the Iraq adventure didn’t do good, and essentially freed Iraqis (whatever that means; the average Sun, Mail, or Guardian reader, concerned with Jordan’s breasts, wouldn’t notice if the PM were replaced by Enoch Powell or Mussolini). It did so at a ridiculous cost. We liberated people we have no duty to, at great cost to our own servicemen, to whom we have. What useful function those who died in “friendly fire” performed is beyond me. I’ve nothing against Americans; many of those whom I know are lovely people, I’d just rather be far away if any of them has a gun. (As I’ve linked to before, too many don’t seem to know that a bullet fired up in the air still comes down again.) And whatever calculus you want to apply, the debit side is greater than the credit.

Here’s Big Dave

If nothing is eventually found, I — as a supporter of the war — will never believe another thing I am told by our government or that of the US, ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.

Ooh, that was good. Againagain, as the Teltubbies used to say.

If nothing is eventually found, I — as a supporter of the war — will never believe another thing I am told by our government or that of the US, ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.

We won’t ask why he ever did believe a thing of course, though Francis Wheen can use the fact that he did as more evidence of the move away from the enlightment and the evidence of our senses and logic, back to the dark ages. If only more journalists had the integrity of Jeremy “Why is this lying bastard…?” Paxman. Iraq has oil. Bush has interests in oil companies. He’s also a knuckle-dragging Christian fundamentalist and a fucking cunt. I mean, duh.

Arthur Silber is impressed by the Independent on Sunday. While every paper in the shop ridiculed the 45 claims. Aaronovitch and the rest of the gang don’t seem to realise that servicemen are real people, not chess pieces. And it wouldn’t kill Bush to go to the odd funeral.

Intervention can be a noble thing. As Albert Camus said, “That which is a good reason for living is also a good reason for dying.” It just seems outside the employment contracts of our troops to invade countries we have no quarrel with and whom we have been keeping disarmed. Especially when their own side is more lethal than the enemy. If Mr Aaronovitch wants to take up arms and fight himself, I am sure that the spirit of Orwell would smile upon him. However, just as the ‘leaders’ of Hamas are happy for others to blow themselves up, he believes fighting is best done from a cosy office. At least Andrew Gilligan was there.

I’m sure that he and his colleagues can play a part still. If we need to interrogate Saddam but prefer to leave no physical scars, I’m sure someone can leave a pile of mugshots and articles from Julie Burchill, David himself, Stephen Pollard, etc in his cell. Although I’d hope Amnesty would step in to prevent such cruelty.

These 530 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:20pm GMT Comments.

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Oh, Come On Now »

And I say, “Aw come on now
You know you know about my debutante”
And she says, “Your debutante just knows what you need
But I know what you want”

Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again

The fact that I’m not a Marxist doesn’t make me a ‘libertarian’ (for lots of reasons, but mostly because they’re not antinomies). So, again through Matthew Turner I find this page of specious idiocy. I was tempted to comment, but really there are too many points, and I’d only look like a troll, and I’m sure if they visited this site and discovered that I write “fucking cunt” in every post (yes, it’s come to pomo self-refence now; it really is time to stop), they’d make me look like an idiot.

Anyway, here goes with a few real-world simple objections.

What “threat to liberty” is posed by the “private..sector"?

How about the Bhopal disaster for one thing? Every so often a South Korean office block collapses because they don’t have the stringent building controls in force elsewhere. What about Microsoft’s heavy-handed protection of its brand, against MikeRoweSoft for example? I can’t remember the name of the town that Disney owns, but I wouldn’t want to live there. American car manufacturers were reluctant to put seat belts in cars in the 1950s because they felt that doing so emphasised the potential dangers of driving, so the choice to wear them was not present.

Since every crime is a form of theft…

Well, I haven’t read Rand, but I dispute the thingness and propertyness of health and life. And killing my friend or my child is not the removal of a thing I own.

How can anyone know what is right for one person, even Kant, or the preciously super-intelligent self-appointed mega-beings of Crooked Timber, other than perhaps that one person?

I like the ‘perhaps’ there, but we make this assumption all the time. I bought a pair of glasses recently; I knew that my left eye gets lazy and tends to close if I read a lot, and I lost my last pair, but I didn’t know the technical name for this. I assume that the guy who tested my eyes (and explained to me why Dolland and Aichison had disappeared from Cardiff) did know, and that whoever ground the lenses knew what was right for me. Of course I got to try them on and read through them, but that’s not the same thing as knowing. As anyone who’s tried to talk a friend out of driving when drunk should know, there are times when others know better. Parents know more than children. And, of course, we’ve all made mistakes in relationships, or bought the wrong things, and we’d like to prevent others from making similar mistakes. I feel that ‘right’ is being used in such an ideal way that no one can know it, even assuming perfect self-knowledge (very dubious) or absolute clarity of the thing itself (unlikely if not impossible).

I’ll take “We’re all in this together” the slogan of the state and the resistance in ‘Brazil’. It’s not scientific or anything, but we have to rub along. Libertarianism seems to dissolve to an unworldly atomism, and seems far too callous about real human pain. That doesn’t mean that I like Arthur Silber or Jim Henley any less; but I also think they’re rather more refined and less dogmatic than the UK libertarians.

These 491 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:38pm GMT Comments.

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Tuesday, 10 February 2004

Private Houses, Public Schools »

Bobbie surprisingly agrees with Stephen Pollard. Every dog may have his day, but this is one of Pollard’s loopier moments. Perhaps the moon is full or something. (We note that his longer entries are usually published somewhere; this one does not seem to be, which in turn implies that if failed to sell. Our impression of sub-editors rises perceptibly.) Bobbie makes a strange claim:

By spurning private schooling they assuage their consciences — but in fact deal more damaging to the state sector than they could ever dream. By pushing up housing costs around good schools, they force people out of their homes and abandon schools in dire need of assistance.

How does this work? If people sell up, it is to seize a (perhaps temporary) profit. Much as I admire Bobbie, I think his reading of the piece is flawed, and his interpretation mistaken. Anyway, this is from the offending article:

Last week, Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Brighton College, used the ‘h’ word [hypocrisy] about a certain set of middle class parents who educate their children in the state sector. Attacking the “conventional wisdom” which holds that parents who go private are “selfish, not community-minded and are essentially social snobs who choose these schools to keep their children away from the great unwashed”, he pointed out that many are “very ordinary” people who work hard to save enough money to afford the fees. The real “moral unworthies”, as Dr Seldon put it, are “the middle-class parents who squeeze and twist the system for their own advantage to get their own children into the best state schools”. They are “the worst moral hypocrites”, who pay a premium for their house to ensure that their children live within the catchment areas of the best state schools.

As always, when reading Pollard’s witless ramblings, take a deep breath and think of Dylan Thomas’s “An alcoholic is someone you don’t like who drinks as much as you do.” (I imagine Pollard going purple: “Did he go to Oxford? What would an unwashed Taff know? They’re all the same, like John Humphreys. I own a horse you know. I went to public school. I’m important.” Yawn.) The “middle-class” are bad, the “very ordinary” are good. Is there such a thing as “conventional wisdom”, and, if so, does it hold what Mr Seldon contends that it does? (My answers, if you care, are “Yes”, and “No. It believes Jordan to be attractive, Burberry to be a designer label and hence stylish, and Manchester United to be a worthwhile football team. It has no opinion on public schools.") What are real “moral unworthies"? Are there fake “moral unworthies” sneaking through customs at Dover and Heathrow despite David Blunkett’s best efforts?

Anyone who has read Pollard’s site will know that he doesn’t even realise that this is market forces at work. Some schools are more desirable than others. The criterion for entrance is living close by. Therefore some areas rise in value due to their location. (Also, of course, not all houses in an area go on sale at once, the way consumer goods do. Buying a house is more like an auction, with limited supply. Any economist, of any persuasion, can tell you that this inflates prices.) Also some left voters (note the venom Pollard expectorates when using the word ‘left’, I suppose being a Fabian does that to you) refuse state schools on principle. Other people (these may be the same people, but no evidence is offered, but I like the odd fact now and again, I am fussy, aren’t I?) clearly choose to live in ‘desirable’ catchment areas. This is where Pollard’s total ignorance of economics shows itself in all its glory. Send your son to Eton, and you pay fees. Whether he becomes the PM or a celebrity junkie, you don’t get your money back. Buy near a good school, and it costs more, true, but when your kids leave, it sells for more. It’s called investment. Some buyers may be speculators (in turn pushing value up, by drying up supply). But this simple fact is, alas, over our correspondent’s head.

So qualifying properties cost — pure cause and effect — an average of £700,000, a premium estimated by local agents to be around 35 per cent.

Unless wages in Muswell Hill really buck the national average, the people who can afford £700,000 properties when they have school age children must be in some vanishingly small portion of the populace. This isn’t — it can’t be — a movement of any consequence. Van Goghs go for over £10 million, and there are very few bidders for those, but the competition is real.

