Monday, 9 May 2005
Silicon Chip Inside Her Head Is Switched To 'Overload' »
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn,
A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many,
I had not thought death had undone so many.
Eliot, The Wasteland
Where’s Nick Barlow when you need him? He ought to have something to say about last night’s Doctor Who. I’m sure Nick went to the stage version of “His Dark Materials” and so he’d have recognised the actress who played Lyra.
But that’s a trivial point next to the brilliance of the story. Perhaps it’s me, or each episode is better than the last. I saw references to “The Time Machine,” “The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe,” and “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” (and a visual homage to “2001"). I’m in awe and this close to writing Russell T Davies a slobbering fan letter. The writing keeps in mind the age range of the audience. There was corporate satire (which could have been at the expense of the BBC or of Sky); there was criticism of journalists taking too much for granted; a good joke about travelling; and the “Charlie And The Chocolate Factory” reference seemed to be aimed at the under-10s while the hand-holding may be a reassurance for very small children.
I thought the use of late-night Channel 4 actors (Simon Pegg and Tamsin Greig) leant a sort of knowingness which may have passed over kids’ heads without harming the story at all. Simon Pegg seemed delighted to be playing a Bond-style villain. (And there were some Bond references in there too.)
Christine Adams as Cathica (with a ‘C’) and Anna Maxwell Martin as Suki both enjoyed roles which moved between sharply-observed meeja types and strong action figures. Best of all were the reference to the dark, not quite explained “threats” in the news, and the portrayal of an anarchist as a goody.
We need more of this.
These 281 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:10am GMT Permanent link.
Self-indulgence »
The BBC reports this morning that Blair [is] fighting backbench attacks.
One critic, Frank Dobson, said Mr Blair was a “liability” but Work and Pensions Secretary David Blunkett branded the backbenchers “self indulgent”.
Well, I’ll be a little self-indulgent, and quote myself from an earlier post on David Blunkett.
Perhaps Mr Blunkett could prove useful as a sort of weather vane for policy. Should Sheffield declare itself Nuclear Free? David Blunkett: Yes. Correct answer: No. Should we start a Vichy-style identification scheme? David Blunkett: Yes. Correct answer: No. Should we lock people up without trial? David Blunkett: Yes. Correct answer: No. Does the country need an internet university, when we have the OU, and lots of the old kind? David Blunkett: Yes. Correct answer: No. Should one declare oneself to be the father of a child when the mother is also sleeping with her husband, a Guardian journalist, and at least one other person? David Blunkett: Yes. Correct answer: No.
Add to which, Blunkett is so stupid that when his lover marries someone else and takes his name (rare in professional women who have name-recognition) he fails to take the hint. On election night I raised the “e-university” in the pub, and a friend’s boss was on the steering committee. They said it wouldn’t work. Try actually listening, David.
Still, if Tony sacks Blunkett, he’s got a lot of late nights listening to Metallica being played down the phone, ahead of him.
Shorter Tony Blair, “Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah … I’m listening … Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah … hold on I’ve haven’t finished, Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah … I’m listening … Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah … Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah … I’m listening …”
These 161 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:33am GMT Permanent link.
David Mamet Is An Idiot »
In Saturday’s Guardian David Mamet asked, “Why do people insist that Death of a Salesman is universal?” Not only is the play Jewish, to suggest otherwise is an act of bad faith.
Richard Wright’s Native Son is, in addition to being a masterpiece, a Great American Novel. Its hero, Bigger Thomas, a young African American, is driven to savagery by the racism of his times. The novel is essential reading for any student of 20th-century American literature. It is not remotely about an “everyman”, but about a black man. If it’s not about a black man, it compounds rather than addresses the problem of racism. For who would suggest that the tale is “universal"? Only a white critic — empowered or emboldened by what mechanism but a deluded understanding of prerogatives supposedly conferred by his skin pigmentation.
Hmm.
But some thirty-five years later, the Chinese reaction to my Beijing production of Salesman would confirm what had become more and more obvious over the decades in the play’s hundreds of productions throughout the world: Willy was representative everywhere, in every kind of system, of ourselves in this time. The Chinese might disapprove of his lies and his self-deluding exaggerations as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what he wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count. When he roared out, “I am not a dime a dozen! I am Willy Loman, and you are Biff Loman!” it came as a nearly revolutionary declaration after what was now thirty-four years of levelling.
Athur Miller, Timebends: A Life, p184. That’s why.
These 41 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:55pm GMT Permanent link.
He's Not The Only One »
After his abrasive interview with George Galloway, Jeremy Paxman turned to New Labour Constitutional Affairs Minister in the previous government, David Lammy:
“I think he’s a carpet bagger,” said David Lammy, Labor’s Constitutional Affairs Minister, on the same program. Lammy, who is black, said that Galloway “came down from Scotland to whip up racial tensions. He has inherited now the most divided and polarized constituency.”
The incendiary Guido Fawkes can think of others who “came down from Scotland.”
Charles Moore in the Torygraph points out that Blair won office on the lowest number of votes since 1922, and it is the smallest share (since women got the vote) that has enabled the formation of a government with an overall majority. Its been three-quarters of a century since the governing party got less than 10 million votes. Its an even worse result when one considers that the population in 1922 was so much smaller. See also this FT article.
The Tories Gored Labour in England, winning the popular vote by 60,000 more votes than Labour. (The Tories picked up 8,086,306 votes, Labour trailed with just 8,028,512.) So it’s fair to say that England is under foreign occupation by a Scottish socialist party unsupported by the population, with only 1 in 5 of the English backing the regime.
Is there really an English movement against Scottish carpetbaggers?
These 44 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:58pm GMT Permanent link.
The World Continues To Turn »
Good to see Rhodri Morgan back to form this weekend. He’s looking a lot better than he was before the election. It’s also good to see a politician so reliably appearing in public. If he’s accompanied by the security services, I must say they disguise themselves as Trustafarians and Chianti-drinkers very well. Someone at least doesn’t buy all this bullshit about the TWAT.
I’ve only met old Rhodri once. He’s still nice enough to say “Hello” when he passes though I doubt he has any recollection of who I am. I used to organise an race until it became clear to everyone that they’d rather lend money to Peter Mandelson than trust me with administration. Rhodri Morgan is usually good enough to say a few words at the prize-giving. (It’s pretty much the same words every year, but you can’t have everything.) I had to make a lot of pleasant small-talk with him once when the last runner got lost and came in three-quarters of an hour late.
The Welsh Office doesn’t share its leader’s sanguine attitude toward terrorism. When I dropped off the programme for him that year, I chose the day the Queen was coming to Cardiff and walked a gauntlet of what seemed like 100 armed policemen, which was rather novel. And when I tried to pass the programme over the desk in an envelope (it seemed more professional that way) it was refused until it went through the x-ray machine. “It’s a programme, look,” I said, pulling it out, but the receptionists looked like they might all dive under tables if I got any closer.
So I put it through the x-ray machine.
It got stuck.
These 281 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:30pm GMT Permanent link.
I'll Never Be Conservative Party Leader Now »
The Torygraph’s somewhat elastic loyalty stretches even further when it comes to internecine fighting. Melissa Kite asks rhetorically, “What are you going to do, Michael — ban people with the name David from standing?”
Well, that’s another ambition dashed. Snot fair.
These 41 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:30pm GMT Permanent link.
Reception Committee »
Found through Ria Bacon.
These 5 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:51pm GMT Permanent link.
The Universality Of Willy Loman »
Earlier today, I quoted Arthur Miller on Death of a Salesman.
The Chinese might disapprove of his lies and his self-deluding exaggerations as well as his immorality with women, but they certainly saw themselves in him. And it was not simply as a type but because of what he wanted. Which was to excel, to win out over anonymity and meaninglessness, to love and be loved, and above all, perhaps, to count.
Matthew Parris knows that Willy is universal and not exclusively “Jewish.”
Mr Blair will find humility when the hippopotamus finds grace. Why, not 30 seconds into his victory speech at Sedgefield, he was flattering himself with a new misleading statistic that had just popped into his mind. Not only had he won his seat (he told the adoring crowd) but he had also increased his majority! In truth he received nearly 2,000 fewer votes this time; the slightly widened gap between himself and his nearest challenger arose because votes against him were spread across more candidates. But there he goes again. The fellow’s incurable.
Self-deluding exaggerations, indeed. (Via Mike Power.)
These 28 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:28pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 10 May 2005
Dalek, All Too Dalek »
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
Auden
(This is a post I started last week, and couldn’t adequately finish which is why the opening may seem a little odd.)
It’s not often I agree with the editorial opinion of the Sunday Torygraph but the TV & Radio listings magazine can’t be faulted. Oh hold on, it’s talking about Saturday, 7 May, so I can’t agree — yet.
In this particularly fine episode, the Doctor and Rose travel into the future, to find earth in the thrall of a broadcaster from space. As always in TV-land, the future looks like a budget version of Blade Runner. Except confusingly, the women are wearing the same Topshop wrap-around dresses which are so ubiquitous today. Maybe vintage is in? This really couldn’t be any better: funny, scary. and it even has a message. Well worth the licence fee.
How distant the days of Charles Moore’s editorship of the daily seem now! Who (arf, arf!) now recalls when the Torygraph sputtered a pale MSM version of Biased BBC?
I could be writing to Viz: “Why oh why can’t the BBC quadruple the licence fee? Why, I’d saw my right arm off with dental floss to bring back that Greg Dyke. Cheer up … etc”
Well, I concur with the last sentence of the preview on the basis of the previous episode. I didn’t think I’d see acting as good, as resonant, as that on teatime TV. I’m not sure the view of Americans will go down well with self-declared North Atlanticists, but I still consider it the patriotic duty of every British blogger to puff Dr Who until the US networks cave in.
The dialogue was splendid:
What are you going to do? Sucker me to death?
You would make a good dalek.
It’s not the one pointing a gun at me.
I tried writing about “Dalek” after I watched it, cutting and pasting Darth Vader’s “Give in to hate” speech, but that would merely cheapen it.
“Dalek” aspired to something higher — touching Brecht’s “Only the rich win on one side of a war; the poor on both sides always lose.” (I can think of several bloggers who think that wars can be won; that tells me all I want to know about them.)
There were structural weaknesses, and I thought the end was a bit of a mess. But then there are the constraints of story-telling. I was never much convinced by the Birnham Wood stuff in MacBeth or Portia passing as a man.
If we want a “moral” culture, this series is a good start. Rose does not seem to believe in any eschatological morality, but she is the principled steady one. When a Dalek dies; that’s it; likewise everyone human. She still gets in the way of harm. She’s open to exploitation: how many children saw through the Dalek’s affectation of victimhood? (Affectation? but it was tortured!) Still, better that than emotional deadness.
I liked “Doctor Who” well enough when very small, less so later on; it’s rarely been scientifically literate enough for me. The new series goes a long way to making up for that. It still depends on telepathy for instance; and the animation of plastics was just silly. However, I loved the first episode, and it’s grown on me. Patrick Crozier differs:
But having said that, Doctor Who is beginning to bother me. I thought the opening episode (and I said so at the time) was a triumph. But with each successive episode I have become less and less enthusiastic. I am becoming ever more convinced that I was right first time: this is going to be a disaster.
I hadn’t quite been able to put my finger on why (and still haven’t) but I feel that Joe Newbery’s “How to ruin Doctor Who”, an essay I recently came across, comes very close to it. Newbery’s basic point is that the Doctor is an Enlightenment hero. His dominant characteristic is his rationality. Not for nothing did Richard E Grant describe Doctor Who as “Sherlock Holmes in space”.
Just as an aside isn’t it interesting how almost all the great fictional detectives: Holmes, Poirot, Marple, Fletcher, Morse are single? I don’t think it’s coincidence.
Now, the leap that the author makes is to list all the ways eg. make him more human, give him a love life, make it action-orientated, have him dressed in normal clothes, to make the Doctor less rational and therefore ruin the show.
I don’t understand a word of this. Dr Who is going to be a triumph. Holmes was a junkie, and possibly gay; Poirot and Marple were Christie-esque ciphers. It’s late, but the only Fletcher I can think of is Ronnie Barker in HMP Slade, and I don’t recall him as a hero of the enlightenment. Morse? Morse was a morose bully whose books were never worth reading. I don’t see why rationality is somehow in contradiction to action. Socrates was a hoplite. Shakespeare (probably, given our exiguous knowledge) was a soldier too. Philip Marlowe (now, he had a namesake who was rational) was murdered in a tavern — possibly because he was a spy, possibly because he was gay. Either course seems like action enough. Plato was a wrestler. Einstein had a love life. So did Marie Curie. Neither could be classed as witless. Elton John rarely wears normal clothes; in what way does he represent rationality?
Whatever rationality is, it seems a lot like a program processing data to me. Part of that data is being human. That means love, dressing normally (or like a Las Vegas Queen, it’s your choice). If Russell T Davies has written a Doctor who lives by “As long as I know how to love, I know I’ll stay alive,” that’s good enough for me.
(That was written last week. The rest is today.)
Nick Barlow assures me that he will write something about The Long Game, while I wait, I’m surprised at the hostility and (this will come back at me, I’m sure) lack of imagination in the fan criticism.
Take the review on Waffle.
Well, it had Simon Pegg (of Shaun of the Dead) fame, and it had zombies. Apart from that, this was a very average Doctor Who episode. There was tension, there was humor, there were bodily functions (yes, it does rather look like Russell T. Davies is obsessed with them. Check “vomiting” off the list) and there was a coded political message about media manipulation and deception. It was, on the whole, fun, and it looked like the lead characters were having fun. But compared to the previous ep it wasn’t special.
Now you see, I don’t go along with the it had a “coded political message” — I think it had three. There’s the adult one which everyone seems to have picked up, there was a pre-teen “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” one about resisting temptation (don’t spend mummy and daddy’s credit cards on nose-piercing children!) and one for the tinies about holding hands when you go anywhere you don’t know.
On Behind the Sofa Again, Q complains that the house in episode 1 is also Adam’s parents’ house. So it is: there’s a photo here (it’s the one with the Labour sign; which might be significant as we shall see).
On the same blog, Patrick Spacek says:
Now, was this episode perfect? No. There was far too much expository dialogue in the first half (though I’m undecided if the way that the script made characters deliver it was clever or kind of lazy or both), and the actual plot felt kind of rushed, especially near the end.
Again I feel that this is more than harsh. The expository dialogue did a lot of other things. It covered up the lack of sets pretty well, and we learned quite a bit about Rose: Billie Piper’s acting with eyeball-flickers when Adam said that he’d never be able to come between her and the Doctor was marvellous. We saw clearly that she was a lot more emotionally mature than he was, and a little hurt.
On the same blog (which is lots of people writing about the same thing — like all blogs really), I’m more inclined to agree with tachyon tv, especially on:
Suki: or Michelle Fowler in space. … I loved the way she turned out to be a ruthless undercover agent and not a bit of fluff after all.
as well as his take on Adam’s future role in the series. And me too in the surprise behind Suki; this series isn’t pedestrian. But the criticism that
the Doctor isn’t very proactive (this is becoming a worrying trend in this series)
I disagree with again. I think he’s something better; he enables others to develop. He perhaps could have fixed everything, but instead he stood back and let Cathica work it out, like a good teacher. (Again, this is a children’s show. It’s no good if the Doctor just dictates the answers. It’s about science, the fun is doing it for yourself.) And both the women turned out stronger than we suspected at first.
