You'll see glimpses in the deluge

So. It's been a couple of weeks since I started trying to break out a bit on here and write some different stuff. I am enjoying it tremendously. So before I slope off for a long weekend I thought I'd just write something to reflect on that.

At times I do worry that I write a bit too much - part of this whole thing had come with the intention of writing less often, but better, but that doesn't turn out to have been the case. If anything, I appear to be writing more than ever, which isn't quite what I'd been hoping for. I worry that perhaps a bit of quality might be lost and I might be spreading myself a bit too thinly. But then I think: no, actually, quality isn't a finite thing. Sometimes you can write three or four things in a row that you really like, and then not do some for ages, but that doesn't mean your first post back will be any good, because it probably won't be. Writing, for me at least and I may not be a typical (or indeed good) writer, is something I need to keep doing to get better at it. A lot of the time I think I'm trying to outdo myself, which is probably no bad thing. I also seem to be fluctuating from not swearing at all to swearing a great deal, not sure why, but I'm not overly concerned. Some things, like Fucking Bigtrak, need a good swear.

I really liked this as well, which I discovered this week. Me, a 'deluger'. That makes me smile, that someone would take the time to set up a list and put me in it, because they wanted to read what I wrote, despite the fact I also occasionally (or even frequently, who knows) annoyed the hell out of them. It's a handy workaround for people you want to read but who turn up a bit too often, like me. So I don't mind if you'd rather list me as a 'deluger' so you can take a breather when I'm rabbiting on a bit too much; it's probably a more elegant solution than my unfollow-refollow business. I'm rather proud of being a 'deluger'.

And there are glimpses of better things to come, I think. There are always glimpses, and that's often enough. A couple of weeks ago this blogging lark didn't seem a great deal of fun; now it seems more fun than ever.

Obviously this post is one of the rubbish ones you have to wade through to get to the good ones, but that's unfortunately how I seem to be doing things at the moment.

I'll stop over-analysing. And writing.

Now.

MMR Mail comment gold

Props to the Mail for allowing, on this story:



this comment:



I wonder how long it'll stay there. But ace.

Spotter's badge: @eluxoso

Anorexia and the Mail vol 8,432

One of the most frustrating things about the Daily Mail is that it is, occasionally, an excellent newspaper. Here's an inspiring story about one woman's battle with anorexia:



But, as ever, they have to give with one hand and take with the other. Also in today's Mail, it's the latest in a long saga involving bitchy comments about photos of Natalie Cassidy:



In the story there's a plausible deniability about bitchiness regarding Cassidy's figure, though it later mentions how she 'piled on the weight':



So it's only in the comments that this kind of thing is allowed:



So there you have it. One the one hand, a real-life story about one person's battle with anorexia - on the other, bitchy sniping comments at someone who apparently isn't thin enough. It's the same old story.

It's a mental picture all right

I know I shouldn't do it, but I accidentally let the mouse wheel creak round a notch when I was reading this relatively interesting Telegraph blog story about Labour's PR own-goal over 'Change We Can See'. And I found this comment by Phil Kean, which is a classic of its type, I think you may agree. It sums so many things up beautifully about what you find underneath stories in the comment boxes, you could be forgiven for thinking it verges on parody. But I think this is all sincerely meant:

A mental picture of Labour’s achievements since 1997

* UK bound illegal immigrants massing in Sangatte
* Fat, career benefit claimants sat in front of the TV
* Drunken girls fighting outside a pub at 1:30 am
* Reams of costly regulations sitting on my desk
* The sun reflecting off of a speed camera on the A3
* The sneaky paedophiles hiding around every corner
* The big yellow signs that say…. £1.16 per litre
* The tax bill I paid this morning
* Dole scrounging aliens calling UK soldiers murderers
* A shop full to the brim with Chinese imports
* The empty space where once stood a beat policeman
* The car tax disc costing more than some cars
* Very young girls pushing prams
* 3rd world countries humiliating UK armed forces
* Britain as the world’s laughing stock
* Brown & Blair stepping off their chartered BA 777
* Pay nothing for 1st year, then 5 years interest free
* Hayes – Middlesex, or Karachi?
* The end of saved-for luxury items – a ‘must have’?
* A knife glistening as it catches the sun’s light
* India’s space missions – Britain’s baby bonds
* Fat people waddling down the road like pregnant ducks
* Can’t read, can’t talk, can’t write – ready for work
* The have-a-go hero sentenced to 5 years in prison
* The teenage girl ignoring me as I hold the door open
* CCTV & bolted gates on schools & nurseries
* Talent: – Elton, Bowie, Floyd? – No, Leona & Cheryl
* All foreign English football clubs – Uhh?
* The death of Great Britain

I love so many things about this. I love that Phil is so angry about fat people that he has to mention them twice, and blame the Government for the fact that people eat too much. (And those fatties had better watch out if they're kids, because there are paedophiles on every corner. Every corner? Every. So here's a tip - just don't go around any corner, because there's a paedo waiting.*) I love that he blames the Labour Government for the lack of an Elton John, a David Bowie, a Pink Floyd, in this musical generation. I love the poetic but also slightly worrying description of "a knife glinting as it catches the sun's light", though to be fair he did practise that with "the sun reflecting off a speed camera on the A3" to make sure he got it right. Hey, at least the sun appears to be shining in Britain under a Labour Government though, Phil, count your blessings eh? Even if it is only glinting off knives and speed cameras. Oh, and the fact that he can't help himself to a thinly veiled "Hayes - Middlesex or Karachi?". I'd say Middlesex probably, Phil, but what do I know? I did undertake some education under a Labour Government so it's possible that I am as thick as pigshit and don't know where places are any more. Above all, I love the horror of PAY NOTHING NOW, THEN FIVE YEARS INTEREST FREE. The bastards. How dare Labour allow a situation in which people could spread payments for large items over several years, without having to pay interest on those payments. The dirty rotters!