We remember that one of Mrs Thatcher’s favourites was Lord Young of whom she said, “Others bring me problems; David brings me solutions.” So in that spirit, we offer three solutions.

1. Admit that there is no evidence whatever for this; it’s just smug lefty-bashing. House prices rise in some areas; it could be speculators, Tory-voters too tight (or too canny) to educate their kids privately; or it could be hypocritical lefties. The case is not proven.
2. Nationalise housing, and only let people move at the discretion of the state. (This would have been my preferred solution in 1945, just as soon as we’d nationalised the Bank of England. But you can almost see the indignation running down Mr Pollard’s spine, “I didn’t join the Fabian society to promote communism!” Yes, and I joined the wrong party, but there you go.)
3. Accept that it’s market forces. Abolish the market by cancelling all league tables and this silly constant testing. The empahsis on ‘choice’ meant exactly this: a market, and it was always going to favour those who knew how to cheat. Of course we note that Stephen Pollard is writing a biography of David Blunkett as well as being “the author of numerous pamphlets and books on health and education policy” so there’s always the possibility that it’s his fault in the first place. But then New Labour treats old friends the mafia way, all talk and kissy-kissy, but the bullet is still waiting.

These 806 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13am GMT Comments.

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The Eff Word »

His mind is engaged in rapt contemplation
Of the thought, of the thought, of the thought of his name:
His ineffable effable
Effanineffable
Deep and inscrutable singular name.

The Naming of Cats

I think regular readers may have gathered by now which writers I like and which I can’t stand. I don’t — unlike some — have to stoop to declaratives like “I loathe": I’ve tried to stick to William Goldman’s dictum of “show, don’t tell.” Take Melanie Phillips (no, really, please… etc). If there’s any explanation of her writing style than taking Nietzsche’s “philosophy with a hammer” edict too literally (the way she takes everything else, except the things she uses the word “literally” for) and hitting herself over the cranium with a small mallet, I’d like to hear it.

Take this:

As was even more predictable, the most ludicrous version of this was promulgated this morning by John Humphrys on the ineffable Today programme.

This isn’t what “ineffable” means: she’s using it as a fancy periphrasis for “unspeakable”, but its orientation is exactly the opposite. “Unspeakable” is a doubleplusungood word; “ineffable” is doubleplusgood.

Meanwhile via the redoubtable Norman Geras comes this confusion:

In this white and padded world there is no terrorism, only “terrorism”. No democracy, only “democracy”. The substitution of clear thinking by the tyranny of the inverted comma is now learnt as the very height of critical thinking at Smart Alec 101 classes across the world, while the Wahhabi-funded madrasas churn out another kind of education altogether.

The words, “You don’t get it, do you?” spring to my lips, but I’ll try to elucidate.

Take a simple word like “table”. A table can be lots of things: it can be this table of course, or it can be a generic sort of table, or it can be something flat one rests on to eat or write, which would include things which are manifestly other things like upturned crates, a friend’s back (for writing on), the floor. In Oliver Stone’s Wall Street, Michael Douglas has a magnificent yuppie apartment, filled with designer furnishings. Darryl Hannah puts a glass down on a coffee table and it falls through a hole (presumably there for aesthetic reasons). Is that more or less of a table than the one my flatmates once rescued from a skip? It certainly cost far more.

“The United Kingdom is [in 2004] a democracy.” Perfectly true. The UK at present answers all our criteria for a democracy (and highlights why it only merits two cheers). “The United Kingdom in 1918 was a democracy.” Is this not more problematic? Young men enlisted, and died in the trenches, for ‘freedom’, but the country they defended didn’t allow women to have the vote. “Athens was a democracy in the time of Socrates.” And is not this still more so? Women couldn’t vote, not could most men, and they kept slaves. They were better than the Spartans, although not according to Socrates. “The USA in 1960 was a democracy.” Was it really? Cassius Clay won the Olympic Heavyweight boxing gold medal that year. He went for a meal in a restaurant back in the States. He was told, “We don’t serve niggers.” He replied, “That’s OK, I don’t eat ‘em.” They had him thrown out. He threw the medal over the side of a bridge. (I have to admit that I cried when he was given a replacement at the 1996 Games. Countries can move forwards.)

I grew up in North-West Edinburgh. The incumbent MP was a Tory who held slightly less than 50% of the vote. The Liberals ran second, with Labour a not too-distant third. I was too young for the 1979 election, but not for the 1983 one, the one that mattered after the Falklands and the miners strike. My father, practically a communist, having grown up in Salford between the wars, voted Liberal. I voted Labour. The Tory kept his seat. (I think, finally, he was removed in 1997 or 2001, but the Labour vote was obstinate, and gave the Tories one more seat.)

Suppose I were American, and thought Dean the perfect candidate? It looks like I won’t be able to vote for the candidate of my choice.

Is America such a stable democracy? In Harlan Ellison’s The City on the Edge of Forever, Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Uhura (whose only line is, “Captain, I’m frightened") and co, beam down to a deserted planet with a strange energy source which proves to be a portal to the past. For some reason that I can’t recall, McCoy is crazy and goes through this thing, and the rest lose contact with the Enterprise; it ceases to exist. Kirk and Spock follow McCoy into the 1940s and find that he rescues peace campaigner Joan Collins (that Joan Collins) from a traffic accident and that her survival and success in keeping the US out of the war results in the Nazification of the US. Try broadcasting that now. It was good stuff in the 60s.

I campaigned for the People’s Party in 1997. I thought the manifesto was pretty crappy, but I hoped that the Daily Mail’s worst fears would be realised. Instead, I got Tony Blair. As Tony Hancock said, “Is that right? I ask you, is that right?”

Norm’s correspondent ‘South African reader DF’ thinks democracy is easy. I envy him.

These 782 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:32am GMT Comments.

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Reaching No Absolute In Which To Rest »

Happiness,
Happiness,
I thank the lord that I’ve been blessed,
With more than my share of happiness

Ken Dodd

This follows from my last post. I’ve been meaning to write on why we don’t have 50-odd words for ‘love’ as Eskimos are reputed to have (and don’t — they’re compound words, like in German) for ‘snow’. We stagger round with the Platonic idea (from the Symposium) that we can love only one other person. (Camus tried to refute this and all he achieved was a refutation of a mistaken idea; love itself still exists.) Yet most of us believe that we can have this sexual love alongside loving other family members, children, good friends, pets, certain books or films, or places and so on. Why don’t we have a volcabulary for this? It’s a common enough feeling. There’s a word ‘mauve’ which most of the population would recognise as a word, but fail to be able to tell from ‘purple’.

Mariella Frostrup discusses happiness in the Observer, I think about as wrong-headedly as one can get. (Though my judgement may be clouded by her revelation that she is pregnant by another man. Has my boat really left the harbour? etc.)

So why does happiness increasingly elude us?

Does it increasingly elude us? Whatever happened to “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"? Who says we were ever happy? No one in the Bible goes about singin’ and dancin’ in the rain for example. Our society could be the pinnacle of human happiness. It’s not examined.

I think it’s for two reasons. First, we have created a society that is utterly selfish and devoted to the pursuit of personal happiness.

This implies — without question — that societies, or human nature, can be otherwise. At school, everyone was always telling me that communism wouldn’t work because of ‘human nature’ (I blamed capitalists).

The second reason it’s difficult to be happy is that we think we can measure happiness, or sniff it out like truffles.

Who thinks this? I know that I can’t sniff out truffles (terrible sense of smell).

We create teeming metropolises and homes full of mod cons, then sit glued with envy to Tales From River Cottage as Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall tries to recreate the lifestyle of a medieval peasant.

The former may be something to do with increased chances of survival, and nil to do with happiness. Just a stray Darwinian thought…

What I am going to say may sound trite: What makes us happy is not immersion in all that is superficial. By its very nature happiness is a transitory state.

Actually, it may not be. Ms Frostrup mentions several distinguished thinkers in her introduction, among them Albert Camus, whose anti-hero Mersault realises on the way to the scaffold that he had always been happy. There are happy lives and unhappy lives. Happiness used like this means something quite different to an ephemeral pleasure.

Today’s fast-moving pursuers of happiness…

And this is wrong? I prefer Thom Gunn:

A minute holds them, who have come to go:
The self-defined, astride the created will
They burst away; the towns they travel through
Are home for neither bird nor holiness,
For birds and saints complete their purposes.
At worst, one is in motion; and at best,
Reaching no absolute in which to rest,
One is always nearer by not keeping still.

These 361 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:58am GMT Comments.

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Wednesday, 11 February 2004

Integral Affairs »

integer… n. a whole: … integrity (in-teg’ri-ti) entireness, wholeness, the unimpaired state of anything: uprightness: honest: purity…

Chambers English Dictionary

Peter Mandelson had a quiet word with the Guardian yesterday. He

said there were some inside and outside the Labour party who were exploiting the Iraq issue in order to harm Mr Blair’s integrity.