Sean Alexander thought:
Perhaps more successful is the Orwellian device of having Floor 500 as a kind of future Room 101, only this time as something to be aspired to rather than feared.
No, it’s not, it’s Narnia, where it’s always winter but never Christmas, as I said before.
And then there’s politics. The usually reliable Scott Martens says:
Doctor Who was always something of a working class science fiction program. The Doctor didn’t circulate among the rich and powerful - he always moved in working class circles, travelling in that now extinct but once ubiquitous landmark of the British urban landscape, the police box. But this new Doctor seems more explicitly designed to reach a middle class audience.
Back on the group blog, e puts my own thoughts into better words:
Doctor Who 2005 is a new Who in many ways. Gone is the Doctor’s received pronunciation and upper class background. Christopher Eccleston’s working class accent and everyday bloke background brings a new feel to the program. Companion Rose Tyler, who lives on a council estate, manages to befriend plumbers, psychic maids and other workers through the ages. Even the loss of Gallifrey, which was little more than Cambridge-in-Space, is a relief, class-wise.
The sole upper class hero of the series to date is Harriet Jones, MP of Flydale North. She’s certainly a member of Labour (and we’re told she voted against the Iraq war) and given her dialog throughout Aliens of London and World War III, possibly a socialist. Apparently as prime minister, she will usher in Britain’s “golden age”.
Another series hero is the Long Game’s Suki, an “anarchist” who attempts to bring down the Jagrafess and losing her life in the attempt. It’s odd to think of an anarchist, the philosophical enemy of social contract and societal responsibility, as a hero but here she is, bravely fighting to restore truth in a world where corrupt media controls the people.
Well, I understand the anarchist as hero, but that’s a different matter. Since I’ve mentioned Harriet Jones, and the group blog’s name is “Behind the Sofa Again” wasn’t it great how Rose and Harriet hid behind the curtains, but the Slitheen could smell them? And a Labour MP who voted against the Iraq War ushering in Britain’s “golden age"? Well who else could do it?
Although the Bad Wolf meme takes front and center stage in the newest series of Doctor Who, another more subtle meme permeates the series: classist anti-capitalism. Never have so many villains had such a commonality of interests.
Well what motivations do villains have apart from power and wealth? I don’t think Ian Fleming was fighting the class war with Goldfinger. In the old series it was usually unclear why all these aliens wanted to conquer Earth. Now at least they have reasons.
I’m sure I had something else to say about the Dalek episode, but I’ve forgotten it now. It’s like my brain’s been wiped.
These 1215 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:21am GMT Permanent link.
You'll Have Had Your Tea? »
The title is a much-mocked Scottishism (and Radio 4 comedy), meaning roughly, “I’ve no intention of offering you anything by way of refreshment.” Sometimes there are things you want, and you know are there, but there’s no way to ask for them.
Phil writes a lovely sort-of-obituary for the career of Martin Kettle on the Sharpener. (Tagline: “Trying to make a point” which is more than Kettle is, arf, arf!)
You may not like Blair, or his policies, or his way of doing things, and you may think he ought to go sooner than he wants to — and in some of that I would agree with you. In our system, though, the people get the last word. It is only five days since the voters decided that Blair and the Labour party offered them the government they preferred.
This depends on what you think the voters were asked. Which was the New York restaurant where the waiters were famously rude, and if you asked for tea they gave you coffee, which didn’t matter because both tasted like hot chocolate? The election campaign as I remember it, and I’m trying not to, consisted of Tory posters reminding us of Blair’s sickly grin, and Labour posters threatening defectors with waking up with Howard. The choice on offer, in a word, sucked. We were asked to choose and we chose — Blair is narrowly better than Howard. Crazily, we wanted not a “not so very very very bad” option, but a “quite good actually” option. And we weren’t offered it. Howard and frothing immigrant-panic or Blair and frothing mullah-panic, what a choice.
Many things happened on May 5. One, as Peter Hain rather patronisingly put it yesterday, was that some Labour voters lent their support to the Lib Dems for an election. But another, and rather more common, phenomenon was that Labour voters turned straight to the Tories. For every Cambridge or Hornsey, where Guardian-readers made a risk-free switch from Labour to Lib Dem, there was a St Albans or a Hemel Hempstead, where the same play let in the Tories, and a Gravesham, an Ilford North or a Peterborough, where voters swung straight across to the Tories without any appreciable move to the Lib Dems.
My emphasis. Not elected, no, but “let in.” We are elected; you are let in; he is George Galloway. (Does Mr Kettle really not know that voters don’t swing, but a small percentage changed their voters; most people voted the way they had in every previous election.) Now for Mr Kettle’s outstanding piece of journalism:
I don’t know for sure why there was a small swing to Labour in Blair’s own seat of Sedgefield, in spite of the media’s efforts on behalf of the Reg Keys bandwagon.
I don’t know why either, because there wasn’t. 2005 Election results: Sedgefield: Tony Blair Labour 24,42 58.9 -6.0; in 2001: he won 64.9% of the vote. That, Martin, is a swing away. You should really start thinking for yourself and not taking down Blair’s drivel. The man’s an inveterate liar.
Update: Matthew Turner has pointed out that the BBC site I linked to above says there was indeed a swing to Labour from the Conservatives (of 0.2%), and indeed it does. The Cons went down too (Labour -6%; Con -6.5%) Tony Blair did poll fewer votes, and he attracted a smaller percentage of voters (he could legitimately, IMO, have claimed a gain if fewer people had bothered to vote, but his share went up). Reg Keys is the obvious beneficiary (media campaign or not), and he is credited with a 10.3% gain, despite never standing before. In short, however, I was wrong.
Mr Blair will find humility when the hippopotamus finds grace. Why, not 30 seconds into his victory speech at Sedgefield, he was flattering himself with a new misleading statistic that had just popped into his mind. Not only had he won his seat (he told the adoring crowd) but he had also increased his majority! In truth he received nearly 2,000 fewer votes this time; the slightly widened gap between himself and his nearest challenger arose because votes against him were spread across more candidates. But there he goes again. The fellow’s incurable.
Matthew Parris, but he can count, and as an ex-pol himself, knows to check their claims.
And I don’t know why there was a 20% swing against Labour in Clare Short’s Birmingham Ladywood seat. But I venture to suggest - not least because Labour did quite well in some other Birimingham seats - that the two examples do not quite add up to an irresistible case for assuming that the voters reject Blair in favour of Short’s continual calls, repeated yesterday, for him to go. Physician, heal thyself.
Again, Martin, there wasn’t. It was 17%. Higher than the national average, I grant you, but not 20%. Do you check any facts at all? Birmingham Ladywood is an inner-city seat with a large immigrant population. The LDs fielded an Asian candidate, Ayoub Khan. Ms Short lost a lot of sympathy for faffing about over the Iraq invasion.
You may say, rightly, that Labour took some bad hits last Thursday. But the seats that fell were a motley crew, and the patterns of what fell or to whom were neither national nor uniform. Labour actually held its most marginal seat from 2001, Dorset South (where it increased its majority over the Tories), and repeated the trick against Plaid Cymru in its eighth safest, Ynys Mon. Meanwhile, Labour lost its fifth safest seat from 2001, Blaenau Gwent, to an independent. For all the talk of the Iraq-inspired move of Labour support to the Lib Dems and the left, 31 of Labour’s 46 losses were to the Tories.
Labour lost Blaenau to an ex-Labour member; Peter Law won the votes of Labour members who weren’t prepared to be pushed around, but let’s gloss over that, Martin. It doesn’t fit your thesis. As for Labour losing seats to the Tories if any voters went Lib-Dem, that was exactly what the Labour campaign predicted. No one really expected Labour votes switching to the Liberal Democrats to win many seats. It sure takes a lot of gall to affect surprise on Friday at what you predicted on Wednesday.
These 467 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:21pm GMT Permanent link.
New To The Blogroll »
David Duff whom I really should have added ages ago, whom I rarely agree with (but wouldn’t life be boring if we all did?) and who has an enviable capacity for wind ups where I trail behind him like something tied to a dog’s tail.
Phil of Actually Existing, who proves that he’s old enough to remember Essential Logic (the band were more famous for the eponymous Laura’s playing sax for the Stranglers). He’s just started his blog and already he’s got an invite to the Sharpener. I don’t know.
Waffle which I was inexcusably rude about, having got them mixed up with others. Do Doctor Who blogging, so attractive or otherwise depending on taste.
This leaden pall, proud member of the pseudo-left, who draws an embarrassing comparison with the comments between the far-right and …
… Little Red Soccer Balls, oh, they’re on already.
The splendidly named Ragged Trousers who is too new to say much about.
Lastly, Consider Phlebas, who has the temerity to question my logic. Quite right lad, you get your link for that.
These 179 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 11 May 2005
A Risk Free Switch »
As I’ve hung my head and said, I was wrong about Martin Kettle. Blair did enjoy a swing of +0.002. Still, I forgot to mention his snide side:
For every Cambridge or Hornsey, where Guardian-readers made a risk-free switch from Labour to Lib Dem, there was a St Albans or a Hemel Hempstead, where the same play let in the Tories, and a Gravesham, an Ilford North or a Peterborough, where voters swung straight across to the Tories without any appreciable move to the Lib Dems.
My emphasis. Well, if you don’t like “Guardian readers” Martin, there’s the great free market out there, and we all know that the Guardian is exceptionally stingy, so go heave your talent to the Times, the Mail, the Sun. No takers? Awwww poor little Martin!
I was reminded of Martin’s charm by Oor Jamie, who quotes David Aaronovitch’s graceful leaving of the Observer:
I will, however, miss some of you.
As Jamie is too kind to spell out, he’s only condescending to those who (unwittingly no doubt, passing the silver over for Hugh McIlvanney) paid for all those pies he shovelled down his maw.
And let’s say one thing for Liberalism. I know I have my faults, and I know this is pretty near the top of the list among those who know me. Last Friday morning, having treated George Galloway to the blowtorch of his scorn, Jeremy Paxman whirled to his studio guests and said “He’s right, isn’t he?” If a discussion near me gets too one sided, I’ll take my shirt off and play for the other team (or pull it back on, as needs). Quite a few irritating university educated liberals I know do the same thing. (I had an English teacher who went to see A Clockwork Orange and who put the case for killing kittens to our fourteen-year old class the following day. I haven’t looked back. As Jamie wonders, if David Aaronovitch really hasn’t met anyone willing to put the case for war, he’s not reading his own paper, and can’t be getting out much.
And I know I’ve said this before, but Jamie brought it up.
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.
It doesn’t matter if you’re a supporter of the war or not, why do you believe what the government says? As David Duff points out, “there can only be one basis for a nation’s foreign policy and that is self-interest” and I suspect that DD, like myself, believes that self-interest governs all our relationships. If Peter Mandelson told me he exhaled carbon dioxide I’d demand laboratory confirmation. Doonesbury has been satirising credulous journalists for long enough now. Jamie takes Big Dave down like Gavin Henson tackling Willie Carson.
Since when he has believed nothing other than what he has been told by the government. Still, it must have seemed like a safe thing to say when the dominant insider consensus was that they would be there because, well, that was the dominant insider consensus.
Well, why the hell do I read the Torygraph? I think it’s because it pays far better and its columnists aren’t recruited as token “girlies” expected to snicker and giggle about the pop charts and footballer’s wives as Indy and Graun writers do, and because they don’t patronise their readers. Mark Steyn talks crap, but crap that he believes, and, for the most part, makes internal sense. If anyone asks me how the Soviet Union pedalled such shite for so long, I’ll cite you, David Aaronovitch, as “exhibit A.”
These 497 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13am GMT Permanent link.
Things I Meant To Say »
When I was young, and life was an open book, no that’s wrong … Whatever, back then Doctor Who had certain principles.
My dad objected to whichever period of “Doctor Who” had K9 because the robot dog was just a gun by proxy, and now I suppose he was right. I wouldn’t swear to it, but the proper Doctor never hit or shot anyone, in my recollection.
There were several imitations of genius in Dalek. Rose and Adam fled up a flight of stairs (which we all know completely bugger Daleks’ plans for conquest). But, CGI permitting, and the Dalek — true to form — volcalising what came next, the “tin robot” flew. Surprise Number 1! And then the Doctor scrambled though Adam’s bucket of “alien weapons” where he found one working piece. And he runs up the stairs, breathless, heaving and everything, and he throws the instrument away! Whatever else, the Doctor is British, and we don’t do guns.
I’ve got a long long Star Trek post to follow, but IMO, Spock was the most emotional of the Enterprise crew. He was funny in IMO the best episode ever (he suffered meeting his parents, and saved the life of his clearly hated father); Kirk somehow managed to get into a fight in a corridor and lose his shirt; and it all worked out in the end.
Though the episode which made me what I am is The Devil in the Dark, the one about the miners who find this creature which kills them. For some reason which reason will never understand, out of a ship of 430, the captain and the first officer explore the tunnels separately. Spock, the good guy, tells Kirk not to kill the creature. When they get deep enough in the tunnels it is of course Kirk who finds it, and Spock, so incapable of emotion who radios, “Kill it, Captain, quickly.” By all the ham in Denmark, by then we know that Kirk will do no such thing. And Kirk who reasons with the creature which leads to the withdrawal of the Empire Federation.
Then there is the emotional Spock of Amok Time. I can’t begin to explain how toe-curling I found Data’s Sherlock Holmes episodes. Holmes was about the scientific method, and if Data didn’t know it, there was no place for him in Star Fleet. Sure, there are lots of Americans who think the world is flat. However, as their parents are clearly not too bright (and I can’t forget that scene in Deliverance) that’s all right.
Like Adam, I think the universe is teeming with life (with reservations). We’re not fit to join in. Hyperspace bypass coming through.
These 449 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:34am GMT Permanent link.
This Is Where Your Licence Fee Goes »
In Doctor Who next month: “Landing in modern-day Cardiff, the Doctor encounters someone he believed long dead…” So not only do we have Cardiff pretending to be Hampstead, the South Bank, Regent Street, and an fictional tube station in episode 1; The New Theatre in Cardiff being the New Theatre in Victorian Cardiff in episode 3; and the museum and the council chamber of Cardiff University pretending to be Number 10 Downing St; now they’re using modern-day Cardiff as modern-day Cardiff. Will this flagrant waste of licence payers’ money as these so-called “programme-makers” fly off to exotic locations never cease?
And I thought Rose was from London, strange how her Dad gets killed in … you guessed.
Google Map. Photo of Holmesdale Street from St Fagan’s St. Taff Terrace, where Adam’s parents house is, is the last one off the north side of Corporation Road (in yellow).