Relatedly, here's a marvellous quote from the master of patrolling the world of internet comments, Speak You're Branes, when faced with an entry about "Clown and Starling":

Starling? Who the fucking cock is fucking Starling? Is it some kind of sideways reference to Josef Stalin, Soviet leader 1878-1953, but with an ‘r’ and a ‘g’ jammed in there so it’s an entirely different word? Is it the bird? I don’t know that much about birds. Are starlings like magpies, but for taxes instead of shiny stuff? Are they notorious as the absolute worst bird at overseeing a national economy? Or is it, as I suspect, that tedious moron Douglas Lee is physically incapable of either calling a politician by their real name or thinking up an even slightly witty substitute for ‘Darling’?

I’m just fed up with this. I sometimes assume Harriet’s surname means ’son of Harper’ before realising that if that actually was her name I wouldn’t ever get to read it. Every time I summon up the masocourage to look at a right-wing blog and see if I’ve not been wrong all along, I have to waste twenty minutes of my precious life ploughing through the sixty-two latest hilarious incarnations of Comrade (Has-)Bean Jocksky Bottler McLeonidBrezhnev Tartantits One-Eyed Idiot Barry “Bagpipe” Soetero Haggisface until I finally get to some lazy variation on “McBroon” and work out it must be the Prime Minister.

Though I suppose they’re just as stumped when they read ‘Gordon Brown’.

Now that's funny.

* Phil also complains about "CCTV & bolted gates on schools & nurseries" - but surely these are wise precautions if there are sneaky paedophiles hiding around every corner? Maybe those measures are just symptomatic of Labour's paedophile boom; they obviously wouldn't be evidence that we're so worried about 'paedophiles around every corner' that we're turning schools into prisons.

By far the greatest team

As a football fan, you'd better get used to defeat, because it happens all the time. Those of us who struggled through school - and continue to limp along, in our adult lives - knowing we'd never get bragging rights, because our teams would never be a Liverpool, an Arsenal, a Manchester United, are used to that feeling more than most.

Each defeat on the pitch is a little tragedy, one which seems to be more and more easy to deal with as time passes and I get a bit older. That's to be expected, though there's a bittersweet feeling attached to knowing about that. You wish that you did care as much as you used to; you wish that it felt as marvellous as it used to when your team manages to win; you wish it felt as painful as it used to when they don't.

But there are other defeats, too. Longer-term defeats. The kind of defeats that are harder to take - when the club you follow, or love, or whatever verb you have nowadays, can't pay its bills, so starts to fall apart. That's what is happening to Crystal Palace, a team I've followed for many years, though I haven't been to see them in a long time because of one thing and another - now they're in administration, facing relegation and a long, hard slog to get back to reality. It's a harder kind of defeat to process in your mind, because there's something about the whole sport that seems to be wrong if this kind of thing is allowed to happen. But it does happen. Palace weren't the first and they won't be the last.

Of course it's worth pointing out that it's right that clubs should be penalised for not being able to pay their debts and going into administration. You have to remember the creditors, many of which are local businesses, who haven't been paid, and who may well not see any money at all. It's not fair to anyone if clubs were to be allowed to accumulate vast amounts of debt, say "Whoops!" and then kick off again five minutes later with a clean slate.

I suppose you could say it was never the fans who borrowed too much, knowing how much money was coming in and how much was going out. It wasn't the fans who ran up the debts, so why should they suffer? But in all this, I wonder how much responsibility may, or should, be placed with them - or us, if I include myself, which I should. Were we the ones who told our clubs to reach too far? Were we the ones who demanded success, who felt that a few seasons in the Championship wasn't good enough, who urged those in charge, regardless of their competence or otherwise, to do whatever it took to reach the promised land of the Premiership, at any cost?

In a lot of ways you can look at it like the disease of English football anyway - the route-one demand to stick the ball up there as quickly as possible and hope that it gets bundled in is comparable, you could say, with the demand to punt a team to the top of the football pyramid without years of consolidation. We just don't want to build up from the back. We'd rather forget about all that fancy Dan stuff, pick a team full of tall players and hoof away, keeping our fingers crossed that it'll be all right. We get big target men as chairmen, and hope they'll manage to fluke our teams over the line, rather than creating a better chance of success by constant pressure, good hard work and a focus on development. Do we wait and hope the young players come through the ranks? Or do we demand that managers go out and buy journeymen pros who keep the local kids out of the side?

Not that academies count for much nowadays, anyway. You can hope that one of your kiddies gets good, but your chances are limited. The best players in your catchment area will have been siphoned off by the Premiership big boys long before you've ever had a chance to see them in action. You might get them back when they're 25 and have failed at the top level, but that's about it. Even if you do manage to develop a teenager, they can nip off when the time's right, leaving you with minimal compensation, and you might get a couple of sell-on fees, but that's pretty much that.