I think the only explanation for Peter Mandelson’s speeches and interviews is that, like the novels and popular songs in Nineteen Eighty-Four, they are all written by machine. Surely, a reputation can be harmed; integrity, being, ahem, integral, can’t be.

…he claimed that a small group in the parliamentary party did not care that they were “ventilating Tory smears”.

I know. You know what smear is. You know what ventilation is. And then you put them together. I can imagine an elephant stuck in a tree and sitting on a leaf and waiting for autumn, but this one defeats me.

Yet Mr Mandelson’s view will carry weight because it is shared with other Blairites who believe some rebels have formed an unspoken alliance with the Tory press to destroy Mr Blair. “The Tories are pushing at the prime minister, whatever the cost to the country and the party,” he said.

Which party can he mean? I have complete sympathy if Mr Mandelson can no longer tell the Tory party from Labour: both walk on their hind legs and sleep in beds. If the Tories are “pushing at” the Labour Party why should that bother them? Nor can I see the cost to the Tory Party of supplanting Tony Blair, unless, Mr Mandelson is — unconsciously — implying that their chances in the next election are better against TB than another candidate.

The near-debacle on tuition fees was the legacy of an approach that Mr Blair had put behind him. “The foundation hospitals and university fee vote presented special problems and their handling was the legacy of a period I hope we have learnt from,” he said.

In other words, don’t judge us by what we do, but what we say we’ll do, and what we’d like to do. Reminds me of Max Hastings in the same paper.

Let me offer a striking case study from 1997. At that time, I felt strongly supportive of Tony Blair. I believed that after years of Tory sleaze, he might indeed represent a new morality in government. One morning, Peter Mandelson rang me at the Evening Standard. “Some of your journalists are investigating my house purchase,” he said. “It really is nonsense. There’s no story about where I got the funds. I’m buying the house with family money.”

…

Months later, of course, when the Mandelson story hit the headlines, I faced a reproachful morning editorial conference. A few minutes later, the secretary of state for industry called. “What do I have to do to convince you I’m not a crook ?” he said.

I answered: “Your problem, Peter, is not to convince me that you are not a crook, but that you are not a liar.”

“What do you mean?”

“You told me explicitly that you were buying your house with family money, and now we know that wasn’t true.”

There was a pause, then Mandelson said: “It wasn’t exactly untrue, either. I always intended to buy the house with family money.”

(Emphasis added.)

I take strength from this aphorism in Nicholas Lezard’s review of Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s The Waste Books:

Courage, garrulousness and the mob are on our side. What more do we want?

These 223 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:41am GMT Comments.

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And Will Not Scare »

My mind’s not right.

A car radio bleats,
’Love, O careless Love…’ I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat…
I myself am hell,
nobody’s here —

only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire
under the chalk dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.

I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air —
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail
and will not scare.

Skunk Hour (for Elizabeth Bishop), Robert Lowell

I think Gordon’s friend’s name may be ‘Harvey’ as that’s what’s written on his tag. It may just be his owners’ surname, because he doesn’t answer to it. He comes easily into the kitchen now if I leave the back door open for Gordon, who is still reluctant to use the cat flap if he can inconvenience me.

“Isaac Newton, the greatest mind this country produced, invented that. Fucking use it,” I shout at him, but he just rolls his big yellow eyes at me, and I unlock the door for him, and leave it open, even in January.

Felix/Harvey comes right in and sniffs everything until Gordon chases him out, and then he comes straight back in again. I admire the laddie’s pluck. Maybe, because he’s black-and-white, I could call him ‘skunk’ after the Nautilus Island scavengers in the Lowell poem.

These 142 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:10am GMT Comments.

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A Chip On Each Shoulder »

[He]’s a well-balanced person. He’s got a chip on each shoulder.

Linford Christie described by a rival

Norm took this test. So I thought, “Where’s the harm?” And my results:

Auditory : 50%

Visual : 50%

Left : 52%

Right : 47%

Dave, you are one of those rare individuals who are perfectly “balanced” in both your hemispheric tendencies and your sensory learning preferences. However, there is both good news and bad news.

A problem with hemispheric balance is that you will tend to feel more conflict than someone who has a clearly established dominance. At times the conflict will be between what you feel and what you think but will also involve how you attack problems and how you perceive information. Details which will seem important to the right hemisphere will be discounted by the left and vice versa, which can present a hindrance to learning efficiently.

In the same vein, you may have a problem with organization. You might organize your time and/or space only to feel the need to reorganize five to ten weeks later.

On the positive side, you bring resources to problem-solving that others may not have. You can perceive the “big picture” and the essential details simultaneously and maintain the cognitive perspective required. You possess sufficient verbal skills to translate your intuition into a form which can be understood by others while still being able to access ideas and concepts which do not lend themselves to language.

Your balanced nature might lead you to second-guess yourself in artistic endeavors, losing some of the fluidity, spontaneity and creativity that otherwise would be yours.

With your balanced sensory styles, you process data alternately, at times visually and other times auditorially. This usage of separate memories may cause you to require more time to integrate information or re-access it. When presented with situations which force purely visual or purely auditory learning, increased anxiety is likely and your learning efficiency will decrease.

Your greatest benefit is that you can succeed in multiple fields due to the great plasticity and flexibility you possess.

Or, alternatively, fail in multiple fields. Still, as the poet Beckett said, “Fail. Fail again. Fail better.” As for feeling conflict, the alternative epigraph would have been “I sit at my table and wage war with myself,” but I can’t remember which REM song it’s from.

This hemispheric thing is all balls, anyway. And someone had the gall to add The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes to Crooked Timber’s Books Every Educated Person Should Read. Total nutjob. But at least I finished it, which isn’t true of Gravity’s Rainbow, despite several attempts. I’ve never heard of most of the books (there’s wide agreement on Roth, but argument about which one), but I have read some of the more obscure ones, including Harlan Ellison’s TV reviews for some California paper. I only read them because he was my favourite writer at the time, having written the second-best ever Star Trek (see earlier post for summary) and one of the most memorable. My dad went aroung saying, “You’ve got to have a hobby. It keeps you off the streets” for years, which may be where the quotation thing comes from. I doubt that this gets me counted among educated adults.

These 219 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:24pm GMT Comments.

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Digging Into Referrer Files »

This is an oldie but goodie.

Who looked for tell me chris gibsons acne solution?

Or ben laden funy photos?

Or mormons travelled to america in submarines?

At least there are no ‘jew’ ones there today.

These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36pm GMT Comments.

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Saturday, 14 February 2004

Tragedy »

There are some things so incredible that you can’t take them in properly.

Italian cycling star Marco Pantani has been found dead in a hotel in Rimini.

“I’m devastated, it’s a tragedy of enormous proportions for the entire cycling world,” said fellow cyclist Mario Cipollini.

The good die young, as they say.

These 34 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42pm GMT Comments.

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Sunday, 15 February 2004

The Good Die Young »

Better to live one day as a tiger…

Chinese proverb

The good die young (ish). The BBC seem to think that Pantani had come to personify his sport’s troubled relationship with drugs.

He was older than Jesus, Shelley, Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Keith Moon, Rimbaud, James Dean, Wilfred Owen, Sylvia Plath, Chatterton, Keats, Marlowe, etc etc. Dante began “In the middle of the journey of our life” (meaning half of three-score year and ten, ie 35) when he was 29. Camus, possibly the only philosopher to give the subject proper consideration decided that live is worth living if you are male, healthy, and young. Though anyone who knows me will know that I’ve worried about this since I was older than Thomas Chatterton ever was, and older than Rimbaud when he gave up poetry.

I can’t speak for women (but Sylvia Plath and Sappho died young), but for men, it’s all downhill after the mid-twenties. Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile at 22, and retired not long after. Albert Einstein published four ground breaking papers in 1904, the year he was 25. Nietzsche was a professor at 24. (The oldest person to publish a paper which earned a Nobel Prize was Shrodinger, at 39.) Better to die young and beautiful. Always assuming that you have beauty in the first place. (The alternative is to become a newspaper columnist and practice your constipated spaniel look.)

If you’re not a millionaire by the time you’re 30, you never will be.

Coming up for me, Douglas Adams, Joe Strummer, John Entwistle.

These 247 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:12am GMT Comments.

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Yea, Though I Walk In Neath’s Dark Vale »

If you build it, they will come.

Field of Dreams

First, a change of policy. As I believe all people are equal, even Daily Mail readers, I’ve decided to rescind my practice of referring to others by their titles or as Mr, Ms, Dr, and so on. I can’t conceive of two phonemes which go together less well than ‘em’ and ‘ess’ (or ‘zizz’) — or which are harder to pronouce and keep one’s pretence of sanity. Henceforth, I abolish all these designations, and use only the egalitarian “comrade.”