It’s also practically impossible to get killed in a car accident round there. There are two speed humps between where I took the picture and the main road. On the other hand, the road narrows at the first of them (more traffic calming) and I saw a white van nearly do for a cyclist as I was walking away. (A la Mick Hartley.)
These 212 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 12 May 2005
Cool For Tigers »
Last things first: is it worth 75 quid? (89 through Apple, that would be 167.569 USD or 130.131 Euros.) I mean a currency converter is cool and everything, but Google does that, don’t they? And if they don’t, somewhere else will. (I’ve never tried, I use my all-purpose “km to miles” conversion which is close enough for both the Euro and the dollar.) And you can buy cheap calendars almost everywhere. And the five-day weather forecast is on the BBC site. And I learned French at school (though not Chinese). And I own two dictionaries and three thesauruses. (Though as Dave Heasman points out far too often, I still mix up homonyms.) And there was an analog clock thing somewhere among the UNIX stuff. And I had a perfectly decent RSS reader.
I’m not sure how Mail has been improved, but the spam filter is a little better. Safari RSS doesn’t seem as efficient as Newsfire (and if it was the only reason for the upgrade, it would be on the expensive side). OTOH, it is the business.
If I wanted to fiddle with iTunes, I only needed to click on the dock. Now I can click on the dashboard icon in the dock and pause music that way.
I haven’t figured out Automator yet; I’ll stick to scripting probably — until The Missing Manual comes out. I think I already downloaded QuickTime 7.
But there’s other stuff. I think there are new fonts. I haven’t dug elsewhere yet.
It looks gorgeous. And it’s wicked cool. Needless to say Longhorn is still “under development.”
The full size picture (163KB JPG). Why are screenshots now huge pngs?
One OS to rule them all.
These 284 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:03am GMT Permanent link.
I'm Not Convinced »
Robert Jubb of Consider Phlebas says Glenda Jackson is On The Warpath. Sadly, he doesn’t supply a link to her splendid tirade on the myth of the great Blairite coalition.
Tony Blair and his coterie have long been dismissing as “scaremongering” warnings about the impact of his style of leadership on the grassroots of the party. “They may complain,” New Labour has argued, “but they have nowhere else to go.” Well they had somewhere else to go last Thursday, and they went there in their millions. …
Of course, it may well be that Tony Blair and those around him will be able to reach out to the disaffected. David Blunkett’s savage attack on “the self indulgent” voters who expressed disquiet over trivial issues like the death of 100,000 innocent Iraqi civilians may well herald the dawn of a new progressive centre-left consensus — but I have my doubts.
Similarly, the appointment of a minister like Andrew Adonis, whose policy of tuition fees was like a poll tax with a mortar board in the university towns of Britain, may signal a commitment to a more inclusive process of policy development. I’m not convinced.
If you think that’s sarcastic, stand back for Larry David’s support for John Bolton.
Let’s face it, the people who are screaming the loudest at Bolton have never been a boss and have no idea what it’s like to deal with nitwits as dumb as themselves all day long. Why, even this morning my moronic assistant handed me a cup of coffee with way too much milk in it. I was incensed.
His assistant probably calls him “The Milk Nazi.”
These 52 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:16pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 13 May 2005
A Facility For Quotation Covers The Absence Of Original Thought. »
Dorothy L. Sayers, Lord Peter Wimsey in Gaudy Night
Quotation found on Amazon page on Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom, which I should have bought at the same time as Tiger.
No blogging from me today, I’ve been too busy hacking together version 0.5 of the comments facility.
Instead, as I’ve been rewriting the code, I was thinking of adding a “best posts” section to the sidebar. As there don’t seem to be any, however, here’s a “worst puns in titles” list instead.
- The Lonely Passion Of Geoff Hoon
- Hoon Let The Dogs Out
- So Here’s To You, Maggie Gyllenhaal
- Bugger Bloggers
- The Only Dalek In The Village
- Name That Neptune
- Eternal Sunshine Of The Jaundiced Cat
- May You Live In Decadent Times
- How Green Was My Valet
- With The Cross Of Jesus Burning On The Lawn
- Dalek, All Too Dalek
- Stats All Folks
These 138 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:53pm GMT Permanent link.
By God It Nearly Works! »
Output:
Angus Mcneil Mcsporran | Friday, 13 May, 2005 @ 05:33 PM | Permanent link
Och, yes, this is an excellent site.
window.open()
Pure brilliance but.
[12 words.]
And this is what went in:
Angus McNeil McSporran
backword@gmail.com
http://sitemeter.cocksucker.com/
Och, yes, this is an excellent site.
<? ho ho php code ?>
<script language="javascript">window.open()</script>
Pure brilliance but.
Get your <a class="heh” href="http://www.dave.com” onclick="bingo!">Paris Hilton</a> videos here. Get your <a class="heh” href="http://www.cock.com” onclick="bingo!">Paris Hilton</a> videos here.
It strips attributes from the “a” tag that aren’t href but I forgot to include those in the example. And it didn’t like the site given as a homepage, so it used the email address instead. We’re getting there.
These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:48pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 14 May 2005
Better Than Being Called A 'Minger' »
Kids these days, thigh ain got no respec. And the oldies, they’re just as bad. There’s a splendid piece by Jacques Peretti in the Guardian Guide this morning.
Trevor McDonald is worried. He’s dedicated a Tonight Special to the phenomenon of happy slapping. The Daily Telegraph is sufficiently perturbed by this pandemic of kids carrying out surreal stunts on strangers to issue handy hints on how to spot a happy slapper who’s about to cuff you one.
There’s nothing like a moral panic (or panicking moralists) to bring out the best satire.
Sid Chaney, an 85-year-old from Basildon, has never had an Asbo or been prosecuted but he has been banned from his local Barclays bank after defrauding it (and other banks) of over £100,000. He spent about £20,000 of the money on food at his local Sainsbury’s and gave it away to pensioners in the high street. The idea came to him one morning when he picked up all the junk mail on his doormat and, instead of throwing it in the bin, decided to apply for every credit card application form addressed to him. Sid began by opening a bank account in the name of his pet canary, Walter. Walter was immediately offered so much credit, Sid opened three further accounts in the name of his dog, Patrick. Patrick applied for and was given three credit cards, one with a limit of £1,500. Even after Walter the canary died, Walter was still being showered with new credit cards.
A veritable Robin Hoodie, no? Sid should be given a medal. The banks deserve to be defrauded, if they’re that stupid. Back in the 80s when Nigel Lawson talked about “M0” and “M3” and all that, credit spending wasn’t as out of control as it is now. And as for Barclays, the bastards supported apartheid, so their branches deserve to be burned down. There is however, a glitch in Mr Peretti’s logic.
The simplicity and logic of Sid’s scam would have been worthy of a Super Size Me documentary, only Sid is probably unsure how to record Match Of The Day on the video, let alone work a camera.
… At 88, Alexander Muat has the distinction of being the oldest person with an Asbo. Alexander has blocked driveways with a wheelie bin, attacked people with a chair-leg and shone a spotlight into his neighbour’s bedroom.
His crowning glory, however, has been to create a complicated system of surveillance cameras, recording the street outside his house and anyone suspicious, ie children playing football there. He has also built an electrified fence round his garden, with enough voltage to stun an intruder, such as a postman or visiting relative.
Alexander, though a little Victor Meldrew in demeanour, is no different from those slick tossers with video intercom who live in gated warehouse apartment blocks. His notoriety can be explained by the fact that he’s basically an eccentric old person, and, implicit in that, does not have the same rights as said tosser with a fortress flat and a Mercedes.
If an 88-year-old can “create a complicated system of surveillance cameras” why can’t an 85-year-old operate a simple camera?
As Patrick Barkham observes in How a top can turn a teen into a hoodlum in the news pages, “youth offending is falling.” As for Bluewater’s ban on hooded tops, John Prescott backs it.
Mr Prescott said his personal experience made him agree with the move.
“I went to a motorway cafe about a year ago and some kid said something to me,” he said.
“I said ‘what did you say?’ and he came back with 10 people with hoods, you know, these fellas with hoods on.
“He came at me in a very intimidating manner but, of course, I now have security control. They appeared and they vanished.
I do love “They appeared and they vanished.” A true Prescottism. And is Mr Prescott not understanding a teenager somewhat ironic, given that his own unintelligibleness is every Commons sketchwriter’s reliable fallback? While the Deputy Prime Minister needs “security control” (huh?) Rhodri Morgan the First Minister of Wales can walk the streets of Cardiff with no protection. Riverside has something of an EU-scale hoodie-wearer mountain.
I understand the thinking behind ASBOs and “zero tolerance” but it doesn’t seem to be very practical. Back to Mr Barkham in the Guardian.
According to Richard Garside, the director of the Crime and Society Foundation thinktank, the government’s drive for respect has simply amplified perceptions of antisocial youths. West Midlands police has complained the force is being inundated with calls about innocuous antisocial behaviour.
“First it was squeegie merchants, then it was antisocial behaviour and now it’s respect,” says Mr Garside. “By creating this category of loutishness or kids hanging around the government can acknowledge anxieties without admitting there may be a problem with crime.” It is unhelpful, he adds, to place what young people wear on a continuum of antisocial behaviour that includes vandalism, noise pollution and crack dens.
And like Mr Peretti, I’m ambivalent on anti-social behaviour.
These people are at the opposite extreme to happy slappers. They break the law by acting as a kind of ultimate law-abiding citizen circa 1952. They share a disgust and bewilderment at the fact that no one really cares that parking three inches further from the kerb than you’re supposed to should be a hangable offence, and in that I must admit I concur more each day.
Hoodie-wearers are nothing but trouble. SC who goes to the same circuits class as me turns up in a hoodie (with the hood down, but as our moralising friends will point out, it could still be pulled up). She’s also persuaded me to “do the double” of two classes back-to-back on Fridays, ensuring I’m largely dead on Saturdays, which is anti-social enough. Several of the regulars went out for a meal last night where she boasted that she got a kid suspended from school. Her boyfriend is a biology teacher, and a pupil who’s “had about eight warnings” asked him if she was his wife. “No,” he said, “but we live together.” Cometh back the pupil, “I saw her reading the news this morning. I’d give her one.” The deputy headmaster overheard and suspended him. As she said, “It could be worse, he could have called me a minger.”
I wonder if the school wrote to the boy’s parents to tell them their son was suspended for inappropriate sexist remarks. Worthy of an ASBO at least.
These 443 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:55pm GMT Permanent link.
You Know How Sad I Am »
At home she feels like a tourist
At home she feels like a tourist
She fills her head with culture
She gives herself an ulcer
The Gang of Four, At Home He's a Tourist
Well, I thought Father’s Day was very good. I should have recognised the church from the trailer: it’s just up the road from where the Tardis landed. I went to a funeral service there a few years ago. (I’m not sure about the accident; I think that was in the Bay, though I’m not absolutely certain. I loved the SWP posters on Thatcher’s third Reich term. They keep the politics up well.)
I thought the emotional parts worked better than the horror parts, but that’s in line with my long-standing prejudices, so I don’t pretend to an objective judge. The Guardian compared this episode to Stephen King, so maybe I should start reading him.
I was being boring last night about ‘Doctor Who’ and having a space to be boring is one of the reasons for having a blog, so I’ll say again how much I like this series. I like its playfulness, the way we meet Mickey as a child, as we also meet the man who is father to the girl Rose becomes we see how the young Mickey is father to the man. (That was more than a little contrived.) I think this episode pulled off the easier-said-than-done trick of having characters think one thing and say another and letting us see both. Jackie, Rose’s mother is especially well done. When someone says Rose as a baby is pretty, she says, “She’s a right little madam.” When Rose tells her father how well her mother speaks of him, he says “She’d never say that.” She’s become a person as the series has developed. Not a person I particularly like, she’s too tough and brassy for that, but a real, recognisable person.
I remember Thatcher’s Britain, and it was like that. Housebrick mobile phones, drowning Del Boys, “Er indoors”.
The Doctor’s relationship with Rose continues to grow. She denies they’re a couple. But that’s what being a couple is exactly like. Contrary to Tolstoy, everyone else’s course of love runs smooth, but your own is hesitancy and doubt.
This is how storytelling should be. We get the objective correlative that explains how the relationships work. There’s an adventure element, but it’s really just about people. Really, life, love, being ordinary is an adventure. I’m sure I’ve said it before, but The Time Machine has the same structure as Heart of Darkness (unnamed narrator recites what a named narrator ("The time traveller”, Marlowe) tells about his adventures). Wells corresponded with Henry James. Anyone who thinks science-fiction isn’t “proper literature” knows nothing about either.
It’s made near where I live (a less-than-ten-minute-walk to the church above) which adds something. (When I took the photos a father walking with his son gave me a look of recognition. I thought he looked like what Bertie Wooster would call a “tough egg” so I gave him as wide a berth as I could. After I left in pursuit of fresh angles, I realised that they were doing the same thing as me.) Americans, if your local channels don’t buy this, they’re idiots. This is class.
These 516 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:18pm GMT Permanent link.
I Admit It, I Like George Galloway »
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
Gorgeous George is, of course, a Scot, and I am, as many of his detractors allege he is, a racist: I think we Scots are the greatest people in the history of the world. I have a weak spot for Gordon Brown and John Smith where I have none for Tony Blair. (Hold on, that’s not racism, that’s perspicacity.) Daniel Davies, who I normally agree with, says “He’s in many ways an utterly reprehensible character; friend of dictators, self-aggrandising, supporter of a lifestyle seemingly out of proportion to his income, frequenter of the libel courts, stirrer of racial tensions, etc etc. But, he does put on a hell of a show, and that’s why he won in Bethnal Green.”
I like Gorgeous George for another reason: he’s funny.
GEORGE GALLOWAY will appear before a US Senate committee to defend himself against claims that Saddam Hussein gave him barrels of oilA spokesman yesterday revealed the Respect MP’s response to the claims was: ‘Book the flights, let’s go - let’s give them both barrels.’
He quickly added: ‘That’s guns, not oil.’
Though he occasionally affected his swashbuckling man-of-destiny schtick, Mr Galloway was not the demagogic left-wing Bond villain I’d been led to expect. It would be fair to say that we had a laugh, not least when I asked him about his new comrades the Socialist Workers Party, surely the kind of Trotskyist headbangers to whom his book referred to as ‘fanatics’ and ‘fantasists’ (for all his radicalism, Mr Galloway claimed to never have been a pal of what he terms the ‘ultra-left’). To compound the incongruity, Respect were also in talks with the Socialist Party, an all-but-irrelevant rump that represented the last traces of my old friends from Militant. I wondered if it felt strange, metaphorically shaking hands with people he had once apparently despised. ‘Well, no,’ he said, as a smile crept across his face. ‘As you probably know, I can shake hands with anybody.’
John Harris, So Now Who Do We Vote For? pp140-1. Jamie quotes H L Mencken. I know this is unfair and superficial. And I know Ms King has said that she served her constituents well, and that won’t be true of her successor, and she may well be proved right. But I also like Nietzsche’s demand “Make yourselves hard!” Gorgeous George has done that. He’s a fighter. (I was going to say earlier about Rhodri Morgan going walkabout sans protection and John Prescott with his “security” that thugs like Vladmir Putin are nothing more than hoodied bullies grown up. If a politician can’t stare down a few teenagers without armed backup, what hope has he against the mature (or “rancid") version?)