It's hard to take because these little collapses happening up and down the football league are just a symptom of something going quietly wrong with a national sport which hands out billions of pounds to clubs who can't fill their stadiums with enough paying punters. Talk about the gap between rich and poor getting wider - nowhere is it more extreme than in the recession-free bubble of professional football. On the one hand, massive clubs with huge squads, pots of TV money to burn and the ability to run up monumental debts secured by bigtime investors; on the other, smaller clubs who tried to be like the massive clubs, but didn't have the backing, or the fanbase, or the luck, or any combination of things, and who have ended up falling back down to earth with a bump.

The football league is littered with those noble failures. Some came back, and some might never recover from the pain of financial collapse. The fans kept coming through the turnstiles, but it wasn't enough. It isn't enough. There was a time when the lifeblood of a club were the fans who were prepared to turn out and watch the games - they could legitimately claim to have some bearing on the fortunes or otherwise of the badge they supported. No longer. Now it doesn't matter if the top teams play to empty stadiums, with no fans caring one way or the other at home - the millions will still pour in.

I started off writing this, thinking that I would say that I didn't care so much about things any more - that this decline in the club I used to watch twice a week was somehow a disappointing lack of disappointment. That was what I was going to say, anyway. But then I started writing this, and I started feeling quite nostalgic, and then that nostalgia made me angry for the way in which that sport I used to follow is not the same one that's there in its place now. There are all kinds of things that can make you feel nostalgic about football - a memory of a particular match, or a goal, or just the experience of going.

For me, it was just the being there, being part of something, being among all those other people, who had come to this same place by car and train and whatever, and who all were singing the same songs, cheering the same players, being part of the same thing. It actually makes me angry that that feeling is dwindling, because it's that feeling I loved so much. Does it matter if you don't have the cash to try and reach the very top? Does it matter if you don't gamble, but don't go under either? Isn't just the being there, enjoying what you're being part of, enough? Or must there always be that insane desire to think that the game little triers in front of us under the floodlights are really "by far the greatest team the world has ever seen"?

They aren't, and you know they aren't, but to me, somewhere, the whole experience is the greatest thing the world has ever seen. I haven't been to a match in years involving my team anyway, but I suddenly want to go and see one, now there's the threat of it possibly being taken away for good. I suppose that's how football gets you, why you can never really get away. No matter how much you tell yourself it doesn't matter, it still does. It still hurts to lose. And somehow, that's a thing that brings me comfort.

Yes. Yes they do.

Psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa doesn't mince his words in his column for Psychology Today:

British Newspapers Make Things Up

Most people reading this will probably, at one stage or another, had that exasperated, angry moment when they realised that what they were reading in their newspaper, presented as fact, was patently not fact at all. Then there was probably that other moment, when we realised it wasn't just the red-top tabloids who were capable of lying to us, but even the big-boy newspapers who claim to be respectable. Kanazawa has written about it before, and has now seen that moment of realisation strike a colleague:

In the earlier post, I explain that, by the American standards, all British newspapers are tabloids because they don’t distinguish between what is true and what they make up. I knew this from my own experiences of dealing with British journalists, but, as it turns out, even the British government admits, in an official government publication, that British newspapers make things up and report them as facts.

Most British people consider the Times of London to be the most respectable “broadsheet” newspaper (as opposed to “tabloid” newspapers) in the UK... Last week, the Sunday Times published an article with the headline “Blonde women born to be warrior princesses.” The article reported that “Researchers claim that blondes are more likely to display a “warlike” streak because they attract more attention than other women and are used to getting their own way – the so-called “princess effect.”” The Times article quotes the evolutionary psychologist at the University of California – Santa Barbara, Aaron Sell, and his findings are purportedly published in his article in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, written with the two Deans of Modern Evolutionary Psychology, Leda Cosmides and John Tooby.

As it turns out, however, none of this is true, as Sell explains in his angry letter to the Times. He and his coauthors do not mention blondes at all in their paper and they don’t even have hair color in their data.

For newspapers, though, including the Times, who may have done the stuff themselves or simply C&V'd it off a fellow publication, none of this matters. It doesn't matter what the contents of things actually is, so long as it makes a good story. You can see this in a couple of ways, and I'm always torn. Is it agenda-driven nonsense on a mission to distort, or is it simply ignorant contempt of telling the truth and desperation to make 'a good story', no matter how misleading it might be? I think it varies. Perhaps we can be charitable and say the Sunday Times story was simply crass journalism and highly ignorant. That might be better.

This is eerily reminiscent of my own experience with a British journalist. He interviewed me in 2006 about one of my articles, which demonstrates, among other things, that the average intelligence of a population is positively correlated with the health of the population everywhere in the world, except in Africa. The headline of the article he wrote? “Low IQs are Africa’s curse, says lecturer.”

Kanazawa doesn't mention the publication by name, but it was the Observer. Like I said the other day, it's important to get these things right, because of the effect they have on the people involved; but there's an additional element. Look at the glee with which that headline was snapped up by the Stormfront ultra-nationalist forum:



That's why it's important to get things right. Sure, it might be 'a better story' if you can hammer someone else's quotes and carefully thought out academic views into a couple of handy paragraphs that don't quite say the same thing, but there's nothing wrong in reporting something complicated as being complicated - in fact, it's demonstrably harmful to do so, playing into the hands of extremists.