The first person to receive the accolade of the newly democratic backword is Comrade Hain, described by the only person I know who was ever a contituent of his as a “fucking cunt”. (OK, that was journalistic licence — my little attempt to worm my way into Fleet Street: I confess that I added the “fucking”. ) As Comrade Blair well knows, Labour scraped a narrow victory in the 2001 general election, landing them with a paltry 412 seats (out of 659). As a result, Comrade Blair had little opportunity to pick ministers from the majority party (most of them were Labour members, and therefore of doubtful political allegiance; some may even have been socialists), so poor Comrade Hain was forced to take two jobs.

Frank Johnson gets as close as an onlooker from the gallery can to the publicity-shy Comrade Hain. We blush to think a wallflower like this is pushed into such prominence, and would welcome the day when he saved the embarrassment of such public display, by being, let us say, kicked out of parliament.

On the troubled matter of Welsh representation, Comrade Melanie Phillips falls into the heffalump trap that awaits the unwary metropolitan journalist: the oldest hatred of all (elegantly labelled by Comrade Freud as “Taffophobia"). Writing about Comrade Michael Howard’s constituency of Llanelli, Comrade Phillips’s blood pressure rises when an aged consituent opines of Michael Howard’s mother

“But I must say, I didn’t like her. Whenever you looked in the window of her dress shop, she’d come out and try to get you to come in and buy something. But then, of course, they’re like that.’’

I rarely agree with Comrade Cuthbertson, but there is a distinction between what people do and what they are. Prejudice against the Welsh, such as Comrade Phillips demonstrates is utterly reprehensible, but writing as she does for the Daily Mail, we would not expect her to acknowledge the deep antagonism that runs in the Welsh valleys. Political allegiance is a matter of conscience, and if people cannot be held to that, where is morality? One imagines Comrade Thatcher’s father, Comrade (though we believe he preferred the pre-revolutionary term ‘Alderman’) Roberts was just the same. That’s the problem with Tories. They are all like that.

These 414 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:28am GMT Comments.

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Kiss The Sky »

Help me baby
Help me baby

Purple Haze, Hendrix

We come to our next point via Comrade Phillips’s prejudices, spelled out here:

Although [Michael Howard] had previously said his party would not be whipped on [gay marriage], this is the first time he has indicated how he intends to vote. Despite his platitudes about marriage, he has now consigned it to the bin as far as the Tories are concerned. He is backing a proposal whose purpose is to destroy normative values of behaviour. If the Conservatives don’t stand for conserving such values any more, they stand for nothing.

We could be puzzled by why the leader of Comrade Majesty’s opposition should be shy of declaring how he intends to vote. Here at backword we thought Honourable Comrades were pretty much expected to make their beliefs clear and to vote publicly. We could be puzzled as to how endorsing the freedom of one section of the populace harms another, by definition, exclusive section. We could be puzzled why the Conservatives can’t change what they stand for without having to stand for nothing. If we were inclined to read further, doubtless we’d be puzzled by more, by life is too short.

This is pertinent because of the recent Crooked Timber discussion on Transcription errors, which introduced me to the delightful word Mondegreen.

Like Michael Brooke, I am an iPod addict, and I’ve ended up with three versions of “Purple Haze” on mine (The Kronos Quartet, Hendrix in the studio, and Hendrix live). When I was younger, I always heard the lyric as “Excuse me while I kiss the sky.” However, on the live version he unambiguously sings, “…while I kiss that guy.” (Emphasis on recording.)

I expect a Daily Mail attack on ‘degenerate Negro “art"’ any day now. I can testify, and I am sure Comrade Lemmy Kilmister, who used to roadie for Comrade Hendrix can back me up, that too much exposure makes you DEAF. BUT IT’S WORTH IT.

These 243 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:03am GMT Comments.

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High Infidelity »

Shakespeare, he’s in the alley,
With his pointed shoes and his bells.
He’s talking to some French girl,
Who says she knows me well.

Stuck Inside of Mobile With the Memphis Blues Again

I’d really like to know what drugs Comrade Lileks is on, but I hope he doesn’t drive or operate heavy machinery anywhere near me.

He has a certain moral clarity, it is true. Even if it is the certainty of “Trust me, a cavalry charge against Russian cannons will end this war for good.”

If a friend of mine cheated on his wife and put his family in jeopardy, I’d have a hard time staying his friend. Infidelity ruins lives.

I don’t understand the function of the word ‘and’ in the first sentence. Does he mean “[i]f a friend of mine cheated on his wife”, “I’d be OK"; if he “put his family in jeopardy”, “I’d be cool with that”, but if he did both, “that’s the end of you, bud.” Or does the second follow from the first? I have to ask because I don’t see how having an affair endangers a family. Not in the way that heaving a bairn over a balcony at the press corps below does, anyway. Comrade Lileks may mean jeopardize the “family unit”, but that might be a good thing. The US Constitution promises “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness"; millions of Americans are divorced. Perhaps these two are related. Paul Gauguin, perhaps my favourite painter ever, gave his family and respectable life the elbow in his thirties and buggered off to the South Seas. Faced with the choice, do you choose a fun-loving genius as a friend, or a petit-bourgeois shrew? Shakespeare not only had affairs, he immortalised them in poetry. I don’t know about ruined lives, I thought the result elevated all humankind a degree or two.

Trust me: many a faithful politician has lied to his constituency without first bedding a chippie to see how this lying stuff worked for him.

What the hell is wrong with carpenters? They have feelings and sexual urges too.

True enough. But what I want is focus. Serial philanderers lack focus. (If that’s what he is, and I have no idea.)

(The ‘he’ refers to John Kerry, so after a comprehensive muck-spreading, comes the back-pedalling of “I didn’t say that”. Ooh, you did, you old tart, James.) How does he know if serial philanderers have focus or not? Or if anyone has. (Would ‘Focus’ be a good name for a Cornish brothel? No, doesn’t work. ‘Pocus’ might work.) Mick Jagger might be called a serial philanderer. It doesn’t seem to have slowed him down.

I don’t want a guy who gets The Itch now and then, and finds the portion of the day devoted to scratching that itch getting bigger, and bigger, and bigger, until once again we get an intern scandal right about the time we’re supposed to be concentrating on Iranian nuclear tests.

Politicians shouldn’t, of course, concentrate on any one thing: there is a big picture they’re supposed to see. Long holidays for Comrade Bush, and afternoon naps for Comrade Reagan are of course fine. Getting the Itch now and again (I’ll assume he means lust rather than an STD, because they can really throw you off your stride) could be a symptom of a certain sort of energy, of élan, or lust for life.

I’d trust an life-loving president far more than the half-embalmed gerontocracy which used to be in charge of the USSR. Perhaps comrade Lileks is just having a weekly dig at the Democrats, because there weren’t any philandering Republicans in my lifetime. G.H.W. Bush, too boring. Reagan, too senile. Ford, too unco-ordinated. Nixon, well too Nixon, the morals of a psychotic used-car salesman, as cuddly as a feral pit-bull, and the charm of sandpaper.

Hang on, there’s an open goal for a “fucking cunt” joke here, but I really have to give them up.

These 504 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:54pm GMT Comments.

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Wednesday, 18 February 2004

I’m Alive! »

I haven’t given up blogging. I’ve just been getting to grips with SSH (far cooler than FTP, but that may just be its newness), and learning enough about shell scripts to rewrite all absolute links so that the move to the new domain will be painless.

The move to new hosts (http://www.mythic-beasts.com/), was, as you may not have realised, nearly totally painless, though this may have been due to the anaesthetics.

These 71 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:06pm GMT Comments.

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Mostly Photos »

OK, the last post didn’t quite work as expected.

However, the time to hesitate is through, no time to wallow in the mire. Not only am I a crawly amphibian (and there are worse things to be), but I seem to have gained a certain notoriety in my town. Fame! I’m going to live forever. (Not that I really want to.)

What worked on my old Windows machine, worked a little differently on Unix. Interesting — or not.

By way of a change, and as an experiment, here are several photos I took on the day of the Wales-Scotland game (Valentines Day to the rest of the country). The ones at the bottom are my cat and his new friend.

I liked these two guys. I should know what their shirts are; I think it’s some Borders club, but that’s the extent of my knowledge.

Four Welsh girls…

… and four Scots lads.

See you Jimmy.

This pair insisted on being photographed.

This the photo that went wrong in the good kind of way.

This shows what Caroline Street is mostly famous for.

And some more cat pictures.

Gordon close up.

More cat silliness.

These 196 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42pm GMT Comments.

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Thursday, 19 February 2004

Good Point »

This is going to be one of those posts where I try to connect something I read because I followed a link from someone else’s site which in turn led me to another site which said something I ought to have posted on. However, following a different link (also starting from the sidebar on the main page), I come across the same something quoted by a totally different source.

Trust me, if I don’t try to explain, it’ll all be simpler.

One of my regular reads is Chris Brooke, who links to Nick who happened to offend Hak Mao with his “pro-war left” comment.