Everything I’ve heard about Ms King has alluded to her sex, her race, or her religion. Her namesake must be whirling in his grave.
These 276 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 15 May 2005
Management Consultants »
Most days, Dilbert is merely brilliant. Sometimes, Scott Adams crosses into genius.
These 12 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:01pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 16 May 2005
I Bet They Love Him In Blaenau Gwent »
Guardian: Secret papers reveal Falconer role in breaking up NUM.
Labour’s current lord chancellor, Charles Falconer, provided vital legal advice at the height of the miners’ strike 20 years ago to enable the Thatcher government and the National Coal Board to assist the breakup of the National Union of Mineworkers, according to previously secret documents released to the Guardian.
He was, I suppose, a barrister, and doing his job, following orders, just like a bailiff, a suicide bomber, Josef Goebbels, people like that.
Minutes of a private conference between the NCB and Mr Falconer and another barrister show that the barristers stressed it was “fundamental that the Lynk union was not seen to be an [NCB] creation. They considered that the ultimate risk was an action by the national union [NUM] against the board … it was even more imperative that, if there was any doubt as to whether the Nottingham union was still part of the national union, the board should not be seen to be negotiating with it”.
I’m unclear on this. Barristers are engaged on matters of law. They appear to have been giving advice on strategy. Law is confined to matters of fact: it’s “you shouldn’t steal” not “you shouldn’t be seen to steal.” If Mr Falconer was advising not on what the law was, but how to avoid it, is he not an accomplice? The Bar Council might be interested.
I bet they love him in Blaenau Gwent. Happily for them, they rejected Mr Falconer’s party.
These 115 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Another Honest Politician »
There are 2 kinds of buly. There are fat bulies who can run fast and fat bulies who can’t run for tooffe. There is nothing to be done about fat bulies who can run xcept to be polite to them e.g. good morning grabber you bilge rat pax pax pax, i didn’t mean it really i didn’t ow ow paxpaxpax.
On the whole this is hardly satisfactory.
How To Be Topp, Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle
Ordinary folk nicer than politicians, shock. Sam Leith in the Torygraph today:
For my money, the story of the week has been that of the resignation of Bremen’s economics minister, Peter Gloystein, after playing a “joke” from the podium at the opening of Bremen Wine Week. Mr Gloystein emptied a magnum of champagne over the head of a homeless man, saying: “Here’s something for you to drink as well.”
What made the scene so piercing? It was that, as he stood, with his hands at his sides and champagne cascading over his hair and down his front, Udo Oelschlager didn’t shout or throw a punch: he burst into tears. “Who are you?” he asked in hurt bewilderment. “Why are you doing this?” You can’t fake that.
Gloystein could not have created a more resonant image of wealth and complacency sneering at poverty. But it was the tears that surely did for him.
In trying to salvage the situation, Gloystein spoke in the same gestural vocabulary as the original offence. Here, he said, offering first his business card, then money from his pocket, then his £150 Montblanc pen. These declined, he offered him a night in a luxury hotel, followed by a two-week holiday. How much that missed the point; how much it compounded the offence.
“I don’t need your money,” said Oelschlager. “I’m not going to be bribed. You offended me and wanted to make me look like an idiot.” Never underestimate the moral power of a gentle, suffering thing. Oelschlager is pressing charges, and Gloystein’s career has gone down the poop-chute. Good.
The Scotsman reports it as Fizzy joke falls flat and ends a career in politics. (The picture caption begins, “German humour of a sort …” Cruel, but at least it doesn’t mention the war.)
“Everyone knows the guy locally,” said Hartmut Ebener, an eyewitness. “He’s homeless, harmless and quite sweet. He didn’t deserve what happened to him.”
Mr Ebener, along with other horrified spectators, was stunned when Mr Gloystein upended the magnum bottle and proceeded to pour it all over the head of Mr Ottmann.
The politician made things worse by laughing and joking even as booing and hissing rose from the spectators.
“Who are you, why are you doing this?” yelled Mr Ottmann as the wine soaked him through. Bodyguards for the politician bundled him away.
As well as being homeless, penniless, jobless and damp, Mr Ottmann suffers from a chronic long-term illness that makes it difficult for him to walk.
If Herr Ottman had looked like he might have punched Herr Gloystein’s teeth down his smug throat, would he have suffered the politician’s little joke?
The head of the government in Bremen, Henning Scherf of the SPD, said there was “no way” his deputy could have stayed, especially after photographs of the incident were published in the German press.
“These pictures are too much of a burden for the entire political class of western Germany to bear,” he added. “Such a shameful picture burns itself into the minds of people who see it.
“It makes people think, rather dangerously, that ‘This is politics, this is what we are all about’.”
Can’t have the people seeing the truth now, can we? As Mark Steel said in the Independent (found through Turbulent Cleric):
It feel like a wicked stepfather saying, “Alright, I abuse you three days a week, and you’ve made your opposition to that clear and I recognise it. But if you run away, the only place you can go is to your wicked uncle and he abuses you four times a week. So you might think you can afford a silly protest, but look where it ends up.”
Elsewhere, Chris Dillow quotes Arnold Kling:
Anyone with humility seems to be selected against in the world of politics.
This is part of the reason why I’m against all-women shortlists. Politicians are generally out-and-out sods, and fewer women than men fall into that category.
These 123 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 17 May 2005
Johnsons And Johnsons »
Never let it be said that I don’t see patterns when they emerge. Last week, Harry Hutton entered into correspondence with Sir Boris Johnsons of unruly hair infamy. (Harry actually only corresponded with Boris’s representative on earth, the fragrant Melissa). This week, he’s writing to Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs celebrity.
Is there plot afoot? Is Mr Hutton taking on the world of Johnsons, one by one?
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:22pm GMT Permanent link.
A Little Rebellion Goes A Long Way »
Tony Blair listens! The Labour party is finally working to get the disaffected left back in the fold. ’Respect’ key to Blair third term.
George Galloway, I salute you, your courage …
(BTW is George famous for anything else at all? Everything I read about mentions “Sir, I salute you …” and nothing else. He must have led an exemplary life.)
These 61 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:31pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 18 May 2005
David Blunkett In »
David Blunkett, who made a controversial return to the front bench just six months after retiring over allegations that he misused his office, showed why he is so indispensable to the government. Speaking at an early morning press conference the new minister for Work and Pensions announced that he was already on top of his brief and had hit the ground running.
One journalist asked if he was “also back with a bang.”
“Don’t be cheeky lad,” Mr Blunkett retorted, “I have security control.”
The minister continued, after the screaming stopped, “the UK needs everyone who can work to be in work in order to fund future pensions. Work is the key to pensions.”
Smiling, he added that that this not all his department will be doing. “I want to go down in history, to be remembered. And I want to create jobs. I’m setting up a new department, a large department. People are always asking, ‘Is the Pope catholic?’ and I thought, ‘Come on, this is the twenty-first century, we should know one way or another.’ So along with my able colleagues Ruth Kelly, Charles Clarke, and Geoff Hoon, I’m heading a superministry for religious investigations. It’ll take a while, and we’re looking at offices in Canary Wharf, because we want to be where the action is. But we’re the government, no matter what it takes, we’ll get there.
“And it will be money well spent,” he finished.
These 238 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:47pm GMT Permanent link.
The English Are Crazy »
I never got the English. Some people say I never got ‘English’ but I’m fluid enough. Take these English guys in the Senate. One is sort of red and hard to understand, talks with marbles in his mouth, but he’d say “Mawbles.” Heh. Said to the other one, “Yoo, slur, are a bad and a counder.” It’s like a foreign language, really. Called him a “white boy,” too. Funny thing is the other one is orange, and even harder to understand. Talks like that guy in Manchuria with the Sack Her club, who’s not keen on an American being his boss. Look sonny, we’re you’re boss country, get used to it.
Funny rules they have too. Is the President that David Blaine fellow? The one who entertained his people by living in a box for a year? Or is it the queen? They elected a woman, so having a fag as POTUS (or would it be POTUK?) shouldn’t really surprise. I wouldn’t go that far myself. The deputy though. He’s a guy I like. Master of rubric. They laugh when he talks in the Senate-thing. I could almost take lessons. We should parsley.
No wonder they’re backward. Don’t understand business. The red one, or possibly the orange one, keeps saying that I shook hands with Saddam. So? And I sold him weapons. Again so? That’s business, guys. Better the money in my pocket that the other guy’s.
Hmm. Diary free for invasions around 2015. Should we, convert them to Christianity and that? No oil, nothing there but service industries, sack her clubs (that seems terribly undemocratic, though), and pop stars with cancer. Maybe France, after all, then. The women! Oh la la! I speak the lingo like a naturist.
From the diary of Donald Rumsfeld
These 294 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:13pm GMT Permanent link.
Listen, This Is Your Guardian Speaking »
French electorate should be dissolved with immediate effect writes Jon Henley in tomorrow’s Graun. Shorter Guardian: Hop off, you frogs.
These 20 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Where's Michael Crichton When You Need Him? »
Mesozoic Era wee beastie found in amber.
Unlike true spiders, which are predators, harvestmen have broader tastes. They eat vegetable matter, dead insects and reportedly even enjoy dining on the odd bird dropping.
Now, if chummy had nibbled on a Triceratops, say…
[Rant about how Murphy’s Law is a joke, and global warming is real, judiciously left unwritten.]
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 19 May 2005
Sign O' The Times »
Now he’s doing horse
It’s June
I’ve never understood that song. My dictionary defines ‘horse’ as “a common animal” which is hardly satisfactory.
If you want a sign, you could sign here or sign here. Or better yet, both.
These 33 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:42pm GMT Permanent link.
One Hundred And Eighty! »
Never say I’m curmudgeonly. Here’s Norman Geras on Tony Blair’s post election little do:
The Beeb reports that Tony Blair was given ‘a rousing welcome’ at a lunchtime meeting of the Parliamentary Labour Party today. There you are — rousing. Sources close to normblog report that, according to steam radio, he got a 20-second-long ovation. Count it out.
20 seconds and counting.
Arriving tonight at Friends Meeting House he received a three-minute standing ovation from the full house.
Counting it out, I make three minutes to be 180 seconds.
Now as a good patriot, I don’t trust this Arabic notation, bloody Muslims getting everywhere! I bet you hated algebra at school, well you know who to blame. So Tony got XX seconds, and Gorgeous George got XXCC (that’s 20 and 180 to you terror-supporters). Right and proper as these eye-tie numerals are, I can’t seem to work out which is the greater. (I mean, how in the name of god is MM larger than MCMDXXXXIX?) George cavorts with Arabs, and what did they ever do for us?
These 121 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 20 May 2005
A Little Respect »
I don’t know how he does it, but, once again, Scott Adams dissects our managerialist culture’s take on responsibility.
These 19 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:26am GMT Permanent link.
Horsing Around »
Rodney: “Why do they call him Trigger? Is it because he carries a gun?”
Del: “No it’s because he looks like a horse!”
Since Dave Heasman has chosen to — yet again — correct my bottomless ignorance, by pointing out that ‘horse’ is US slang for “heroin,” I should confess that I also shamelessly lied when I said that my dictionary defines ‘horse’ as “a common animal", of course it doesn’t. (It even defines “sausage,” that’s what I call thorough.) It actually says, “A solid-hoofed perissodactyl ungulate mammal …” which may not be any more satisfactory, but is certainly more thorough. The last definition is “Heroin.” slang (orig. US). M20. It even cites [James, I assume] Baldiwn:
His first taste of marijuana, his first snort of horse.
I do like:
4 A person as resembling a horse in some way. Now chiefly as a familiar form of address in old horse. E16.
Sixteenth century humour, there’s nothing like it. Thank god. “Are you with me?” “No we’re with the Woolwich” … etc.
These 117 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:41pm GMT Permanent link.
What's In A Name? »
In olden days a glimpse of stocking was looked on as something shocking but Heaven knows …
Cole Porter
I haven’t been paying enough attention to the BBC’s wonderful ASBO watch.
A long-running family feud landed in the courts when an elderly sibling was wounded by flying rhubarb.
A 51-year-old woman, threw the much-maligned crumble filling at her big brother, 72, when he laughed at her. One of the sticks hit him in the eye.
After hearing that the incident was part of a long-running feud, Northallerton magistrates handed the woman an Asbo aimed at stemming her “erratic” behaviour.
The rhubarb attack itself was punished with a 40 hour community service order.
What we need is a Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin. (I should write to Charles Clarke and suggest it. It has just the right note of piety for Ruth Kelly and the appeal of social engineering for Tony Blair. Whatever, it’s how I’ll refer to the Home Office from now.) Teach them kids respect. This “anything goes” culture has gone too far. Make all teenagers wear uniforms. And get their hair cut.
These 89 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Revenge »
Once more into the referrer file: www.answers.com/ how to deal with sith situation where the patient is manipulative in mental health in uk.
Naturally, I don’t know the answer, but the sith situation seems financially very healthy. Like Ogged, I very much doubt that the dialogue will be healthy all. As the man said, “You can write this stuff, George, but you can’t say it.”
These 66 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:34pm GMT Permanent link.
Slip-sliding Away »
New feature: lame duck watch.
Blair treated for a slipped disc. And I love this:
Mr Blair’s wife Cherie denied Mr Blair had a slipped disc when asked about his health at a law awards meeting.
But Downing Street explained Mrs Blair had been told her husband had a “prolapsed disc” and did not realise it was the same as a slipped disc.
For a QC, she’s not terribly bright, is she?
No 10 says the back pain will not affect his plan to serve a full term in office.
I certainly hope not. This is the man who is proud that Labour’s share of the total possible electorate was 22%. … Labour got 55% of the seats but 36% of the votes cast. In the UK General Election, May 1979, when we lost, we got 37.73%.
Historic third-term? Unmitigated disaster, more like.
These 77 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:58pm GMT Permanent link.
New Sidebar Image »
Pinched from Sir Boris Johnsons’ site. Bien je jamais as the great man would, and indeed does, say. Updated only a little.
These 23 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:47pm GMT Permanent link.
I Was Only Joking »
This is weird. Only two hours ago, I wrote What’s In A Name? And, fuck me, Ruth Kelly goes and sets up The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin. Satire hasn’t got a prayer.
These 38 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:45pm GMT Permanent link.
Old Testament Brutality »
John B posts a Mad Mel update. John links to the old bat, I wouldn’t.
The BBC continues to dig itself yet deeper into the pit of ignorance and prejudice into which it fell over the description on From Our Own Correspondent of Palestinian on Palestinian violence as ‘Old Testament-style brutality’ (see earlier posts below).
“Fell over” is particularly ugly, even by Mel’s high standards of pretentious diction ("apologia”, “calumny"). Even in multicultural Britain, the Radio 4 audience is largely white, middle-aged, and middle-class. It’s a reasonable assumption that most of them will have encountered the Old Testament at school. “Koran-style brutality” when few people have actually read the book, and know of it only second-hand, would be much weaker writing. Ms Phillips quotes the BBC reply to her readers’ complaints.