I hope American and British readers (and readers throughout the world) will finally wake up to the reality of British journalism: You just cannot believe what you read in British newspapers. I’d further call on my academic colleagues on both sides of the Atlantic never to speak to British reporters. You have absolutely no control over what they say about you and your scientific research.

The only hope is that there are greater opportunities nowadays for those involved in damaging newspaper reports to voice their concerns and put their side of the story - not just as a couple of sentences 'for balance' at the end of the article, but by publishing a response that can be widely seen through the internet. That's something positive, but it wouldn't even be necessary if we could trust our press to get things right, to represent things accurately without misleading. But I am not so sure we can.

Thanks to @flinderella for the nudge!

Fucking Bigtrak

And yes, I mean "fucking Bigtrak". If I wanted to say Bigtrak I'd say Bigtrak. But no. I mean fucking Bigtrak. The intensifier is important. I'd even, tmetically, go for "Big-fucking-trak" if "fucking Bigtrak" didn't sound so right. As in "What was that little robot thing on wheels that you couldn't afford?" - "Oh, that was fucking Bigtrak, thanks for dredging up all those dark memories, you utter bastard.

Yes, Bigtrak is back:

Bigtrak was one of the awesomest toys of the 1980s (actually introduced in 1979), and, like other 80s icons, Knight Rider and the A-Team, it is staging a comeback.

Like other icons of the 1980s which have been resurrected, like Knight Rider and the A-Team, it's going to be a pretty shite shadow of the former glory. (I mean, Val Kilmer doing Kitt's voice? Hello?) One reason for this is quite understandable. I'm not fucking eight years old any more. The pleasure of a fucking toy on wheels that you could program to bring you in a can of Coke - yes, it would drive a fucking can of Coke from your kitchen to your living room, through the magic of complex programming sequences all punched into its space-age 10-digit keypad, no less - is not the same when you're not a tiny child staring in wonderment at this mass of battery power and plastic struggling to power its way through the shagpile with a weighty Coke can on its robot back, and you are in fact a rather pathetic, tragic-looking old man, who was once an eight-year-old boy who marvelled at the fucking Bigtrak, but whose parents couldn't afford one; or worse, could afford one, but thought it was shit, so got you some fucking Kenny Dalglish football boots for your birthday instead, like that was any fucking kind of substitute - like it was even comparable!

Of course, I have a feeling this new Bigtrak isn't going to be aimed at the kids. It'll be aimed at those beta-male dads who never quite got around to playing with the fucking Bigtrak in the first place, but who now have the disposable income to say: "Do you know what, fuck it. The bills may be piling up and the credit cards may be right on the limit, and the kids may need clothes and lunches and all that shit, but I'm going to buy myself a fucking Bigtrak, because I want one, because I've spent all this time earning money and I want it, so there, and I'll pretend it's for the children, but secretly I'm not going to let them touch it, because it's mine, and it's going to take away all those horrible memories of having to watch the fucking Bigtrak adverts on the TV, knowing deep down that I could never have one, and there would always be a fucking Bigtrak-sized hole in my heart."

Fucking Bigtrak.

Of course, I want one. Oh, I won't lie to you. I want one, all right. I want one now. I want to have one, just because I can. I might buy it just to break it. I might drive the fucking Bigtrak off the side of a bridge, just to punish it for having taunted me throughout primary school. I might program it to drive into the bypass at rush hour, see how the little bastard enjoys that. I might just buy it, just to have it in the box. And then, at Christmas time, I'll wrap it up and stick it under the tree, then look puzzled when I see it there, then unwrap it excitedly and say "YES! Yes! At fucking last! This should have happened twenty-six fucking bastard years ago! Then I'd have fucking well turned out all right! If only I'd had the fucking Bigtrak, everything would have been OK! But no. Oh no! No. No, and now look at me. A broken man on the cusp of middle-age and desperate decline, sending presents to himself and pretending to be surprised, despite having gone to the shop and bought the wrapping paper, and wrapped it, and hidden it at the back of the wardrobe."

Or something like that.

Fucking Bigtrak. Your 'trak' wasn't even that 'big' anyway.

You still haunt me.

Mail & ME update

You'll remember a while ago the Mail asked "Is ME real?" and then said sorry for having done so, blaming it on a 'junior' staff member.

Well today it's pleasing to see that there's a solid amount of coverage of the Kay Gilderdale story - here, and here, and here. Interesting reading it is, too.

Mail feminism

It's not hypocritical to cover a wide range of views. Of course not. Even having articles with opposing views from one way to another doesn't necessarily imply a flakiness; it's often a strength in a publication to have a variety of opinions.

However.

Here's an article in yesterday's Daily Mail, complaining about, well you can see for yourself:



OK. But how to illustrate the problem of women feeling that their bodies are their only passport to success? Hmm, it's a tricky one, but they went for:







You might possibly conceive that those images aren't just depicting the horror of women feeling that the only way they could achieve things in life would be to present themselves in a certain sexualised way; and that, just possibly, there could be a sliver of a chance of them being titillating. If you did think that, the next image might be a little bit disturbing:



Hmm. Not so sure about that, after all those other ones. But that may just be me. This quote stood out in the piece:



Yes, it's the internet's fault for damaging young women's expectations. It wouldn't be the case that a family newspaper would present images of barely clothed women to its readers in a way that isn't a million miles away from a lad's mag, would it?