Hak’s response is very selectively quoted by Glenn:

GOOD POINT: “The question of whether Saddam Hussein was a monstrous, murderous tyrant has two answers — ‘no’ or ‘yes.’ There is no ‘yes but.’

Julian Sanchez, who’s on my blogroll, but not — I think — any of the others (but he’s very good), says:

It’s a transparently retarded point. The obvious answer is: “Yes, but being a murderous tyrant has never been and shouldn’t be sufficient reason to roll out U.S. troops.” Which, of course, was the answer everyone has been given all along. How much longer have we got to endure glib stupidity and bluster passing as “moral clarity” or some such gibberish?

Good point. But both Nick and Hak Mao are worth reading at length. Glenn-like aphorisms have the disadvantage of being superficial, and the issue is more complex than that.

These 162 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:46pm GMT Comments.

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Five Out Of Nine »

At last! UK terror suspects held at Guantanamo Bay are to be released. I first heard of this through an email from Kirsty Wark, which I nearly didn’t read because unlike those from Jeremy Paxman, hers rarely contain jokes in poor taste — or any jokes at all. (I subscribe to the email. I don’t know Ms Wark at all. While some readers may find this hard to believe, we Scots do not all know each other.)

The trials should be very interesting.

These 83 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:15pm GMT Comments.

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Friday, 20 February 2004

Hungry Like The Wolf »

Athens’ most comely young man, Plato, has touched off a media firestorm with a forthcoming condemnation of two decades of alleged sexual harassment against men by Socrates, his former tutor.

Xenophon, also a former student of Socrates agreed. “He’s a ugly sod, but he can’t half argue. He can talk the hind legs off a goat, and he’s got hollow legs.”

One of the elders of Athens, who refused to be named, said, “I don’t know what’s going to happen to this city. When I was young we had to make do with learning a little Aristophanes and studying Heraclitus. Now it’s all this stuff about virtue, caves, and horses that aren’t there. Young men come to study in sensible togas and sandals and in no time, they’re wearing things you wouldn’t believe, drinking retsina all night, and falling into fountains. Athens is going to the dogs. It’s the end of civilisation.”

Another elder thought Socrates was a bad influence. “Talk to the youth in our schools, and they’re all stout Athenian patriots. A few hours with Socrates, and his right-wing propaganda, and they start arguing that in Sparta men are real men. There’s a well-known bias in academia, and while we left-wingers represent the people, we can’t seem to get the jobs. Who is this Socrates anyway? He’s only a stonemason. Where’s his degree?”

“He’s, like, a real education, man,” said one of his current students. “He really opened my mind. He’s really, like, clever, you know?”

Another student was less impressed. “It’s fine if you’re good-looking, play the lyre, or are quick-witted. He’s always got his eye on the pretty boys.”

At the root of this resentment are persistent rumours that Socrates, married to the fragrant Xanthippe, has been using his rhetoric to seduce unworldly young men.

“We’d been at it all day,” one former student said, “I suppose we’d been drinking quite hard. He [Socrates] had just proved something about innate knowledge and the area of two squares which was over my head by this time, when he turned to me with a wink, and slipped his hand up my toga. If that wasn’t bad enough, the next time I saw him, he ignored me completely, and devoted his attention to that little tart Plato.”

He continued with the opinion that Socrates was “overwhelmingly, destructively, seductive” for students. “Learning is supposed to be dull. School was excruciating. We got tested so often we had no time to learn anything. Athens should see that all rhetoriticians charged with instructing the young have acceptable levels of charisma and warmth. And ‘acceptable’ has to mean none at all. Zero tolerance. Why, I even saw a lad last night playing his lyre with his teeth. Then he set it on fire and smashed it. Decadence, decadence…

“A girl is not ruined for life by being seduced. A young fellow is.”

In addition to charges of corrupting the young, Socrates is also under investigation for his unbelievable stories about a mythical country called ‘California’ which he claims he visited in a ‘time machine’ with travellers he referred to as ‘Bill’ and ‘Ted’.

Thanks are due to the Torygraph for the original story. Kierkegaard for the details of Socrates’s drinking, and Nietzsche for the factoid about his looks. (He says Monstrum in fronte, monstrum in animo , somewhere, a very Nietzsche thing to say, and one I always think of of when I see Julie Burchill’s mug. But, Fred, that moustache! It has to go.) Michael Brooke for the Lord Longford quotation. Sully for being endlessly paranoid. Peter Cuthbertson for being so amusingly crazy. Michael N for writing sense at Obsidian Wings on the gay marriage thing. Jeremy Irons and Anthony Andrews for the falling into fountains reference. Thanks also to my friend DL for telling me last night about the “stunning” female students handing out flyers for a school disco themed club dressed in school uniforms and fishnets while sixth formers and their parents circulated on a open day. “You could see the dads trying not to stare while the mums wondered what den of corruption they were letting their babies into.” He was more bothered that students these days needed to take their parents to their future seats of learning. But then, like Marc Mulholland and Richard Herring, his and my student days were mobile phone-less. We had it tough.

These 731 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:15pm GMT Comments.

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Ars Longa »

That’s some catch, that Catch-22

Joseph Heller

They really have it in for peace demonstrators…

Washington’s scruffy Ambassador Theater, normally a pad for psychedelic frolics, was the scene of an unscheduled scatological solo in support of the peace demonstrations. Its antistar was author Norman Mailer, who proved even less prepared to explain Why Are We In Vietnam? than his current novel bearing that title.

Slurping liquor from a coffee mug, Mailer faced an audience of 600, most of them students, who had kicked in $1,900 for a bail fund against Saturday’s capers. “I don’t want to grandstand unduly,” he said, grandly but barely standing.

It was one of his few coherent sentences. Mumbling and spewing obscenities as he staggered about the stage — which he had commandeered by threatening to beat up the previous M.C. — Mailer described his search for a usable privy on the premises. Excretion, in fact, was his preoccupation of the night. “I’m here because I’m like LBJ,” was one of Mailer’s milder observations. “He’s as full of crap as I am.”

Time magazine, October 27, 1967.

I only know of this piece because, despite being like “most people whose nerves are sufficiently sensitive to keep them well-covered with flesh”, Mailer reproduced it in The Armies of the Night.

Mailer has one more trick over shabby journalists: he actually fought. This is more an observation that a theory, but the divide between the pro-war and anti-war factions might be characterised by the likelihood of actually serving in combat. Funny how the most reluctant warriors include Colin Powell and John Kerry.

And if you do serve, is there anything more waiting when you get home than driving a taxi all night, building up a gun collection, and talking to your mirror? The safe, sensible option is to support war but stay away as much as possible. In classless America, dying is for poor people.

These 149 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:08pm GMT Comments.

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Convulsed With Laughter »

From the moment I picked up your book until I laid it down, I was convulsed with laughter. Some day I intend reading it.

Groucho Marx

That second sentence isn’t literally true.

These 6 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:29pm GMT Comments.

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Saturday, 21 February 2004

Fools Rushton »

Another form of irregular verb: I reference peer-reviewed research; you rely on so-called ‘experts’; he just makes stuff up.

At Crooked Timber, there is a high standard of name-dropping, but as many contributors and commentors are academics, most of these are reliable.

However, elsewhere citations are less rigourously checked. Take Peter Cuthbertson’s comments. There are some outright loons there. One WJ Phillips quotes J. Phillippe Rushton without citations, and just as well.

I’ve actually read Rushton, and while the experience is probably less unpleasant than cataloguing the Metropolitan Police’s haul of kiddie porn might be — it can’t be by much. You may think that there are some nasty bastards writing race-hate in the tabloids but that’s just peanuts to Rushton and company.

Rushton doesn’t exactly hate blacks: he allows that they are “good at sports.”

[Blacks] have a narrower pelvis which makes for a more efficient stride. They have more testosterone which gives them more explosive energy. But these come at a price and the price is a smaller brain.

I’m perhaps just a little keener on athletics than Professor (and, regrettably, he is a professor) Rushton, and I remember than there was a track meet in my home city of Edinburgh, which included the rarely run these days 100yd dash. The Scottish all-comers record was perceived to be fairly soft, being held by a white guy, who was an amateur (and a student) when he set it. The line-up included Linford Christie, ranked around 2 or 3 in the world at the time, and a dedicated professional who used weight-training regimes and warm-weather training periods in Australia. He didn’t, as I’m sure you guessed, break the record, which is still held by that paragon of testosterone-powered, small-brained, emotional lability, Menzies Campbell, Liberal Democrat spokesman for defence. The difference in ability between Christie and Alan Wells whom he replaced as British number 1 is statistically significant, but it’s also very small. I don’t know (and neither does anyone else) how fast Harold Abrahams would have run on modern surfaces with Christie’s training regime and diet.

Blacks don’t have “a narrower pelvis” because blacks don’t have A pelvis. I suspect that Colin Powell is wider than George Bush; he looks it on television.