It is our understanding that the religious tradition of which the Old Testament is a pillar is common to the three main monotheistic faiths.
To which Ms Phillips rankles:
This reply beggars belief. To suggest that the Old Testament is the religious authority for Islam and Christianity just as it is for Judaism is simply staggering. The authoritative religious texts for these two religions are the Koran and New Testament respectively. The fact that they are also Abrahamic faiths, in that they are variants upon the core narrative of Judaism, does not alter the fact that the Old Testament is the defining religious text of Judaism alone, and that ‘Old Testament-style brutality’ is a jibe against Jews alone, used grotesquely in this case to describe Arab violence.
Nope. I don’t see it either. The Old Testament is a part of both Christianity and Islam. The nuttier kinds of Christians set great stock on Genesis, for instance.
And when we gave Moses the Book and the Illumination in order to your guidance:
And remember when Moses said to his people, ‘O my people! verily ye have sinned to your own hurt, by your taking the calf to to worship it: Be turned to your creator, and slay the guilty among you; this will be best for you with the creator:’ Then turned He unto you, for He is the one who turneth, the Merciful:
And when ye said, ‘O Moses! we will not believe thee until we see God plainly;’ the thunderbolt fell upon you while ye were looking on:
Sura 2 50-2. The Koran is not a self-contained religious text. And some of the violence in it is from the Old Testament.
Ms Phillips finishes:
Taking these official responses together with the original remark, the BBC’s attitude might be characterised thus: when Arabs attack each other, such violence is described as a characteristic unique to Jewish religious tradition, but when this is exposed as a preposterous and slanderous lie, the Jews are promptly stripped of the uniqueness of their entire religious tradition.
But the Old Testament isn’t unique to the Jews; that’s the price of being influential. Also, of course, many actors in the book aren’t Jewish — they’re the various persecuting nations the Jews encountered.
Here’s the offending passage:
Earlier this year, Palestinians elsewhere in the occupied territories meted out justice to a convicted Arab collaborator.
In front of a large crowd, Muhammad Mansour was beaten, shot at close range in the side of the head and then the mother of one of the men he betrayed was then called forward to stab his lifeless corpse and pluck out his eyes.
It was a display of Old Testament-style brutality and I wondered if it might one day be applied to the villagers of Dahaniya.
I’m not as familiar with the Good Book as I might be, but there’s no way to read a reference to “an eye for an eye” (whatever the phrase may mean in the original Hebrew) or “a life for a life” into that.
These 232 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 21 May 2005
10 Things I've Never Done »
The unlived life is not worth living
New! The game that everyone is playing. Well, Chris is, sort of, Norm is as keen on lists as ever, and Harry and friends join in.
I don’t full get this one. I don’t think lack of experience is anything to be proud of. As Peter sensibly says in Harry’s comments, “Surely the point of these lists is to list surprising things you’ve never done? What’s interesting about telling people you’ve never been to Turkmenistan?” Quite right. Harry’s Place does throw up some odd things never to have done. Never eating cheese is an accomplishment; never drinking coffee quite a feat. Never having smoked dope less rare, but still noteworthy.
So here’s a list of things I’ve never done, which shouldn’t surprise anybody.
- Been to Turkmenistan
- Swum the channel
- Liked a product so much that I bought the company
- Forged Italian Renaissance art
- Bred pandas in captivity
- Murdered my father and had sex with my mother without recognising either
- Been stalked by Kim Basinger
- Been reminded of my uncanny resemblance to General Augusto Pinochet
- Been asked to adjudicate on a bet between Steven Hawking and Kip Thorne
- Killed an albatross
I did write a review of Clare Grogan’s band when they first toured. I think I wrote about what I’d had to drink and how poxy the audience were though. But I’ve never met Clare Crogan or interviewed her; clearly I should have. (And she was in EastEnders? Get away! And playing a character called “Ros Thorne” bien je jamais!) I really can’t see the attraction of never having been somewhere. Didn’t these people read Green Eggs and Ham as kids?
Here’s a sort of list of things I haven’t done. I’m disappointed that I made it to ten. Sadly, I could go higher.
- Been arrested. The closest I’ve come was when a policewoman spotted me pissing against a wall somewhere like Portsmouth, going through customs leaving Morocco, when the customs officer discovered an (unused, I’m not daft) hash pipe on me, and offered to sell me drugs when a further search found nothing, and hitching to or from Paris. Paris isn’t worth seeing, and Texas laws are stupid.
- Worn a dinner jacket to any kind of function. I have worn evening rig, as a tape in the vaults of S4C (Es-pedwarr-eck if you want to impress the locals) will testify. But that was for the purposes of playing a Mason in some drama.
- Filed my tax return on time. This isn’t something I’m remotely proud of; it’s just incompetence and procrastination.
- Been able to skate (roller or ice). Nothing to be proud of here, either; I just can’t.
- Been to a professional rugby match. And I live practically in the shadow of the Millennium stadium. (If I finish this before the footy starts, it’s pissing down and thundery here.) Never been to cricket or American Football either. Basketball, baseball, ice hockey, and proper football, though.
- Had my tonsils or appendix removed; or anything else.
- Seen The Sound of Music. Or The Exorcist.
- Voted Monster Raving Loony. I always take elections seriously, though I know they never return the compliment. One day, I’ll be old and irresponsible enough to just say, “Sod it.” Roll on, that happy day.
- Been a member of any political party beside Labour. The Lib Dem forms are around somewhere, though.
- Read any Stephen King. I always thought that using the supernatural is a abject plot cop out, but he’s popular so maybe there’s more to him than that. Mind you, so is John Grisham, and I’ve never read him either.
- Owned a leather jacket. I really don’t wear leather, or do dead animals, even if it may be cool.
- Run a marathon under 2:50, which is a very modest aim, and one I
amwas capable of.
Updated a little to cover ideas I had forgotten.
These 569 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:20pm GMT Permanent link.
That Mandate »
“I eventually had to go down to the cellar to find them.”
“That’s the Display Department.”
“With a torch.”
“The lights had probably gone.”
“So had the stairs.”
“But you found the plans, didn’t you?”
“Oh yes, they were ‘on display’ in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the leopard.’”
Douglas Adams
A bit late, but here’s the full text of the Labour leaflet which came through my door just before 7 am on polling day. Now I know that Labour published a manifesto, and made it available on the interweb. I downloaded it, and read what I could stomach. But I don’t know (in the flesh-and-blood sense) a single other person who bothered. Maybe, if we were all responsible citizens, we’d read manifestoes in the weeks before a General Election (though where should we draw the line? The Greens? UKIP? The BNP?). But that’s the politics of how people should be, not how people are.
So this may be what some of the voters in Cardiff South and Penarth actually put their crosses for.
Good Morning!
It’s May 5th — polling day. It’s the day to vote for Alun Michael [1] and Labour and keep the Tories out of government for another 5 years. It’s the day to vote for a strong economy [2], record employment [3], massive investment in public services [4] and a strong voice at the heart of government [5].
Notes: [1] Tony Blair is never mentioned (see below). [2] This was Gordon Brown. [3] This was Gordon Brown. [4] This was Gordon Brown. [5] I’m as fond of Luciano Pavarotti as the next opera-lover, but I don’t recollect his being elected. Martin Bell in An Accidental MP mentions that he always found Dr Ian Paisley to have been polite and helpful, and the Reverend was elected. I still don’t want him ‘at the heart of government.’ Perhaps I’m being obtuse. But what is ‘the heart of government’? Is it a job, like Prime Minister? Or is the cabinet? Could it be debating chamber? I have no idea. Nor am I sure that a strong voice is necessarily a good thing. (I’d actually rather we all compromised a bit, and tried to rub along together.)
But if you value it you have to vote for it![6]
But [2] to [5] could apply to other parties, and I’m sure their supporters believe that they do. So the next bit doesn’t follow …
Vote Labour today …
[Picture of Michael Howard sleeping. Under his pillow is paper marked “Tory Hidden Agenda"]
… or wake up tomorrow with Michael Howard
Not only no mention of Blair, but a picture of his opposite number. The Tories played similar tricks. If anyone questions why I voted Lib Dem, there’s an answer there.
There’s a footer-type bit here with the Labour rose emblem and “Vote Alun Michael” and the address of the printer [required by law].
On the obverse:
Not going to vote?
Think again
[Two columns here: the right is text and the left it a chart headed “Polls almost neck and neck” with “YouGov Poll, May 1st” at the foot.] The opinion polls are close. The Tories have won elections in the past because Labour supporters haven’t bothered to vote. [7] 80% of Tories are certain [8] to vote compared to only 64% of Labour supporters [9]. This could [10] let Howard into Downing St by the back door.
Your vote counts today!
[7] I’m not sure what a non-voting Labour supporter is, really.
[8] Hang on, they’re worried about turnout, but they know for certain how many Tories will turn out.
[9] Tories vote Tory. You, however, are only a Labour supporter. We’re not suggesting that you go all the way with us, while they, vile beasts from Mordor that they are, are all ruled by Michael Howard’s ring.
[10] Then again, it might not.
Also, I voted Lib Dem. They came third. My vote didn’t matter.
If you value:
- economic stability
- low unemployment
- record investment in public services [11]
You have to vote Labour
[11] This is an inept periphrasis of [2] - [4].
A vote for Plaid/Lib Dems will only help make Howard the PM
I voted Lib Dem. My vote didn’t. This week I’m mainly confessing my lack of experience and my profound ignorance, so I may as well admit that I struggled with Hegel. (Read him in short fits and passed the rest of the time composing sonnets. They kept me sane.) But somewhere the old boy talks about whether it is true to write “Today is Tuesday.” It may be true if you write it on Tuesday, but is it true on Wednesday? Is this a lie? I think given the Labour Party’s knowledge of the polls, it is. But that’s a matter of opinion.
There’s a footer with a headshot taken outdoors of our MP with “Vote for Alun Michael” and
- Served as your MP since 1987
- Rated second-hardest working Welsh MP (Western Mail, 31.01.05)
- Your concerns are his priority
Alun Michael Labour & Co-operative
These reasons — well the last two — are actually very good arguments for his re-election.
Now my point is this is the party’s own literature. No mention of the War on Hoodies; the NHS; the War Against Terror; ID cards; the War on Iraq; the return of David Blunkett, etc.
Where is that mandate again?
These 611 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Round The Porn »
I bought the Graun today. Oh boy. For some reason “The Guide” hadn’t been delivered, so Abdul gave me the TV magazine from the Sun, but that’s worthy of several posts.
There’s a very disappointing article on ‘feminism’ and ‘pornography’ by Natasha Walter in the the comment pages. “Very disappointing” here means “rubbish.” “Feminism” as I’ve tried to say before, is a risibly conformist philosophy, predicated on what women ought to think, and rejecting anyone of either sex who disagrees. Ms Walter, like Clare Short, considers “pornography” bad and exploitative. She’s also a tad confused.
You don’t have to be a feminist to hate Nuts. When Tesco said it would be treating magazines such as Nuts, Zoo, Maxim and FHM a bit like the pornography they are by putting them on high shelves and obscuring their covers, the decision attracted approving noises from all sides. Clearly this move was long overdue.
I hope the first sentence wasn’t some smart lesbian pun, which would be beneath Ms Walter. “From all sides” means what exactly? That there weren’t any dissenting voices? And if there weren’t, why not? Tesco doesn’t sell ‘porn’ (AFAIK). So might there not be some cachet for lad mags to have wrappers? A cachet they actively sought?
When I look at these magazines I feel weirdly disappointed; they make me realise that I was too optimistic in the past about the effect of feminism on our society. When I published a book seven years ago about where young women were heading, I believed that as men and women became more equal the visual language of our culture would handle women’s sexuality in a subtler and richer way.
But why would anyone think this? ‘Feminism’ has been around since the early 60s. (I think there’s a not-un-coincidental parallel with The Pill.) Why should “feminism” suddenly take hold after Ms Walter’s book hit the presses when Betty Freidan’s, Germaine Greer’s, and Simone de Beauvoir’s efforts made so little impact?
We’ve had cinema as a popular medium for just over a century now. IMO (and this is purely IMO, your milage may, as they say, vary) the best portrayals of “women” in English-speaking cinema, at least, were by Katherine Hepburn. Against Spencer Tracy and Cary Grant she could be sexy and human and plausible. Far more so that most of her successors in, shall we say, “more enlightened times.”
And why shouldn’t men look at women? I’m no fan of “human nature” as an explanation with any weight, but I’ve yet to meet a heterosexual man who doesn’t. In Asne Seierstad’s The Bookseller of Kabul, there’s a chapter on Afghan women’s poetry. It ends with my favourite:
Lay thy mouth over mine,
But let my tongue be free so it can talk of love.
Take me first in your arms!
Afterwards you can bind yourself to my velvet thighs.
My mouth is yours, eat it up, do not be frightened!
It is not made of sugar, dissolvable.
My mouth, you can have it.
But why stir me up — I am already wet.
I will turn you into ash
If I only for one minute turn my gaze toward you.
I’m sure that I’ve complained about the assumption which seems so attractive to Guardian writers before.
These magazines tell young men it’s fine to narrow their whole world down to girls in knickers and men kicking balls.
I’ve read the Bible. It’s told me, as a for instance, that it’s cool with the big G to smite cities for Sodomy and for, er, whatever it was they did in Gomorragh. I have never smitten a city. I love the films of David Lynch. I loathe Budweiser (the American piss, not the Czech beer), and I’d never smack Isabella Rossellini. I’ve said before that I consider Dennis Hopper the greatest film actor, ever. I was going to say in 10 Things I’ve Never Done that I’ve never taken heroin, despite Lou Reed, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg ("the best minds of [his] generation” etc), Debbie Harry (she was 30! when I was at school; too old to be fanciable, yet horribly well-preserved). Perhaps, and this is a tentative suggestion put forward with little hope, the media have fuck all influence on how most people actually act.
The rest of Ms Walter’s argument is predicated on men’s (we’re not accorded even the limited individuality of the boxes into which advertisers cage us) homogeneity. Men is men to Ms Walter.
Tesco’s decision could be the start of an invigorated debate about whether we want these magazines and the culture they promote in our faces all the time. We might then see their editors wondering how they got to peddle such trash, and their readers looking around for another point of view.
Oh dear, she really hasn’t read William Burroughs. Or considered, say, Alan Turing. Or Baudelaire. Hurry on censorship. “La, c’est beauté, luxe, calme, et voluputé” you say? Burn, baby, burn.
Updated a tad for taste.
These 729 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 22 May 2005
Charles Clarke Promotes Virtue, Exterminates Sin »
More fun from The Department for the Promotion of Virtue and Extermination of Sin.
Excellent front page in the Sunday Torygraph: Six falsehoods in 100 seconds: how the Home Secretary misled public over ‘yob crackdown’.
As the website doesn’t include the breakdown of Mr Clarke’s lies, here’s an adumbrated version.
Clarke: “… where the people were wearing uniform [sic] so they were seen putting something back in respect to the crime they had committed.”