Would it?

You know what's coming by now. Published today by the Mail comes this:




Ah, 'totty'. A bit of a contrast to that story yesterday, isn't it?



Yes, I read something about that yesterday. Can't remember where it was... ah well. It wouldn't be as if the same publication would slobber over pictures of a woman in a bikini and call her 'totty' in a 'saucy shoot', would it?

Oh, it would.

Thanks to Sadie for the links!

The cheeky unfollow/re-follow

I don't like watching other people's arguments. If I wanted to do that, I'd go down to Ikea on a Saturday afternoon. So when I see people arguing with each other on Twitter, I tend to find it pretty irritating.

It's just a personal preference, and yes, I understand that there can be some fun to be had by a good old electronic virtual ding-dong - I should imagine for some people it's like cyber sex but without the happy finish. But it's not really my kind of thing. And I don't really like to play gooseberry while I watch a couple of other people going at it all afternoon.

Which is why, sometimes, I use the tactical unfollow for a few hours to let things breeze away. Think of it as a mute button for those times when you're having a row with someone else and I don't want to be the sad-faced kid sat at the top of the stairs, wondering whether mummy and daddy are going to be living in separate houses.

It's just a personal preference and I will follow back when the dust has settled and everyone's friends again. So don't go getting all hissy and blocking me because you think I've unfollowed you for another reason - and yes, this means you, Power, you tool - because that's all there is to it.

A question of harassment

This story should worry anyone. A blogger has been paid a visit by cops after he wrote something that someone else didn't like. Instead of writing back, or defending himself, troublesome vicar Stephen Sizer complained to the fuzz of 'harassment' and the writer in question deleted his blog.

Here is a genuine attack on the freedom of speech. But of course, it's not an attack on the right of some cretinous idiot to be borderline racist and get handsomely paid for it. So I imagine those who came roaring out of their kennels in defence of Rod Liddle's freedom of speech and right to offend will be strangely less keen about this one. After all, it's not as if this blogger might be their boss in a couple of weeks' time, so the incentive to care is much less weighty.

We don't know exactly what was said, so there must be some caution. If people do stuff that verges on the deeply unpleasant, then of course others are entitled to take whatever action they see fit. But you can't help wondering if, in this case, the law appears to be favouring a particular kind of 'thought crime' that didn't exist previously. Is 'harassment' really what's going on here?

Props, then, to Melanie Phillips for exposing this terrible story in the mainstream - though you have to wonder exactly how much she would be reporting it if it were someone on the other side of that Israel/anti-Israel argument and how much their freedom of speech would matter. And yes, when you read what else she's written in the past couple of days, it does tend to weaken the good work she does do under certain circumstances. But still. Someone in the mainstream has noticed that this has happened.

People do have the right to offend, as bigshot journalists in cosy offices do and as we tiny insignificant bloggers do. Other people have the right to complain, to speak out against them, to tell them they're wrong. That's all fair enough. But going to the police about harassment? This sits very uneasily. Other bloggers I know have been accused of 'harassment' simply for trying to get their facts right, and those wailing about the 'harassment' have known that very well, and refused to co-operate, and behaved entirely shabbily. It's not 'harassment' to write something about someone else. It's not 'harassment' as long as it doesn't verge on the intensely personal, or become malicious or stalkerish. Crying 'victim' when others are simply writing about you is a pretty unpleasant thing to do.

I write the songs

Writing about writing - for example writing the other day, as I did, about writing, and also writing about writing about writing, in places, you could argue, though I won't be writing about that - isn't always sparkling entertainment*.

It made me think of songs about songwriting, and how little I've been entertained by them down the years. There's something so awkwardly postmodern about it, it's almost gurning to camera with a twinkle in the eye and a "Look at me, do you see what I'm doing? I'm doing it, I am"** - it grates like hell. Which is my way of saying: I'm sorry if you get annoyed when I start writing about writing. But it's also my way of saying: these things might happen from time to time and I kind of feel like I need to do it, as irritating as it might be for everyone else.

Let me take you back to a school disco, around about 1986. Earlier or later if you like. Chairs along the walls. Fumbling. Red faces. That sort of thing. What was the make-out song to end all make-out songs? Yes. True by Spandau Ballet. I remember buying the album, many years later, not to recreate that sense of hesitant adolescent misery, I might add, but just because I quite liked it - and then I read the lyrics:

Always slipping from my hands,
Sand's a time of it's own.
Take your seaside arms and write the next line,
Oh, I want the truth to be known.......

Drivel. 'Seaside arms'? What the fuck?

I bought a ticket to the world,
But now I've come back again.
Why do I find it hard to write the next line?
When I want the truth to be said.......

Why do you find it hard to write the next line? I have a fair idea. I imagine you'd struggle with a shopping list, Kemp, if that's as good as it gets. And yet... we never noticed at the time. Too busy with tongues, and associated fun. You forget sometimes just how bad things are, then you re-discover them, and become disappointed. The 'writing about writing' is what kills that song. It's almost a cry for help. "Help! I don't know what to do! Seaside arms! There we go! Phew, finished!"