You can look Rushton up on Google, and you may think that he has a case, but I think he’s a nutter. There’s always Stephen Jay Gould if you want the science of all this.

These 373 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:57pm GMT Comments.

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More On The Gay Marriage Thing »

There are two approaches to gay marriage, it seems.

There is ranting hatred.

And there is this (which is rather sweet). Found through Obsidian Wings.

These 25 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:46pm GMT Comments.

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No Ripcord »

It’s inevitable, inevitable

No Ripcord, Radiohead

Now I know why the pro-war crowd don’t think that Doonesbury is funny. We’re all for self-determination, except where we don’t like it, then it’s fine and democratic to over-ride them.

These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:47pm GMT Comments.

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Sunday, 22 February 2004

We Shall Meet In A Place Where There Is No Darkness »

We train young men to drop fire on people. But their commanders won’t allow them to write “fuck” on their airplanes because it’s obscene!

John Milius and Francis Ford Coppola

This is the end.

Not of this blog, but of at least one friendship, because someone objected to the language.

These 20 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:17am GMT Comments.

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Is That A Letter, A Letter For Me? »

Hmmm. Mail.

dear backward (Hah!)

y ar u nasti about the secetary off state? he is not a f***** cn*t, he iz a verry nice mann. Swerring iz note clevr. u are a boundre and a cad.

Preznit bush is a nice amn to, so there,

PH (Mr), Neath

Oh dear. I suppose there are always people who have to spend their free time watching Dutch cable channels and the American Superbowl (that joke is so last week, and I’d been trying not to mention that story) in order to find fresh examples of the depths of depravity.

I am glad that I helped in my small way.

And now, back to slagging off Bush and Blair or whatever it is I do here.

These 77 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:20am GMT Comments.

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A Kind Of Retraction »

Norm Geras rips into me for my link to his post on the Resolution 137 petition. He says,

Signing a petition to try and influence a political process is not quite the same as overriding that process; it’s not even the same as calling for it to be overridden. Must we never sign petitions? Wouldn’t that itself restrict a common and healthy feature of democracy? Obvious points.

He’s right, of course. I get carried away with my attempts to link the most unrelated posts I can find. (I surf about and find stories I could post on, then I go back later, and write the things. If it seems that I can kill two birds with one stone as it were, then I do, even if it’s not fully intellectually justified.)

There is still a ‘but’. It feels wrong to me. (Wow, that was a clincher of an argument, I must use that one again.)

From my ignorance of the requirements of Islamic Shari’a law, I can’t believe that it’s necessarily as black as we’re assuming. I know it is sometimes, and in some places (like Iran). But does it have to be? There are degrees of liberality among Islamic states. They’re not all in the stone age. (Indeed, none of them are.)

From the petition itself:

We believe that this anti-freedom, misogynist and anti-modernist resolution will push back the Iraqi society to the Stone Age. It will deny the most basic women’s rights gained during decades of relentless struggle and set back their legal status by centuries.

I do think that having been liberated from Saddam, the new legislature can throw out whatever laws it pleases. The fact that Saddam tolerated this one seems like condemnation enough. There aren’t that many systems you can base laws on. A logical one for a middle eastern country is the religion of most of the people. (There are lots of people in the West who’d like temporal laws to move closer to their religious counterparts. I think the separation of church and state is a good thing; I’m not sure that it’s necessary for a working government. Anyway, if the new law forbids gay unions, perhaps Peter Cuthbertson will move. Kidding, Peter, only kidding. I’m only trying to show that there a lot of people — assuming those who post comments on Peter’s site represent anyone at all — who think that it’s our laws that are wrong-headed.)

I suspect that Iraq is not going to become a Western-style democracy in this decade. The war turned out Saddam. That is all. Is there anyone who’ll be surprised if he is replaced by a fairly terrible theocracy?

Another ‘but’. If Norm and Hak Mao’s (and mine) suspicions of the implications of Shari’a law are right, it will be a very bad thing. (IMO, not in everyone’s, that’s the problem with post-modernism, apart from the brackets.)

I need to know more.

And Norm, can you be a bit less civilised in future? It makes me look really bad.

These 414 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:51pm GMT Comments.

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Monday, 23 February 2004

Victim Culture »

There is so much bloggable stuff in today’s Torygraph, that I’m going to have to post on it before I see the reactions to the rest of the news around the blogosphere.

Barbara Amiel argues that Mel Gibson’s ‘Passion of Christ’ is an act of faith, not hatred.

A smash hit about His life, and one that is clearly a serious effort to convey the devastating physical brutality that was Christ’s final suffering, has to be more edifying than most gory cinematic experiences. But not, it seems, for the Jews. Or at least some Jews.

But it’s not a film about “His life" — it’s a film about his death. What I regard as the good bits, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”, the healing, the teaching aren’t there. Only the torture and humiliation. The film may well be “more edifying than most gory cinematic experiences” (though as it is entirely in dead languages — Latin and Aramaic, perhaps not), but that’s not hard; Schwartzenegger films aren’t trying to be edifying. Is there any reaction to “devastating physical brutality” other than anger? If the film were recruiting for Amnesty International, I could see the point. I didn’t want to see the cop’s ear being cut off in Reservoir Dogs, why would I want to see someone crucified?

Vatican II acquitted Jews of deicide, though as a Jew myself I never felt any shame in being of a people who played a role in so significant a belief. It made me kin to a great spiritual birth, rather than just to a mob of killers. Mobs will be mobs, whether they are Jews, Philistines or football fans. The best one can say about them was said in a short story on the Crucifixion by Frigyes Karinthy. In his mob, each person feels that it is Jesus who should be pardoned, but when the great lumpen mass speaks, to the shock and surprise of every individual, it comes out as Barabas.

I’m not sure about that “acquitted"; the Vatican never had the authority to judge Jews in the first place; all it could do was correct a prejudice. While I haven’t read the story in question, as described here it freezes my blood. “Why trust the people at all?” it seems to say, “they only say the wrong thing. Give them a strong leader instead.” Someone should send copies to William Hague and Neil Kinnock with the message, “It wasn’t your fault; it was the mob.”

Abraham Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, seemed unhinged by Gibson’s film. For him, the film was “shocking… Jews and a group of sadistic Roman soldiers are the only ones portrayed as evil”. Even more dramatically, the ADL asked: “Will the film trigger pogroms against Jews?” A helpful response supplied in the ADL’s press release concludes: “Our answer is probably not… Our concern is that [the film] could fuel latent anti-Semitism that exists in the hearts of those people who hold Jews responsible for the death of Jesus.” The ADL, like several other Jewish organisations, condemned the film on grounds that it was “contrary to Biblical scholarship and the teachings of Vatican II”.

I’d like to see that press release. The question seems to be the wrong one, pitching the problem far too strongly. “Will the film trigger pogroms against Jews?” No? Well, duh. The next time anyone proposes anything I consider foolish the only question I will allow myself will be “Will this result in the total annihilation of all life on earth by lunchtime tomorrow? No? well carry on then.”

I believe that Mel Gibson can make whatever films he likes with his own money. However, the story he is telling is purported to be true in a way that “gory cinematic experiences” are not, and it seems to be a slanted propagandist piece rather than a historically accurate retelling. Even if the film were likely to “trigger pogroms” I’d argue against banning it, advertising its failings is a different matter. But then, I think it’s had enough publicity already, and I’ve contributed in my small way, so I’ll stop now.

Celebrating Jesus as a victim may be a good thing, but mourning sickness isn’t according to Civitas. (Also reported on by the Guardian, and the BBC, with responses to the latter at Have Your Say.)

I don’t know why the Telegraph wasted all of page 7 with this rubbish, and I only have myself to blame that I read it. Another thinktank, another “this country would be fine if it weren’t for the people who live here” lecture. Save your money, it comes down to this: “All this flowers and teddies and stuff, it’s a bit girlie, isn’t it? We boys don’t like it. Can we go to the pub now?” If there’s any reason for the rise of the “compassion caravan”, I’d put it down to the decline of decent tragedy on stage, cinema, tv, and the opera. Some really good misery is cathartic. The BBC should be broadcasting Puccini and Checkov. That’ll sort them out.

These 576 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:24pm GMT Comments.

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Sex Lives Of The Potato Men »

Perhaps too few of you have heard of Movie Review Query Engine. It’s a great resource for US reviews of films not released here, but whose trailers have intriqued.

And so we present the MRQE guide to Sex Lives of the Potato Men, which consists of, at present, two reviews. (Both bad.) Come on, there have to be more than that.

These 61 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:22pm GMT Comments.

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Tuesday, 24 February 2004

The Usual Suspects »

Rick: Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

The ever-estimable Jackie has some good posts this morning, but she’s wrong about the usual suspects; it is, as she says, too easy. (And she should see Michael Brooke on the death of Spot.)