Truth: They were wearing disposable blue overalls bought at a local DIY store to protect their clothes from paint.
Clarke: “… mostly young men doing the work, they felt it was worthwhile to do it and they were learning skills which would help them stop offending later in life.”
Truth: they were aged 20 to late 40s. None was a youth. Several were already skilled.
Clarke: “They were badged in the sense that they were wearing uniform.”
Truth: the overalls had no logos, so they couldn’t be distinguished from any other disposable overalls.
Clarke: “it was harder for them than just lying around in a cell.”
Truth: they said it was preferable to being confined.
Clarke: It is happening now successfully in many parts of the country …”
Truth: The project was unique to the sea cadets. Asked where other projects were, a Home Office spokesman said: “It was a one off. There are no plans for any more.”
Mr Mandelli described Mr Clarke’s visit, on March 17, as “a typical politician’s visit in the run-up to an election”. He accused Mr Clarke of saying the offenders were in uniform because “it sounded good”.
What a tosser.
These 237 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 23 May 2005
A Megaphone Media In London »
Something George Galloway is right about: Christopher Hitchens does have fire in his belly on occasion. Here he is, writing for the Weekly Standard (which seems to be a news magazine of some sort).
And now, on the same turf, there struts a little popinjay who defends dictatorship abroad and who trades on religious sectarianism at home. Within a month of his triumph in a British election, he has flown to Washington and spat full in the face of the Senate. A megaphone media in London, and a hysterical fan-club of fundamentalists and political thugs, saw to it that he returned as a conquering hero and all-round celeb. If only the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples, could manifest anything like the same resolve and determination.
Of course, “the supporters of regime change, and the friends of the Afghan and Iraqi and Kurdish peoples” are Christopher Hitchens and chums, so this seems an odd lament. There should a be a phrase for journalists who attack the media, Martin Kettle style. (This is funny, but cartoonist, heal thyself.) But we should give Mr Hitchens the benefit of the doubt: although he hails from these shores, he is writing for the Washington media, not the London version.
We should read the London media to understand exactly how it acted as a megaphone for Mr Galloway. Let’s have The Yanks Fail To Lay A Glove On Galloway in the anti-war Mirror. Notice the smug jingoism of “Yanks.”
The member for Bethnal Green and Bow showed the clear superiority of a parliamentary training (and a soapbox training) over a senatorial one. As Americans like to say, he got his retaliation in first. It didn’t matter how many times Senator Norm Coleman insisted the sub-committee was not a court, Galloway was outraged that he had only now had the chance to defend himself.
Taking the war to the enemy camp, so to say, he delivered a general indictment of the invasion of Iraq, stressed the pro-Israeli loyalties of the senators, used the word “neo-con” as if he’d been using it all his life, and managed to squeeze in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo for good measure.
“So to say” isn’t in the Mirror house style is it? You have, doubtless, already rumbled the author of this piece, who is not a namesake of the writer above in one of those coincidences which only happen in serialised Victorian novels, but the self-same person.
I should perhaps declare a small bias here: on spotting your own correspondent, Mr Galloway shouted that he was a “drink- sodden ex-Trotskyist popinjay and useful idiot”, some of which was unfair.
As Harry Hutton who has something of a way with the language himself notes, it has “[b]een a while since I called anyone a popinjay.” Since the word originally meant “a parrot” it would seem that Mr Galloway said more than he intended, given Mr Hitchens’ echo of the insult. I suggest saying “Pieces of eight” or “Who’s a pretty boy then?” next time. Just as a scientific experiment, you understand.
Hitchens is more comfortable writing for the in-depth magazines than for the British tabloids. That headline, for instance, was almost certainly not his idea. And he does kick Galloway in the closing paragraphs: but that’s really too late, as newspaper articles lose readers with each paragraph like a meteorite burning up. From the Standard piece, this extract seems particularly good.
As it happens, I adore the street-fight and soap-box side of political life, so that when the cluster had moved inside, and when Galloway had taken his seat flanked by his aides and guards, I decided to deny him the 10 minutes of unmolested time that otherwise awaited him before the session began. Denouncing the hearings as a show-trial the previous week, he had claimed that he had written several times to the subcommittee (whose members he has publicly called “lickspittles") asking to be allowed to clear his name, and been ignored. The subcommittee staff denies possessing any record of such an overture. Taking a position near where he was sitting, I asked him loudly if he had brought a copy of his letter, or letters. A fresh hose of abuse was turned upon me, but I persisted in asking, and after awhile others joined in—receiving no answer—so at least he didn’t get to sit gravely like a volunteer martyr.
I wouldn’t have included it, myself. The Democratic Underground site has a thread on UK’s Galloway blisters US policy on Iraq. If that’s what Galloway is like after sustained heckling, and Mr Hitchens’ best efforts, he must roar like Lear when allowed to compose himself. The Times (usually the London Times to our colonial cousins, so part of the “megaphone media” or the Murdoch press to the rump of the left) carries a transcript of Galloway v the US Senate.
And Arthur Silber is very impressed (as are several other Americans, not all on the left, as Arthur certainly isn’t).
There isn’t any doubt about the muscularity of Mr Hitchens’ prose, and he sums up Member for Bethnal Green And Bow with brevity and wit.
Indeed, he was a type well known in the Labour movement. Prolier than thou, and ostentatiously radical, but a bit too fond of the cigars and limos and always looking a bit odd in a suit that was slightly too expensive. By turns aggressive and unctuous, either at your feet or at your throat; a bit of a backslapper, nothing’s too good for the working class: what the English call a “wide boy.”
However, as always, I detect a tincture of distaste for his home country. “Labour movement” (note spelling) and “what the English call a ‘wide boy’” as if the concept was a novel one on the far side of the Atlantic. Ahem.
As ‘Southpaw Jimmy Meadows, the working man’s champ’, he was elected eleven times to the East Bronx ward and only narrowly defeated for Mayor in 1882, a result he always blamed on the inadequate numeracy of his henchmen rather than any any desire of the electorate. The vicissitudes of democracy he regarded as a minor inconvenience. Often enough, when they tallied up his votes, the total equalled the number of registered voters in the entire constituency; and on two famous occasions actually exceeded it. (’A man should exercise his rights as often as possible,’ he used to say cryptically. ‘Ain’t that what America’s all about?’)
Joseph O’Connor, Star of the Sea p392–3 (which I should say is a work of fiction). If anything, the “backslapper” and “working man’s champ” type was better known in the industrial districts of the US, than it ever was in Labour (with a ‘u’) movement.
These 541 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:31pm GMT Permanent link.
Do Asbo You Would Be Done By »
I’ve always quite liked the Torygraph’s Rachel Sylvester, who is an intelligent and non-waffling columnist. My only complaint being that she’s cut a little bias toward the Tories. (Hardly surprising, given her emplpyer.) Still, Respect begins at home—and no law can force the issue is a must read. This is beautiful writing, comic and percipient.
Then the Prime Minister appointed David Miliband as a Cabinet minister, responsible for local government and communities, in the Deputy Prime Minister’s department, to oversee the flagship policy. But that infuriated Charles Clarke, who is, according to one Number 10 source, still being “highly obstructive” and refusing to give up responsibility for anti-social behaviour—as if he didn’t have enough on his plate already, with asylum, terrorism and ID cards.
Ruth Kelly, meanwhile, is insisting that “respect in the classroom” is a crucial aspect of the whole thing, and even Patricia Hewitt wants to make sure that the theme of the moment is applied to hospitals. A ministerial committee on respect is being set up, but nobody can agree who should be its chairman. Civil servants who are writing policy papers on the subject have no idea whom to submit them to.
So, the Prime Minister’s main priority for Labour’s third term is still being kicked—rather disrespectfully, it has to be said—around Whitehall as if it were an old tin can. Cabinet ministers, wearing metaphorical hoodies, are engaged in the political equivalent of “happy slapping” — recording the episodes not on their mobile phones, but in the newspapers — in an attempt to prove that they control the neighbourhood.
Remember this is in the Torygraph so this paragraph is particularly brave.
But there is another school of thought that says that if the Government attempts to demonise particular groups of people, their hostility to authority will only be increased. Is a teenager in a hoodie chewing gum in the street really any less respectful than a Chelsea mother driving her four-wheel-drive car, stereo blasting, down a narrow alleyway?
In his book Respect, the latest must-read in Whitehall, the Left-wing sociologist Richard Sennett argues that anti-social behaviour is fuelled by inequality. The rise of a meritocracy, he writes, has destroyed the self-respect of the poor because if the successful deserve their success, then the poor must also merit their failure. This is incredibly patronising — there are plenty of poor people who have both self-respect and respect for others — but the author is right to point out that the Government cannot force people to be nice to each other through legislation.
There are deep-seated social causes for the lack of respect. In some cases, they have been fuelled by Labour’s approach to government. Describing the public services in consumerist terms, for example, increases the sense that we are all individuals out to get the best for ourselves, with no responsibility to those around us.
As Chris Dillow said in Against social mobility,
If we were to have genuine social mobility, then, we could forget any notion of equal worth or community spirit. It’d be every man for himself.
So what does work?
If any government initiative is likely to increase respect, it is the Sure Start scheme, which provides free playgroups, fruit and parenting classes to new mothers and fathers. At the moment, it operates only in poor areas, but Labour has promised to extend it nationally and the early indicators are that it works. Sure Start mothers are significantly more likely to read to their children, breast-feed and avoid post-natal depression, while children learn to speak more quickly and bond better with their parents. All these things are likely to encourage good behaviour later on. The onus, though, is on the parent rather than on the state. Nobody is forced to attend.
Sure Start is one of Labour’s triumphs. Naturally, it was ignored by their own campaign, which preferred more cock-swinging measures against delinquency.
Ms Sylvester’s colleague Sam Leith considers Happy Slappers and Normans.
The Government, which is peopled by Normans and elected by Normans, wants to crack down. Having abolished one popular sport on the grounds that it was seen to be traditional and upper-class, it seeks to abolish another one that is technologically progressive and belongs to the underclass. Again, it has its work cut out. One can imagine a non-violent alternative — happy scarfing, say, where pranksters would drape foolishly coloured feather-boas on their victims’ heads — but it seems unlikely the slappers would take to it.
Happy slapping has antecedents. Apprentices rampaged through the Elizabethan streets on public holidays; Fink-Nottles played knock-the-helmet-off-the-policeman; members of the electorate still throw eggs at John Prescott. These too, occasionally, could go too far. Tudor gentlefolk were sometimes beaten up. Sometimes the odd Fink-Nottle would play knock-the-block-off-the-policeman. Sometimes the eggs are hard-boiled.
It’s not an accident that Alex and his droogs dress retro in “A Clockwork Orange” — bowler hats were passé by the 60s; cod-pieces hadn’t been in fashion any where except the South Sea islands (where they were the more primitive penis gourds) for centuries. Herodotus considers a little ultraviolence no more than a little humorous relief. In the Old Testament, two teenagers can’t live together without one braining the other. In the New, Saint Peter’s first reaction to seeing a Roman rozzer is to slice his ear off. Oedipus killed his father in road rage because he was testosterone-charged brutal thug. The kids in “Romeo and Juliet” like nothing better than cutting body parts off each other. Who wants to turn the clock back? If Samuel Johnson hadn’t been built like Robbie Coltrane, he couldn’t have walked along the Strand safely. Sherlock Holmes carried a gun. Never did the Empire any harm.
The depth of ignorance of the target-chasing snot-gobbling bureaucrats handing out Asbos is simply stunning.
In one example discovered by BIBIC, an Asbo was given to a 15-year-old with Tourette syndrome, which can involve an inability to stop shouting out profanities. The order banned the teenager from swearing in public, something made impossible by the gravity of his disorder.
In one case in the Midlands, the authorities applied for an Asbo against a 12-year-old girl with Asperger’s who had been swearing in the street. It later emerged that she had heard her parents arguing with neighbours and had simply mimicked them.
These people are idiots. I’d call them what they are, but orange overalls really don’t flatter my colouring.
These 444 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:41pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 24 May 2005
Truth, Casualty Of War Again »
There are, of course, lots of other casualties. 24,000, perhaps. Perhaps 98,000. Maybe more. But truth keeps getting shot all to hell. John Cole, predictably, has a very sensible post, which is so short that the choice is between quoting in full or not at all. I choose the latter. Go read. What’s he talking about? Gary Farber finds the good bits in Pat Buchanan et al’s panel discussion on The McLaughlin Group
MR. BUCHANAN: John, let me speak to this. I don’t care whether it’s true or false. This report is seditious. Putting this thing out there means American guys are greater at risk. It jeopardizes the cause for which people are fighting. Things like this took place in World War I. Eugene Debs went to prison. This undermines the war. I don’t care whether it’s true —
MS. CLIFT: Was reporting about Abu Ghraib also seditious?
MR. BUCHANAN: There’s no doubt, you’re exactly right, it did. But to put that thing in there, Eleanor —
MS. CLIFT: This is nothing compared —
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What’s your point, Pat? I don’t get the point. Let Pat finish.
MR. BUCHANAN: Whether true or false, you do not publish something like that when your country is at war, which incites —
MR. MCLAUGHLIN: What kind of nonsense is that?
MR. BUCHANAN: It incites and inflames the whole Muslim world.
What kind of nonsense is that? Indeed.
These 80 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:19am GMT Permanent link.
Does Charles Clarke Really Belong In »
Craig Brown considers Tracey Emin and Channel 4 lists.
Tracey Emin was upset to have been featured on a recent television programme called The 100 Most Disliked People in Britain. She came in at number 41.
“Can you imagine?” she asked the Observer. “I mean, what if you were on the brink of suicide at that very moment, all alone in your house: That’s the sort of thing that’s going to push you over the edge, isn’t it?”
Well, yes. I’d don’t have the celebrity of Ms Emin, but I’d hope to be a lot higher than 41. Top five at least. 41! Might as well end it all now.
Craig Brown has his own theory for Ms Emin’s fame.
Those whose breasts don’t come up to scratch are unlikely to be placed in any lists, good or bad. Charles Clarke MP, for instance, is obviously more widely disliked than Ms Emin, yet few TV viewers would ever wish to see him topless, or even exhibiting his embonpoint more coyly in a Vivienne Westwood bustier. But Tracey Emin is the Abi Titmuss of the art world, and so will always find herself shoe-horned into every list. Indeed, thanks to her marvellous breasts, Tracey Emin would even beat poor old Mr Clarke on to a Channel 4 programme called “Britain’s Top 10 Home Secretaries”.
Charles Clarke among “Britain’s Top 10 Home Secretaries.” It hardly bears thinking about.
But Tracey Emin offered the Observer another explanation for her inclusion in “The 100 Most Disliked People in Britain. “It’s the way I speak, innit?” she said. “People take the piss out of my accent all the time. They don’t seem to like my voice.” Can this really be true? In his wonderful new short biography of Margate’s less celebrated painter, J M W Turner, Peter Ackroyd points out that Turner had a Cockney accent, and dropped his hs. He pronounced mathematics “mithematics”, having “haiving” and foolery “follery”. Ruskin recalled him uttering the phrase: “Ain’t they worth more?” Yet Turner was revered in his day, and made a fortune. On a more contemporary note, Jamie Oliver is wildly popular, thanks in large part to his accent: it’s hard to imagine he would be quite so adored if he spoke with the posh drawl of Major James Hewitt.