See also:

You've got this look I can't describe,
You make me feel like I'm alive,
When everything else is au fait,
Without a doubt you're on my side,
Heaven has been away too long,
Can't find the words to write this song,
Oh...

by Corinne Bailey Rae. Or even this gem of all gems, by Reginald:



Now I've not been to too many travelling shows, but where were all the potions? I imagine that was one of the verses that got Bernie Taupin 'quite cross'; if not, it bloody well ought to have been. If I was a songwriter... but then again, will this do Elton? Good show.

I think the ultimate example, though, of when songs about songwriting become so excruciatingly self-indulgent that you want to smash your teeth out with a dirty hammer just to make the pain go away, is this delight, from Natasha Bedingfield:

Trying to find the magic
Trying to write a classic
Don't you know, don't you know, don't you know?
Waste-bin full of paper
Clever rhymes, see you later

Imagine what she threw away, if that made the final version?

Read some Byron, Shelly and Keats
Recited it over a Hip-Hop beat
I'm having trouble saying what I mean
With dead poets and drum machines

If it doesn't hurt to read that, I don't know what will hurt you.

So, to sum up: writing about writing is a pain. It can be pretty shambolic at the best of times. So I won't do it again. (Well, I probably will, actually, but I'll bear this in mind when I do.)

* And now I'm writing about that. That's a whole new level of orouboros, isn't it? Or, to put it another way - though doubtless some meandering fool would pluck it out of context and then drop it into his once-readable Independent column and use it as evidence of me not being as shatteringly intellectual as his soaring heights of "you could cut a deck of cards with her cunt"; oh if only I could aspire to climb to your lofty levels, Howard - disappearing up your own arse.
** The only occasion of that I can think of that's any good is Eddie Murphy's static-faced glance through the fourth wall in Trading Places. You can see it here and see if you agree.

Why it's important to get it right

So here's the story. Writer writes something in blog. It gets taken out of context by the Irish Mail on Sunday. And this is how it feels:

The Mail never told me they were writing a piece about my blog. The journalist who wrote it never sent me an email asking me questions about my blog. I won’t do to his professional reputation what he has done to mine, but let’s just say that I wonder whether he would have expected me to answer his questions the way he wanted.

As it is, in the middle of an incredibly trying time for my colleagues, an article has appeared in a Sunday Newspaper that says I feel abused by the people I work with. It gives me opinions that I do not have, and uses words I have never said. It does so to attack my profession, impugn my employers, and portray me as a victim of my friends.

I feel sick. Any future employer could fairly read what Luke Byrne has written about me and conclude that I am a disloyal, untrustworthy person. The people I work with today could, and probably have, read it and decided that I am not on their side, and that I think that they are sexist, nasty, bullies. None of this is true.

Brilliant.

That's why accuracy matters. And you've still got time to write to the PCC today to let them know how you'd like things to change.

Cameron: Naughty swan, bad swan

News of a 'swan divorce' has prompted Conservative leader David Cameron to make the following statement:

"Look, these swans are just one element of our broken society. Once upon a time, swans stayed together whether they liked each other or not, as is right and proper, but now they're shunning those traditional roles and leaving their cygnets to grow up in a divided and broken home, all because of liberals somewhere, probably.

"It's no coincidence that this swan divorce happened under a Labour Government. Sure, it's an extremely rare event and I'm going to tell you that it's wrong to make political capital out of it. But having said that, it is Labour's fault. These swans simply wouldn't have split up, had they been incentivised to stay together by our Married Swan Allowance.

"Only the other day I saw a swan attack a deer!



"Look at that! Did you ever see that under a Conservative Government? These are swans who have grown up in Broken Britain, with namby-pamby PC-gone-mad health and safety telling them they shouldn't do things which might endanger them, which they should of course be allowed to do, unless I disapprove of it, in which case, why isn't anyone telling them not to do it? Next you'll be seeing swans attacking men in canoes at knifepoint!



"Did you see the little blade under his feathers? That's just a symptom of what's gone wrong. What we need are more prison ships for swans! Pull their feathers off! Put them on boats! Slap them round the beak! Dress up in nice red coats and chase them with a pack of dogs! That'll teach them!"

Inspired by @norock and @DanW9

Bleak beauty

Television. God, I love television. I love the way it surprises you, every now and then, with something that really slaps you in the face. Every now and then - not always, and seemingly much less rarely than before - you can find something that's such a cut above the usual dross that it's stunning.*

Yes. Wallander, the gloomy Swedish detective, Kenneth Branagh looking mournful in a Volvo, Midsomer Murders set in Ikea... and yet, and yet... it's so much more than all the cliches you can set up like skittles. I really think it's a bit special, and there are a few reasons for that.

I know what you're meant to say - that the Swedish originals were better, much more stark, much less cosy, more authentic to the books, and so on - and while I found myself intrigued by them, I wasn't entirely gripped. I don't know if I can put it down to one particular thing that's different about the English version, but perhaps, if I were to try and call it, it would be Kenneth Branagh's performance.