It’s not her fault — she admits “I’m pretty sure I don’t agree with random drugs testing in schools, which is the subject of Pollard’s piece in the Times,…” — it’s that idiot Pollard again.

It is, given the state of our schools, all too believable that a man with Mr Willis’s seemingly limitless capacity for getting it wrong was a headmaster before becoming an MP.

Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves of Mr Pollard’s qualifications from the bio on his site:

He is currently writing the biography of the British Home Secretary, David Blunkett, which will be published in the spring of 2005…

From 1995-98 he was Head of Research at the Social Market Foundation, and from 1992-95 Research Director at the Fabian Society.

He is the author of numerous pamphlets and books on health and education policy…

I assume (perhaps completely wrongly) that the reason he chose Blunkett for the subject of a biography (other than that I’m beginning to suspect that he’s the leader-in-waiting du jour) is that the two must have consulted together when Blunkett was Education Secretary. If Stephen Pollard had made his remark about the “the state of our schools” in 1997 or 1998, I might say fair enough. If they’re in a mess now, whose fault is that? But Blunkett and Pollard have kept on the move. There’s the Home Office to make a mess of now.

The ideal Pollardian school:

• Headteachers: 0
• Teachers: 0
• Pupils: 0
• Management consultants: 245 (with office space for freelance ‘blue sky thinkers’ who have experience in other fields, say designing abbatoirs in Korea)
• Maitre d’: 1
• Wine waiters: 15 (consulting is hard work, and these fellows need lunch)
• Cordon Bleu chefs: 3
• Assorted pastry chefs, sommeliers, pot-washers etc.

Pollard ends:

Almost unbelievable. They [Liberal Democrats] are not called the usual suspects for nothing.

Ah, but they’re not. But if they were, for the delight and edification of my readers, here is a crash-course in the origins of the phrase.

Captain Renault: Major Strasser has been shot. Round up the usual suspects.

and

Captain Renault: Realizing the importance of the case, my men are rounding up twice the usual number of suspects.

Casablanca. If you don’t know the film, Captain Renault (Claude Rains) knows who shot Major Strasser. It was his friend Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) who did it in front of him. “The usual suspects” are a diversion, and not the guilty parties. I might suggest the same is true of the Lib Dems.

These 319 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:15am GMT Comments.

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Graceful And Attractive »

Fellow bloggers Atrios and The Sacred and Inane are promoting ‘hot’ Democratic candidate Stephanie Herseth. The latter notes that

she is graceful and attractive, in a stately way … as well as being hot.

Yes, she’s a babe but what is that picture of? I know what I think it is, but if I took a Rorsach test, they’d throw away the key.

She needs to get a spin doctor with a dirty mind, and to lose that photo.

These 64 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT Comments.

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Is Now The Time? »

Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds,
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.

The Scholars, Yeats

I meant to start with a different poem, “Is now the time?” by Robert Graves which ends with something like:

And every time he asks,
“Is now the time?”
A thousand nights are wasted.

However, I can’t find my copy of Graves (my useless filing), and my memory is, well, useless, and the library doesn’t have it, and all the bookshops in town have remarkably inadequate poetry sections. So “beauty’s ignorant ear” will have to do.

Consider (also Yeats):

Until the axle break

That keeps the stars in their round,

And hands hurl in the deep

The banners of East and West,

And the girdle of light is unbound,

Your breast shall not lie by the breast

Of your beloved in sleep.

Or (Marvell):

The grave’s a fine and private place;

But none, I think, do there embrace,

Now, I’m all for feminism. I think women have as many rights as men (which is fewer than some of them realise). I believe that there are rights to be free of certain things. (Ie the state/society should see to it that individuals are protected from certain infringements: one should not have to lie awake all night cradling a shotgun for fear of burglars.) However, despite what Peter Cuthbertson or James Lileks may think, being an adult is difficult; other people (even those we love) are ambiguous — being mature is dealing with that.

Confession time: I’ve read Howard Bloom (because ‘The Closing of the American Mind’ had an introduction by Saul Bellow); I haven’t read Naomi Wolf. (I read Greer because I used to crash at weekends at a friend’s flat in central Edinburgh, and going through her bookcase, I found that Greer quoted Nietzsche, and, well, say no more…)

The lecturer/student relationship is hard, being both intimate and not.

I don’t think teachers should approach their students unless there are clear invitations to do so. If you are teaching Torts, the Russian Revolution, non-Euclidean geometry, the ontology of St Paul, are those sexual invites?

And now, as you will have guessed, we come to Naomi Wolf, whom I managed to forget entirely in my my parody.

This is a story which may be retold by a series of Chinese Whispers into nothing, so here is the Torygraph version.

On her invitation the professor agreed to come to supper at her student house and promised to read her poetry.

She invited him, note (but this could be the reactionary instincts of the running dogs of whoever has taken over from Conrad Black).

When her housemates left she said she believed: “Finally! I thought we could discuss our poetry manuscript. He did not look at it.”

Er, she kicked her housemates out? No, there’s more:

Prof Harold Bloom, she said, put his hand on the inside of her thigh after she invited him to her home for a candlelit dinner 20 years ago.

Let’s examine the evidence, Loyd Grossman style. She holds an candlelit dinner; she throws her flatmates out; and he is to read poetry…

Big deal, you say. But we are talking about real poetry, The Sonnets, Marvell, Yeats, and others.

And she thought this would be a discussion on prosody? If she were my student, I’d give her a big fat ‘F’ and send out for the college pearl handled revolver.

As for the feminism thing,

“He came at me. I turned away from him toward the sink and found myself vomiting in shock. He disappeared.”

She said ‘no’ (though not with the grace to use the beautiful instrument called ‘language’) and he took it as “no means no”. What a vile reactionary. Germaine Greer would part him from his privates with a rusty stanley knife in a second! Except, er, that’s what feminism asked for isn’t it?

She continued: “When he reemerged — from the bedroom with his coat — a moment later, I was still frozen, my back against the sink. He said, ‘You are a deeply troubled girl.’ Then he went to the table, took the rest of his sherry, corked the bottle, and left.” In the article she went on to claim that she had been approached by students across the United States who had experienced similar incidents.

Perhaps that mythical beast, a true gentleman, would have left the sherry, or even given the poetry a shot first. But… it seems to me that she invited him to a candlelit dinner, kicked everyone else out, asked him to read the most potently erotic writing there is, and then got offended. Oh, and waited 19 years to complain.

I remember when feminists had balls. Read Shere Hite, Germaine Greer. Feminism-lite is like every other lite, still rots your teeth, and gives fuck all satisfaction.

These 553 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42pm GMT Comments.

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Wednesday, 25 February 2004

The Dog Ate My Homework »

Far too much good stuff on Crooked Timber today to read to find time to write anything worthwhile.

I must try to get links from Jackie D every day. She’s marvellous for traffic.

These 33 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:25pm GMT Comments.

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Thursday, 26 February 2004

If Matt Himself Had Not Been On Our Side »

I still haven’t got round to blogging all of Monday’s Telegraph, let alone reading the op-ed stuff and letters in Tuesday’s (and not reading Mark Steyn).

Linking to the cartoons by the excellent Matt is too tricky to be worthwhile. I’m not sure they archive them; and the links on the site open pop-ups whose URLs you then have to track down.

Today’s is rather wonderful. Scene: suspension bridge in background, next to a sign saying “San Francisco”. Two guys in foreground, one kneeling holding a ring, the other with a smile and his hands clasped over his heart. The caption, “Darling, will you make George Bush the angriest man in the world?”

Some cheeky subeditor has a pullquote next to it, “It pains me to say this, but George Dubya Bush is not universally popular among British Tories.” Boris Johnson.

These 141 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:50am GMT Comments.

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What Does ‘shecky’ Mean? »

I only ask because I really don’t know. It sounds like an anti-Semitic insult, and Michael Bérubé thinks it might be:

Also, Feser shouldn’t call me “Shecky,” as he does a bit later on in his piece. I’m not a Jewish comic. I come from a rich tradition of French-Canadian humorists, like Jean Beliveau, Raffi, and Celine Dion.

I searched Google, and it seems to be a name used by Jews, comedians, or both.

Now, Edward Feser should get one thing straight, the only people allowed to be anti-Semitic are left-wing or French.

He’s trying to steal our clothes. There should be a law against it.

And, having reached a nice rounded and witty conclusion, I’m going to spoil it by waffling on and qualifying what I’ve said.

I find Crooked Timber’s discussion of Feser and academic bias more informative than the original articles. If there is the systematic bias Feser alleges, why isn’t it more apparent in the American public? There are US entrepreneurs, such as Bill Gates and Michael Dell, who didn’t finish their degrees, but the majority of the business elite have postgraduate degrees (usually MBAs). The rot is currently held to have started in the 60s, since when American voters have elected Democratic Party (which Feser considers ‘leftish’) presidents three times (Carter, and Clinton, twice), against six Republicans (Nixon, twice, Reagan, twice, Bush Snr, and GW Bush). If this is indoctrination, it’s a miserable failure.