Let all columnists, Mr Brown can be prone to the odd diversion. But he sticks his articles together with erudite. Don’t say glue…
These 87 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:36pm GMT Permanent link.
New Labour, New "Truth" »
Mark Seddon, mon amour:
But Mark Seddon, a NEC member, said the all-women shortlist system had been abused, and that eight of the 20 accused did not even know why they faced disciplinary action.
One woman had been threatened with expulsion for simply writing to a local newspaper, Mr Seddon told the Today programme.
In practice all-women shortlists were often used to impose candidates the leadership wanted, he said.
“The reality is there is an independent streak in that part of South Wales,” he said. “They saw that, frankly, all-women shortlists are used or not used when suits because, for the past decades, we have seen an awful lot of candidate gerrymandering from on high.
“In the run-up to the election, a whole load of Labour seats that were supposed to be all-women suddenly, miraculously became [open to] men.”
New Labour seem unable to accept that they lost because they tried gerrymandering and fielded a talentless Stepford clone.
Ms Jones had faced criticism for being London-based and was perceived as a Blairite candidate.
Ms Jones rejected comparisons between Mr Law and the London mayor, Ken Livingstone, who was readmitted to the Labour party after standing as an independent.
“I don’t know who signed Ken Livingstone’s nomination papers but I would be very surprised if action was not taken against them in some way,” she said.
Ms Jones told the BBC: “It was a long period of time before Ken Livingstone was readmitted to the party and he did during that period of time work very closely with the party.
Long period of time? Nice try, but Red Ken “was suspended from the Party for five years for standing against the official candidate.” He served four. He didn’t work very closely with the party. He was popular. Different thing entirely. Now away and change your batteries.
Update: Chris Brooke has written to inform me that Maggie Jones has been a senior trade union official Unison for at least a decade and served “a stint on Labour’s NEC for a decent chunk of the 1990s.” So she may not be a ’Stepford clone’ (not my most meaningful abuse, as robots are not clones).
These 70 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:11pm GMT Permanent link.
How To Be Sensitive »
I warn you now: you may think there is sophistry in this post. I think I’m telling it straight, but you may read me as spinning like a thing that spins a lot.
I’ve already discussed Melanie Phillips’s hysterical reaction to one BBC journalist using the term “Old Testament-style brutality.”
Now, here’s the sophistry bit. BBC journalists (and writers and pretty much everybody else) are “creatives.” They’re supposed to be independent-minded. Even if I agreed with Ms Phillips, I see no reason for drawing any conclusions of any kind about the entire BBC (which, after all, employs many of my friends).
There are some creative, independent thinkers in the military. Certain pilots, submarine captains, SAS type commanders have to be. Lawrence of Arabia was. But these are very senior. Army life is about following rules, and in the main the parts reflect the whole.
A diversion here, why are suspects being interrogated by the likes of PFC England? We’re supposed to know two things about al-Qaeda. They use suicide bombers. The lower ranks need know nothing beyond their mission. And they almost certainly don’t. They’re supposed to have these camps, bottomlessly funded by Saudi oil money. Now our officers expect that, if they get captured by an enemy, they’ll be interrogated. Our guys are trained to survive … well, let’s call it “torture.” Do you really think that if our enemies are anything like as sophisticated as we keep being told, they haven’t had similar training? And Ms England (as she now is) couldn’t tell a gunpowder plot from a human pyramid. It’s not just that torture is wrong, but why did we farm it out to the very bottom rung? What the hell were our commanders thinking?
End rant. When a copy of the Koran is flushed down a toilet in an interrogation, it seems fair to understand that this is some kind of approved procedure. Because I’d rather not believe that naive 20-year-old recruits are asked to deal with suspected sophisticated mass murders and just wing it.
Norm links to the palsied popinjay we all call the Dupe with approval. (Why, you ask, do I pick on Hitchens so much? Why not Popinjay Junior? or Jurassic Popinjay (The Writer Time Forgot). Well, he is readable in short draughts. And, hell, it’s fun.) But Christ knows what Shakin’ Hitchens is on about in Stop the Masochistic Insanity (thankfully, he’s not talking about his good friend Paul Johnson this time).
It’s essential that we understand the deep irrationality that underlies all faith and that can take these fetishistic forms. That great religion expert Kenneth Woodward, who used to write with extreme lenience on such subjects as miracles (for Newsweek, as it happens), has now written a solemn article for the Wall Street Journal saying that Muslims revere the Quran, or “recitation,” much, much more than Christians revere the Bible. The Bible is only a first draft of God’s will, set down by mere mortals, whereas the Quran is the unmediated word of God himself. No wonder, then, that pious Muslims will hear of a Newsweek capsule story, assume it to be infallible, and immediately begin to kill and burn. What could be more understandable?
Now Kenneth Woodward does say what Mr Hitchens says he says — up to the full stop after “God himself.” Nowhere does he suggest anything resembling Mr Hitchens’ penultimate sentence. Nor is there any logic in assuming that because one’s holy book is infallible, that one has to take the word of every news medium in “The Great Satan.” What could be less understandable?
I, however, believe to a very limited extent what our media put out. And, as I’ve tried to explain, I think that if there is one incident of a Koran being flushed down a toilet, then it’s highly likely others were too, and that doing so must be US Army policy. (I may be wrong about this, but really I prefer this version; because if there are terrorists out there planning to put ricin in our drinking water, I devoutly hope the counter-terrorists have some training, and IQs above criminal responsibility level.)
Well, first, most Muslims did not do any such thing, …
Good point, Chris. You see, you can be a decent sparring partner.
… and those who did should not be indulged in the Wall Street Journal.
But they’re not.
Second, why are we to assume that God speaks only Arabic?
We’re not. I doubt any Muslim believes that if he orders a bacon sandwich in English, Allah will not notice his transgression. We’re told the book is in Arabic, and for very good reasons ("Poetry is what gets lost in translation” — Robert Frost) it should be read in Arabic. Things happen in translation, as Ms Phillips, of all people, acknowledges.
Compounding this distortion, the BBC apologist then erroneously associates the Old Testament with vengeance by bringing up that old chestnut of ‘an eye for an eye’. The assumption that this means tit-for-tat retribution is a classic of anti-Jewish prejudice and is based on a literal reading of the English translation of the Hebrew — which is the opposite of the interpretation that the religion teaches, that the phrase means proportionality and monetary compensation as the response to violent deeds and not the ‘harsh and unforgiving retribution’ of life for life.
She’s right there. I don’t think there’s anything inconsistent — if you believe in God, and that God decided to leave a manual which ignored the age of the universe, the mechanics thereof, and spoke mostly about the tribulations of one tribe on a small part of an insignificant continent — in believing that that manual should be read in the language it was set down.
Third, are these not the same crowds who believed that all the Jews were ordered to leave the World Trade Center just in time?
To paraphrase an old seasoned journalist “I don’t know what happened … (and neither, dear reader, do you).” Oh go on then. Are they the same crowds? Ain’t got no clue, mate. Why does the Dupe think crowds believe anything? All this intentional stuff is secreted by brains, and only by brains (OK computers too). A crowd may be composed of people who believe something ("The present king of France is bald” “God is good” that sort of thing) but crowds can’t believe anything. Crowds don’t have hearts, or veins, or pustules, or cancers, though individuals do.
Dr Johnson once had a visitor when he was finishing some article for one of his magazines. When he finished and placed it in the post, the visitor asked if he could read it. Johnson replied something to the effect that he had not had the opportunity of doing so himself. It seems Hitchens writes with similarly tight deadlines.
It’s essential that we understand the deep irrationality that underlies all faith and that can take these fetishistic forms.
Note, dear reader, “the deep irrationality that underlies all faith.”
This dignity and bearing and patience—and not hysterical self-pity and frenzy—is the Muslim style that is worth defending and explaining, and it is also the side on which we have ranged ourselves. Nothing to apologize for in that.
Same writer, same article. I suppose dignity can be deeply irrational, of course. Did Mr Hitchens mean to bury Hamid Karzai before he praised him?
Are we being too cringing, as Mr Hitchens alleges? I share the former-Trotskyite’s distaste for Mother Theresa for instance, and I’d welcome hammering god-botherers.
But there are stories which make me ashamed of the West. But Arthur will tell it better than I can.
These 943 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 25 May 2005
Balances And Checkmates »
Being the beginnings of a reply to Eric.
Afterall, you may as well start thinking now about your reasons for undermining faith in your own democracy, by besmirching the motives of your elected democratic politicians, without a scintilla of supporting evidence.
I’ll go for limitations on trial by jury, Bob. Is it me again? Can I have Habeus corpus, Bob? Bob, do you get bored by the sound of my voice? I’ll take In America, they call it ‘astroturfing’: the faking of grassroots support for a politician or a product whose popularity is on the slide. Hello, Bob, can I have the “Third Way” (beloved by democrat Mussolini, doncha know?) please? I’ll try ’Politicians failing to do their job,’ report says, Bob.
He criticised the lack of Parliamentary “self-confidence or a sufficient relationship with the public at large” to check the enormous powers of the executive.
“Therefore, we are moving away from the centre, having checks and balances on the executive,” he added.
I think I’ll have to look up “scintilla.” I didn’t realise that it meant “Jupiter-like mass.”
These 105 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:17am GMT Permanent link.
Of String And Sealing Wax »
By my chins! This being partly to welcome Ben home, and thank him for his support.
Listen:
In 1884, at age 28, J.J. Thomson became Director of the Cavendish Laboratory at Cambridge University. He turned what he described as a “string and sealing wax laboratory” into the world’s preeminent center for experimental nuclear physics. Thomson and his student Ernest Rutherford were the first to demonstrate the ionization of air by X rays. So fundamental is this phenomenon that the phrase “ionizing radiation” remains the most concise way to characterize the wide range of electromagnetic and particulate radiation emitted by atoms.
Did you know that the first successfully controlled nuclear reaction was at the University of Chicago under a squash court? Or that the Michelson-Morley experiment (which was postdicted by Einstein) was conducted in a basement? (The following is in no way a retraction of my enthusiasm for CERN. I am great fan — I was going to say “massive” but the context is probably unsuitable — of CERN. I quoted what I could remember of extracts on the philosophy of science from CERN’s published matter in my finals papers. The markers may have been alarmed to find a student who’d wasted three years doing nothing but reading post-Nietzsche Continental philosophy and particle physics attempting the degree examination in Psychology. This would have been unfair. I ran a bit too.)
According to the BBC (probably more bias, the Old Testament never mentions gravity, or other planets, so ignoring it is just typical “anti-Semitism” — all Jews look away now, Albert, Richard, Steven, Murray … etc etc etc, that means you), Lens method finds far-off world.
An international team of astronomers has found a planet which, at about 15,000 light-years from Earth, is one of the most distant yet detected.
(Mad Mel fans remember that Joshua stopped the sun which clearly circles the earth. This modern nonsense is merely meant to try you. Write in now, to protest this bias. Don’t forget to ask for slavery back. And stoning. And human sacrifice. Liberals have had their way for too long.)
Two amateur astronomers in New Zealand helped find the world using “backyard” telescopes, showing that almost anyone can become a planet hunter.
…
Two of these telescopes belong to two avid New Zealand amateur astronomers who were recruited by the MicroFun team. Grant Christie of Auckland used a 14-inch (35cm) telescope, and Jennie McCormick of Pakuranga used a 10-inch (25cm) telescope.
Both share co-authorship on the paper submitted to Astrophysical Journal Letters.
By my chins! Didn’t David Aaronovitch back the space programme?
But when Dubya confided his pre-election desire to restart the US space programme, he was widely laughed at.
Laughed at? I nearly died. Chris Dillow quotes Ed Balls (pdf):
Governments which pursue monetary and fiscal policies which are not seen to be sustainable in the long-term … are punished hard these days — and much more rapidly than 30 or 40 years ago.
What Mr Aaronovitch fails to understand is that the space programme a) has not stopped; and b) should not be restarted. For those with a New York Review of Books subscription, Steven Weinberg (the Steven above) puts the case against The Wrong Stuff. Bush is only against Voyager (and that Borg lady was hot!) and Hubble. What he wants is the pointless glamour of more moon landings. Whee! There’s sort of dust! We can bunny hop! And Mars. Does he even know how far away Mars is? It’s so far that the best Olympic athletes bones will turn to wet paper after nearly a year in free fall. Does he have any idea about the solar wind? About X-Rays? You thought smoking Marlboro was bad for you.
Real science is smart people being smart. True, they’ll never be understood by politicians, but who or what is? Real science was Newton staring at the sun, Galileo dropping weights from some tower, Darwin cadging a ride. Real science is cheap.
What am I saying? I just read that Ed Balls quote again. Go for it George. May the Skull and Bones be with you! By my chins!
These 457 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:23am GMT Permanent link.
Where No Machine Has Gone Before »
Voyager 1 pushes for deep space in enterprising trek to stars. Its continuing mission. As reported last night, Bush plans to cancel the mission. (Hey George, what you going to spend the money on? Decent armor for your troops, or tax-breaks for the super-duper rich? Let me guess.)
Of far greater concern to scientists is the possibility that NASA could kill the $4.2 million-a-year project to free up money for President Bush’s initiative to send humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars.
Washington Post. $4.2 million? That would get you a Yuri Gargarin-alike, putting a girdle round the earth every ninety minutes while waving like the Queen. Mars is going to cost much, much more than that.
I’ve come to a conclusion which may surprise some readers, but it took considerable thought.
George Walker Bush is an idiot.
These 104 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:53pm GMT Permanent link.
Popinjays And Bounders »
Must be the BBC strike, Matthew Taylor’s favourite columnist, mr snuffles, is yet again deputised by BBC Political Editor, Andrew Marr.
The danger is of subsiding into a world of flavourless, colourless euphemism, leaving behind the robustness of good English. So I am looking forward to having Christopher Hitchens, the American-based columnist, on Start the Week, partly to hear his response to George Galloway, who called him “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay” recently. Popinjay is good, is it not? I am pretty sure I’m a drink-soaked popinjay myself, and formerly many things of a disreputable nature.
If you say so, Andrew.
Mr Marr goes on to plug his colleague Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time’s Greatest Philosopher Vote.
Bragg’s team ask simply, who was the greatest philosopher ever? We are about to give the wrong answer: I have reliable reports that those two anti-democrats Plato and Nietzsche are vying for the lead. …
As for Nietzsche, taking him seriously is an indisputable sign of bounderism. A clever man, and a swanky stylist; but he bears the same relation to truth as Eric von Daniken — and attracts the same sort of admirers. He’s Madame Blavatsky with moustaches. He’s Khalil Gibran turned to the Dark Side. He’s Kaiser Bill on LSD. I don’t know about drink-soaked but he was probably a popinjay. To choose Nietzsche would be a national catastrophe; he must be stopped.