In other detective shows, I think the detectives' private lives are sub-plots to rumble alongside the main action of killing, bulk out the script to an hour and forty and give you some distraction from guessing whodunnit. In Wallander, the central character's doubt, turmoil and despair are the story; the murders are secondary. Wallander isn't there to crack the case; quite often the cases crack him, leaving the sting of regret, remorse, guilt - all those things he could ordinarily evade. All those things he can't explain away. All those failures, and faults, and wrong turns. This isn't a leader, a charismatic figure, a maverick - just the one person we happen to be focussing on, frequently getting it wrong in his professional and personal relationships.

And there are other light touches with the character - the inability to conduct proper relationships; the unfriendliness of home; sleeping in chairs instead of in bed as a symptom of dysfunction; always at the mercy of the mobile phone with its curious, other-worldly ringtone.

Then there's the look of the thing, the majestic photography, endless summer fields stretching out around, the darkness of the interiors and the vast empty spaces both outdoors and indoors. This Wallander lives in a Hopper world, spending his time in restaurants, cafes, on the road, on his way to places, meeting strangers whose lives he can't quite change for the better, not getting there in time to do any good.

Also, there's the pace of it, the immersion, the threads that carry on from one story to another. Wallander kills a man and can't forget about it; spends most of the next episode haunted by what he's done. This is a world with consequences, where things really matter, where people really get hurt. It's a detective show, of course, and there are killers to be unmasked and brought to justice, but one where the Kensington Gore isn't just splatter, and has come, you can almost believe, from real human beings.

And you don't always get a happy ending, because of that. Wallander always offers the possibility that you might not get that redemption; that the crime can't be undone by finding the killer, and that the horrors remain in those who are left behind. These aren't cunning stories tied up with a bow once they're done a dusted; these are deeper, darker, more sinister - as you might imagine murders to be. The darkness spreads out across the screen, and touches everyone on it. It's quite hypnotic, quite brilliant.

Television. How I love you, television, when you bring me things like this.

* I don't know if it's the presence of the usual dross that makes the existence of the good stuff seem all the better, like lilies on a dung-pile; but I still tend to have high expectations for television, no matter how much it disappoints me. It still has the power to sparkle, even if you think it might not.

The 'moral recession'

It's fairly tawdry, this:

He will point to the torture and near death of two young boys in Edlington, South Yorkshire, as evidence of Labour's failings.

I assume, then, that James Bulger's torture and death was evidence of the Conservative Party's moral failings, and that Cameron would put the blame for that horrific crime squarely at the door of the then administration?

No...?

While stressing that the case is not typical, Mr Cameron is expected to cite it as a shocking example of what he calls Britain's broken society, one of the key themes of the party's campaign but a diagnosis rejected by the government.

Ah, Broken Society. I see. Of course, you or I might say a society in which politicians are prepared to exploit horrific and extraordinarily rare crimes involving the terrible suffering of children whose relatives are still trying to come to terms with what's happened, for the sake of a few votes, would be pretty broken. But I'm sure we'd be wrong, wouldn't we. If only a few more of us got married, then everything would be solved, and crimes like this would never happen at all.

Machetes

In Dispatches from Bongobongoland the other day, I spoke about the narratives that were being created around the Haiti earthquake event.

Most are familiar to all of us. For example, the camera in the aid truck, watching a sea of dark brown faces waiting for a handout, then the inevitable scrabbling around when it's thrown down. We, the viewers, literally look down on these people - do we see them as unfortunates or subordinates? There's a kind of 'feeding time' thing going on which doesn't sit entirely comfortably with me. You could well argue that these events are, of course, happening, so why not describe them? But the camera is always on the aid truck. We are always looking down. We are never in that sea of humanity, looking up.

I'd say that sort of thing, though, is a cliche, a bit hackneyed rather than being deliberately harmful in the impression it gives, other than a them-and-us narrative - which, after all, is how a lot of people do feel towards people in other lands, with vastly different lives and cultures. It can be an instinctive reaction.

The one that is a little different, though, is the one about machetes. Throughout the coverage of the Haiti disaster, the word machete has popped up again and again. Now that's not necessarily untrue, given that many people there will own machetes. But there's something else to it, I think, something less tangible. As soon as the word 'machete' is mentioned, it lights a little fire somewhere in the brain. There's something plantation-y about it, I think, there's that kind of idea going on. When we think of machetes, do we think of individuals having them as tools, or weapons to defend themselves? Or do we think of a mob of men - of a particular appearance - using them aggressively?

Scan through a few nationalist and ultra-nationalist blogs, for example, and you'll find almost visible salivation at the idea that Haitians are essentially a teeming mass of machete-wielding mobs, hacking each other to bits. One writer I found, for example, focussed on the fact that a 'looter' wore an Obama t-shirt, in a post tagged 'Negroes', and compared the scenes in Haiti to those in New Orleans. I wonder if that's not an unusual narrative - perhaps this is just the way we are trained to see disasters (if they happen to people who look a certain way): the lawless savages; the dumb black people too foolish to allow themselves to be helped by the benevolent whites and hampering the relief effort; above all, the machete.

But then, read this, from someone who's there:

John O'Shea, who runs the well-known Irish aid agency Goal, has joined this chorus, telling the Guardian he couldn't get his trucks from the Dominican Republic to Haiti because he had no guarantees his drivers wouldn't be "macheted to death on the way down". He added that Goal has no plans to deploy its much-needed doctors and nurses on the streets of Port-au-Prince.