Feser’s Leftists = Hitler piece defines ‘disingenuous’ for me.

He counted a number of homosexuals as friends and collaborators, and took the view that a man’s personal morals were none of his business;

Fair enough, if you consider having gays as “friends and collaborators” some kind of fault. As Feser says, Bush is nothing like that. Hmmm. I particularly like

9. The Bush administration posted a job for what is called a “gay and lesbian program specialist” at the Department of Agriculture.

That could keep Richard Littlejohn in columns for over a month! These liberals! Not only that but

Concerned Women for America is so concerned

What else would they be?

These 261 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:38pm GMT Comments.

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Lording It »

Sully agrees with me, or I agree with him, or something. He has a long post (which he seems to have started as soon as he got home, and finished at 3am) on The Passion of the Christ.

I said:

But it’s not a film about “His life” — it’s a film about his death. What I regard as the good bits, “Let him who is without sin cast the first stone”, the healing, the teaching aren’t there. Only the torture and humiliation.

Sullivan:

I was of course deeply moved in parts. If you are a person of the Christian faith, it is impossible not to be moved by a rendition of the passion of the Savior that is not a travesty… Portraying [The Gospels] vividly may, we can hope, bring some people to read the Gospels and even to explore further what the redemptive message of Jesus really is.

At the same time, the movie was to me deeply disturbing. In a word, it is pornography. By pornography, I mean the reduction of all human thought and feeling and personhood to mere flesh. The center-piece of the movie is an absolutely disgusting and despicable piece of sadism that has no real basis in any of the Gospels… Of over two hours, about half the movie is simple wordless sadism on a level and with a relentlessness that I have never witnessed in a movie before. And you have to ask yourself: why? The suffering of Christ is bad and gruesome enough without exaggerating it to this insane degree…

The central message of Jesus — of love and compassion and forgiveness — is reduced to sound-bites. Occasionally, such as when the message of the sermon on the mount is juxtaposed with the crucifixion, the effect is almost profound—because there has been an actual connection between who Jesus was and what happened to him. But this is the exception to the rule. Watching the movie, you can see how a truly powerful rendition could have been made—by tripling the flashbacks and context, by providing a biography of Jesus, by showing us why he endured what he endured. Instead, all that context, all that meaning, has been removed for endless sickening gratuitous violence.

He mentions the violence (the thing I am most queasy about in a movie) a lot of times. I’m now less interested in how liberals (like Roger Ebert, whom I thought was Jewish, but as he was an altar boy, I guess not) see the film, than how the Christians who have prebooked tickets and declared in advance that it will deepen their faith will react. These are the people who like to censor rap lyrics and condemn gratuitous violence, and the violence here seems pretty gratuitous. There’s no sex though, so maybe that’s OK.

What I don’t understand about Sullivan is why everything is so black-and-white. Not so long ago, he was right behind George Bush, and viewed anyone who wasn’t as a traitor. Now, he’s gathering up emails from Yoosta Bee Republicans, and crowing about unprincipled and slimy the man is. I don’t like Bush, for most of the reasons gives, plus I think his reaction to terrorism (essentially criminal, in my view) has been to resort of old-style between-nations war-mongering. The wrong tool for the wrong job, and I still think Clinton was doing Clinton about al-Quaeda, and the Bushies abandoned it for not being macho enough.

But of course he has some good qualities — he seems admirably colour-blind, and, until last week, not homophobic at all. Gore and Nader were pretty unsavoury candidates to boot.

I’m with Kevin Drum: the gay marriage amendment to the Constitution seems like bad politics. There is some dissent from this among the comments — particularly Carrie:

Tom DeLay and Republicans have been working overtime, successfully, to stack the House with Republicans with post-census redistricting. Dem senators like Dianne Feinstein have only broken with Republicans once on PBA ban (she’s with them on everything else) and even that went through. Republicans have succeeded in redefining when a fetus is a “human being” (for the purpose of having rights)—that didn’t get any media exposure. And 36 States have passed gay marriage bans to date, including the most liberal California.

I have to say that I love these moments when something which was trivial last month looks like turning round the election.

These 320 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:22pm GMT Comments.

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Friday, 27 February 2004

Adam’s Rib »

Norman Geras in his post on abuse in the blogosphere:

And we can consider the modalities of death by irony? In wishing to dispose of people — ironically — may the various dark points of the twentieth century be used interchangeably and do they all work equally well?

Adam Yoshida in the comments to his post on the Passion.

As for the message [of “The Passion etc"/Adam Yoshida’s blog], you can love your enemy and see the need to kill him at the same time.

Discuss.

I’m sorry, but that was the funniest thing I’ve read this week.

Norm also turns out, not entirely to my surprise, to have taught my best friend DL Political Concepts in his [DL’s] third year of Politics and Modern History at Manchester. DL, being a cloth-eared idiot, always assumed that Norm was American. He makes up for this deficiency by knowing a lot about Political Concepts.

These 88 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:14am GMT Comments.

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Saturday, 28 February 2004

Shoulder To Shoulder »

In Politics and the English Language, George Orwell condemns “stand shoulder to shoulder with” as a “Dying Metaphor.”

But on the day that I learned that Kevin Drum is to end Friday catblogging, I saw a beautiful thing.

Gordon has been friends with Felix for a few weeks now. I’ve even found Felix warming himself on my bed. I haven’t known what kind of friendship cats have. They play together — fighting and chasing, but I didn’t know if it went any further than that. (They do fall out, when one or the other gets too excited, and face off lashing their tails like windscreen wipers in a storm.) Felix has started to attempt to mount Gordon as well, and is angrily rebuffed.

I haven’t seen them around for a while, but Gordon has enemies, mostly large ginger uncastrated male cats who live further up the street, and occasionally steal food from the kitchen. Gordon one of these in the kitchen one evening and I had to pull them apart. (I kept finding fur in odd places for a month.) When I let the ginger cat flee out the back, Gordon followed him to the bottom of the garden and paced in front of him like a Home Guard captain inspecting a particularly badly-turned out — and exiguous — platoon, growling what I took to be hard-hitting home truths.

Ginger turned up today, and sat on the wall while Gordon and Felix frolicked. He jumped off into next door’s garden and Gordon took his place on the wall, and watched him. Felix sprang up next to Gordon, and Gordon looked a little wary, as if he didn’t need to be fighting on two fronts right now. But Felix adopted Gordon’s posture and hissed (a fairly kittenish, and I’m sure altogether unfrightening, hiss) at Ginger, who proceed to very defiantly, and very, very slowly shit in the grass. When he finished he walked off still very slowly like a cat walking into strong wind who is not at all intimidated by the two cats standing shoulder to shoulder behind him, but just has somewhere better to be.

Felix, for being an ally, can sleep on my bed whenever it gets too cold outside for him.

These 379 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:19pm GMT Comments.

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Hooray For Hacks »

On Friday, film review day, the Torygraph runs a feature called “Must-have movies: The classics that every film-lover will want to own.” Yesterday’s (and I meant to blog this then, but I must have forgotten to post it) was All the President’s Men (1976), of which Tom Cox writes:

It’s a uniquely energising film: the kind that makes you want to get up and do something moral and righteous, even if you’ve never had a moral, righteous thought in your life.

Too right. I saw it when it came out. It happened to have an ‘AA’ certificate. I happened to be 14. It may be at the root of my “if forced to choose between journalists and politicians, take the hacks over the lying bastards” attitude.

I can’t help seeing a bit of timing in recommending “a story the world already knows the ending to” with a “complete lack of car chases and murder” and no “hint of a firearm, or a threat on someone’s life, yet, even on the umpteenth viewing, you’re sure Redford and Hoffman are for it.”

When a Torygraph hack writes something like this, you can be confident that he is either looking for another job — or about to start.

These 173 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:55pm GMT Comments.

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Sunday, 29 February 2004

An Ideal Politician »

Gary Trudeau has endorsed a Presidential candidate already.

His reasoning:

“So what do we look for in a candidate? Someone who won’t lie or bully or recklessly lead his country into undending war?

“Someone who’s humble? Compassionate? Responsible? Fair? Curious? Unsanctimonious? Given to thoughtful, nuanced, moderate positions?”

“Nope! Bad for business!”

“FOUR MORE YEARS!”

So if you want to support the cartoonists, you know how to vote in November.

“Oh my gosh,” as they say, apparently.

These 33 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:04pm GMT Comments.

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I’ll Bite »

Jim Henley asks why liberal bloggers don’t mention or link to Clinton Administration bad faith in the matter of Iraq’s weapons programs in Mother Jones.

So now I have. Full reaction to follow. So far, it’s “OK, everyone was wrong on this”, but when the weapons inspectors went back in, we ought to have known more.

Long article, lots to digest. I’m off out.

These 64 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:08pm GMT Comments.

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