Funny, I’d probably have gone for Wittgenstein, but when he puts the case that strongly, I had no choice. Of course he wasn’t drink-soaked: he couldn’t hold it at all. Even cream-cakes gave him a headache. He didn’t share his country’s passion for sausages either; he was a vegetarian.
Clearly I am a bounder, possibly a drink-soaked one.
Marr suggests Popper, a reasonable choice. Better than his opponents, those two frauds, Freud and Marx. There are some other good choices on the site, including Heidegger (top 5, for sure) and Eric Cantona (only a little lower). Plenty of votes for David Hume, which shows humanity (har har; pun accidental) not entirely lost.
These 154 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Just When I Seemed To Have An Original Thought »
Damn! Beaten by Bloomberg.
The estimated cost of the U.K. national identity card planned by Prime Minister Tony Blair is 9.4 percent higher than it was in November.
The unit cost of the cards, which will be issued to every U.K. citizen and everyone staying in the country more than three months is 93 pounds ($170) in the government’s latest estimate, compared with 85 pounds in the November estimate.
9.4% in six months? That’s some compound interest. (£102 by November; £111 next May; 122 in November; by time they come in, in 2007 £133.)
The BBC asks Do you welcome ID card plans? Carol in England says:
I have no problem with identity cards but £85 represents my food budget for about three weeks. If this compulsory, it should be free.
Is she in for a shock! And Guiseppe in Oxford says:
Being Italian I’m used to the idea of having an ID card always with me.
I really had to fight the temptation to remind him that the Italians elected Mussolini, and if we followed their example, we’d have changed sides at least twice in Iraq by now. I like this “damp little island” the way it is.
Seeing Charles Clarke in his ickle policeman’s helmet reminds me of some people I met in what is now Macedonia. The father of one lived in a different city not because of marital differences but because of state allocation of jobs (he was a university teacher and no fan of the regime). The great joke among my friends was a Hello style book of photographs of the domestic life of Tito. He had a workshop with a lathe and other tools, where he used to go to commune in spirit with the horny handed sons of toil. Without their poverty, boredom, snickering foremen, industrial accidents, early starts, factory whistles, of course, but correct in all other details. Sometimes I think New Labour really is a socialist party. They just picked a cul-de-sac of socialism which happens to screw everyone bar the Inner Party.
These 238 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:38pm GMT Permanent link.
Uniformly Scargillite »
Peter Cuthbertson, naturally, opposes the BBC strike. (BTW, is that a popular music reference in the post’s title? Bien je jamais.) Peter’s being showing signs of becoming worryingly sensible, so it’s very nice seeming him returning to form. The comments are particularly fun; Matthew Turner presenting my own view very nicely: the BBC “is much more similar to The Times if anything; ie broadly pro-government, regardless of party affiliation”. The second comment, however, if I may borrow a phrase from the unabashedly right-wing press is a “stunna.”
I don’t understand what PC’s beefing about. The extracts he quotes simply report who will and won’t be working and why. How is this ‘Scargillite’?
I am still an NUJ member and I never crossed a picket line, even when it cost me money as a freelance, simply because I would want to be able to look my striking colleagues in the face afterwards. Rather like ‘my country right or wrong’, it’s just one of the occupational hazards of belonging to a community.
As a conservative, PC should understand that sometimes the instinctive solidarity of the little platoon is more important than being in the right in the abstract. Accepting the burdens and humiliations of that loyalty cheerfully is almost a definition of being a conservative, which is why the trade union movement in Britain— contrary to the mouthfoaming of Thatcherite and neocon globalisers, but well understood by real Tories such as Enoch Powell and Alan Clark— has been mainly a force for stability and a protector of British institutions— a bulwark against red revolution in the past and against internationalisation today.
The habit of industrial discipline instilled by unionisation also made Britons good soldiers, as Harold Macmillan often recalled. Anyhow, the occasional trial of strength within an organisation none too sensitive to market pressures, such as the BBC, is a good proxy for them. It dramatises disputes about policy without doing lasting damage. And broadcasting stoppages never last long, because the temptation to get back to enjoyable work is too strong.
And that’s the resolutely right-wing WJ Phillips. (As always, I wouldn’t go quite as far as WJ in demonising the neocons and internationalists, mostly because I see them as incompetent blethering nutters rather than a conspiracy.)
Peter discovers that the Guardian doesn’t approve of the strike, confirming his belief that the BBC is merely a the advance column of the Politburo.
Also on the Tory side of things, Vicki Woods yet again demonstrates why she’s so much cooler than many ‘right-on’ Guardian hacks.
Who’d have thought that the bright-eyed, miniskirted child I once was would end up a boring old fart, measuring out her life in coffee spoons? Ten past eight: second brew as Humphrys savages the Education Secretary. Lunchtime: Cup-a-Soup while Nick Clarke wrestles with the poor boiled Uzbeks. Teatime: and Twinings with Eddie Mair….
You also know you’re senile when you go mad with rage because folks are on strike. I used to adore strikes - mine or anyone else’s. They broke up the working day so excitingly. I loved all the three-day week business, when Mr Heath asked: Who Governs Britain? and the early shift at Orgreave Colliery said: “We do, sunshine.” You could stroll into work hours late, saying breezily that you’d had to wait for the bathwater. Or the lift.
I never met a picket line I didn’t honour. Never crossed one in my life.
Good for her. (And like WJ, she’s not a closet leftie at all.) New blogger Kitty Killer David’s first post is simply splendid on the strike and on the right side.
I can think of only one reason to oppose it. On a message board I’m on, a BBC staffer found time to post the following. Now if the BBC management knew what we have to suffer, they should give up. Please.
1. David Hasselhoff walks into a bar and says to the barman, “I want you to call me David Hoff”. The barman replies “Sure thing Dave… no hassle.”
2. Two men are walking through a graveyard with their dogs. One man turns to the other and says “Morning”. The other man replies: “No, just walking the dog.”
3. Police arrested two kids yesterday. One was drinking battery acid, the other was eating fireworks. They charged one and let the other one off.
These 242 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:40pm GMT Permanent link.
A Pre-emptive 'I Wuz Wrong' »
I’ve subscribed to the lame duck meme, and I’m not about to change my mind. However, Channel 4 don’t seem to index the emails from BAFTA award-winning presenter Jon Snow, Snowmail, so here’s an extract from last night’s monster (probably online for the next seven days if you want the whole thing).
If I were a newspaper columnist I would not bore you with this, but as Snowmail is my outlet, you’ll have to put up with it. Sometimes as a hack you can feel the currents of something moving; these currents seem to intersect with some of the facts that you are dealing with but you can’t quite put it all together in a televisual piece. Today is such a day.
Since the British General Election, I have been talking one on one with a number of key Europeans, an Iranian, and some Americans here in London—all tops of their trees without yet having fallen out of them. Here’s what I’m picking up—and I offer this as an insight into how others may be seeing things:
In what feels like the converse to the ‘lame duck’ view of Blair, my conversationalists reckon that of all the key European leaders they note Blair just might be suddenly and unexpectedly empowered. He has no more elections to fight and merely has his place in history to establish. At present it is blighted by Iraq, and trust, and slightly made by the re-establishment of a belief and investment in Public Services.
Chancellor Schroeder is badly winged now and facing a well nigh impossible task to get re-elected. Chirac faces serious winging as a result of a referendum ‘Non’ result; Berlusconi is continually becalmed by his domestic embroilments—and then there is Bush.
Into this scenario try this: Blair is today flying around the place struggling to find a way forward on Africa and Global Warming, desperately trying to forge consensus on both and getting pretty well nowhere with the Americans. His government is looking ambivalent on Europe and no one really knows, once there is a French ‘No’, whether he really will stage a referendum.
So here’s what seems to be swirling from the perspective of my informants : Blair has a chance no other G8 leader has. Here he is going into G8 Chairmanship, and EU Presidency with nothing to lose and an unexpected amount to win.
And now, get this: On Europe, two of my sources believe his cleverest move, on the heels of a French rejection of this ‘Anglo Saxon Treaty’, would be to seize the moment and say to the Brits we ARE going to have a referendum precisely because this IS an Anglo Saxon Treaty. Putting our weight behind it in spite of the French rejection, naming the date and then telling the electorate you will resign after it whatever the outcome.
Then you stake your place in history on it, if you lose—ah well, you tried and you were going early anyway; if you win you redeem the position you started out with in 1997 a pro-European PM who staked his political position on it. Further they argue; see off the Americans on climate change; go for your Africa fund - and fund it by the very green mechanism of taxing airline passenger tickets and if necessary aviation fuel.
Pigs will fly? Who knows, let’s see. …
I doubt this, but it may be my intense dislike of Blair clouding my vision, like the blood running down at the beginnings of the credits of a Bond film. I pretty much agree with Harry Brighouse’s post on Andrew Adonis. Last time I debated the Labour party with a supporter, he was adamant that Labour had the more talented team. I’m not going to argue with that point, but I find (and, again, this may be my personal dislike colouring everything) Labour’s inner circle to be pretty psychologically dubious. I don’t mean Peter Mandelson, who apart from taking the European gold medal in self-importance is the only human being with less nous than a life-size cardboard cutout of himself. I do mean Blair himself, who failed to see (once, twice, three times a moron) that given the choice between a career juggling flaming chainsaws and working beside Peter Mandelson, you should take the chainsaws every time. Then there’s David Blunkett, who if I cared a whit about his well-being I hope never has any health problems, because they should sell his skin to the military. A 20-Megaton bomb might pierce it, but I’m sure scalpels just bend, and butter is as effective a weapon as the charge that having a child by another man’s wife, being certain you fathered a second, and being completely wrong, being a bastard to all other parties, and abusing your office makes you unfit for public service.
Sorry, wittering. Then there’s all the rest. Blair may well look good in Europe. Maybe 36% of the vote is impressive there. Hitler had 37% and they loved him. But he’s still “Phoney Tony” and “Bliar” at home. He’s been exposed. Charles Falconer worked for the Government during the Miners’ Strike, and he’s in the Labour Party! WTF? (Apologies in advance to Chris Brooke for this next.) Claims of ‘thuggery’ as independent Law ousts Labour to gain remarkable win.
Part of the disaffection with the local Labour campaign also seems to stem from a feeling in some quarters, reported to this website, that it was “intimidatory”. Mr Law himself in his victory speech reflected that view, “No-one’s going to intimidate me. We’ve seen brute force and thuggery up here already and we are not having any more of that.”
Law supporter Andrew Finney said: “They love Peter here. In Abertillery he’s like the Pied Piper. When Peter had his illness, people in Abertillery were crying but when they saw him later they mobbed him.”
The people, aka “The Working Class.” Remember that Tony. They had their butts kicked by Comrade Falconer’s cronies, but, to paraphrase Jim Morrison, they “got the numbers.” (I’m sure many would gladly sing, “… Though cowards flinch and traitors sneer … It suits today the weak and base,/Whose minds are fixed on pelf and place/To cringe before the rich man’s frown,/And haul the sacred emblem down” into that blank expression you call your face. But you’d probably say, “High charming, hay local folk song!)
I’ve got two views of the current Labour Party. One is that it represents true socialism, the doctrine George Orwell may or may not have turned his back on. As I said earlier parts of it remind me of the absurd bad faith of so-called socialist leaders. But like lefties everywhere, clinging to whatever jetsam keeps us afloat, I believe every revolution ere now was betrayed.
So my alternate choice is the holometabolous Labour Party. It just grew up. And I never did.
These 541 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:58pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 26 May 2005
Straight On The Blogroll »
Third Avenue on the strength of Bias at the Beeb.
Norvell’s article starts with the news that a former BBC reporter, Robin Aitken, has come out as a Tory and accused the BBC of being a rabid lefty breeding ground. Norvell states:
Those of us who pay the BBC’s annual £120 license fee but grit our teeth every time we watch one of its news programs have floundered for some time in search of a term to describe what ails the corporation. Mr. Aitken, a 25-year veteran reporter now retired, has put his finger on it: institutionalised leftism.
The phrase is a play on one — “institutional racism” — currently in vogue among the professionally aggrieved. It’s frequently lobbed when the forces of multicultural goodness can’t point to specific proof of racism in an organisation but just know deep down that something is amiss.
Ah, the sweet irony. When the left moans about ‘institutional racism’, they are classed as the ‘professionally aggrieved’ who can’t point to ‘specific proof’. When the right moans about institutionalised leftism, well, it’s common sense, innit?
Even better is the quotation from Norvell:
The BBC’s world is one in which America is always wrong, George W. Bush is a knuckle-dragging simpleton, people of faith are frightening ignoramuses, and capitalism is a rot on the fabric of social justice. Through this prism, the United Nations is the world’s supreme moral authority, multiculturalism is always a force for good, war is never warranted, and U.S. Republicans sprinkle Third World children over their Cheerios for breakfast.
What’s to argue with that? George Bush is a brain-damaged knuckle-dragging simpleton, people of faith are frightening ignoramuses, etc. I’d prefer the UN (no shock horror, is — Kofi Annan’s skin tone … coffee … give us back Karl Waldheim, Henry Kissinger, they had moral authority! weep the popinjays and Little Green Fedayeen of the world) to the US. We’re a part of the UN. Crazy little thing called democracy. Charles Johnson fans probably missed it at school, too busy impregnating their sisters or whatever Southerners do for fun now lynching is illegal.
This is, of course, the same BBC that, according to a fact-based (remember facts?) academic study on the media response to the Iraq war, was found to be the most likely of all UK broadcasters to swallow the pro-war government line (even more likely than Sky News!). But far be it from Biased BBC or Fox News to sully themselves with such niceties. After all, as self-confessed ‘professionally aggrieved’, they don’t need to point to ‘specific proof’. They just ‘know deep down’ that the BBC is against the war and against the Americans.
Ah facts. That’s why the anti-BBC highbrows, like Jon on Peter Cutherbertson’s comments, just fabricate total rubbish. What are facts when you have the truth? (This used to be a Marxist position, shooting at the petty bourgeois; now the right have adopted it. God help them.)
Nicely argued, logically coherent piece. There’s a line in “Jerry Springer: the Opera” which the BBC broadcast merely to upset “people of faith.” (This is Britain; there aren’t any. The Frogs call us “Les Fuck Offs” with good reason.) BBC watchers heed this:
There is only one cure for unrequited love
Chocolate and howling at the moon
Ah-wooh!!!
Keep on Howlin’ my Big Bad Wolves. (Were those pop culture references or were you pleased to see me?)
These 218 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:33am GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 27 May 2005
No Posts For You! »
Seriously, I’ve gone and screwed up my computer (possibly fatally; the controlling fuse in my fuseboard blew), so no posts while it’s in the tender care of Apple.
It better not be dead. I’ve had to reset my Gmail password already. Hate to think what else I’ve forgotten and rely on it knowing. Didn’t upload enough to iDisk either, now I think about it. Serious bummer.
Looks like I’ll have to watch Doctor Who without even thinking about writing about it. Looks like my post on The Empty Child is going to go unwritten too.
These 95 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:21pm GMT Permanent link.