From what I've observed, such chilling claims do not match the reality on the ground; and by trumpeting a distorted and sensational picture about the violence, some senior aid officials may be culpable of undermining the very aid effort they are supposed to be promoting. When I traveled into Haiti's disaster zone last week from the Dominican Republic, I did so alone and on a bus, whose passengers were mostly Haitians, including some living in the US. Since then, whether on the road to Port-au-Prince or within the city, I have not witnessed anyone wielding a gun, a machete or a club of any kind. Nor have I witnessed an act of violence. (I have seen one badly wounded man who had been shot in circumstances which were unclear and who was eventually rescued by US soldiers after an American reporter sought help.)

Is that, I wonder, the story that isn't being told? We're told that the lawlessness, the machetes, the gangs are what are stopping the help from getting through - essentially, that the suffering are responsible for their suffering, because they won't help themselves, because they have gone feral without the firm rule of law. The machete is the symbol of that. Are machetes used mainly as tools, or as weapons? If you were in Haiti, would you have one?

Inigo Gilmore concludes:

So John O'Shea, if you are reading this, I put down this challenge to you: if you are prepared, in the next few days, to bring an aid van or truck to the Dominican/Haitian border, I will travel with it into Port-au-Prince. I will even help you to distribute the aid.

People fear, because people are told to fear. But there's something else going on with the machete narrative, something a bit darker.

Links 21/1/10

Here are a couple of uplifting things first.

La Traviata in the market. Marvellous.

A proposal in Brixton. Awww, isn't it? Stop vomiting, misanthropes!*

There, that's the end of the fun.

Lenin's Tomb: 'There are no security issues'

This message, now coming from aid workers in the Red Cross and Partners in Health, starkly contradicts the racist coverage of the wire services, the mainstream newspapers, and the television channels and the websites belonging to all of the above...

Between The Hammer And The Anvil: Learning about war, with Hitchens - Chris, not Peter, btw

Feminazery: Your handy round-up of Daily Fail sexism

Obsolete: The illusion of safety

Amid all the predictable over-reaction to Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's successful attempt to set fire to himself, the first thing to go out the window was any sort of perspective. We are now after all fast approaching the fifth anniversary of the 7/7 attacks, which also marks the last successful attack by takfirist jihadists on a Western city. Not that al-Qaida and its franchises haven't tried to attack or haven't been plotting; it's just that all their attempts have either been spectacular failures or have been successfully prevented.

Pickled Politics: Meet the English Defence League's Asian poster boy

A Very Public Sociologist: Does political leadership matter?

Dave Semple: What to do about alcohol prices?

* If I subsequently find out this isn't true at all, and is some kind of stunt, I will be very annoyed and wreak vengeance on all concerned.

Haiti charity idea

I hereby pledge to donate the price of a charity single to a Haiti disaster appeal fund, but only if Simon Cowell and Bono do not release a charity single.

Who's with me?

Oh I wish that we could stop this D-I-V

Virginia Ironside, Mail, today:



Lots of things, really. It's a painful article, containing stuff like this



and this



and contains an awful lot of wearying self-flagellation from the author. "I felt - and rightly, I think - a complete failure," says Virginia. Too harsh on yourself, I think, although I think it would be a little unfair to ask why Ironside should feel a failure for something perfectly ordinary and sadly inevitable in some cases, which happens to a lot of people in their lives, when she could feel much more of a failure for writing rubbish like that.

Anyway, this all comes about because:



Ah, I see. Where is this 'divorce list' then? I imagine it'll be on the Debenhams website, given the enormous coverage in all the papers about it... hang on a minute, then, it's... er...



Mm. I'm not so sure that's actually what I was looking for. Still, it's provided fodder for gaseous eruptions like this, so it's served its purpose. Oh and by the way, this is the headline:



Spotter's badge: @badjournalism

Blogdoodles

The other day I mentioned there would be some changes around here, and this is an important one. I need to end the no-posts-yet-today anxiety that exists when it's about half-past ten in the morning and I haven't put anything up here. It's the easiest thing in the world to sit around worrying, thinking that you haven't updated your website, whereas in reality I think people prefer quality to quantity and can get bombarded by too many posts - profligacy is certainly why a lot of people unfollow me on Twitter, for example, and I can understand that. That and the fact I can be tremendously annoying, of course, but that's beside the point for the purposes of this post.

I know... I know. I'm posting the first post of the day to post about the fact that I shouldn't just post any old rubbish up here as the first post of the day, simply to have a post up and to quell the fears of no-posts-today-yet anxiety. That in itself is fairly self-defeating, but I hope this post serves as an example of just how bad things can be when someone just tries to write something for the sake of writing something - anything - instead of waiting to write something that's actually any good. So I hope you can ignore this. This is just telling you that this won't happen any more. It's here to demonstrate what shouldn't happen, and therefore has to exist. There's no point me saying this halfway through the day, having already posted a couple of things, because that wouldn't really have the same impact, would it?

On the other hand, of course, some of us - and I include 'me' in that 'us', for fairly obvious reasons, including but not exclusively the fact it wouldn't be an 'us' unless it had 'me' in it - do feel the need to write as and when it feels necessary. Think of posts like this as blogdoodles. They're not particularly spectacular or insightful things, but they can be useful for creating a bit of momentum and energy into writing. At least I think so.

I think the reason a lot of us do write on here - 'here' being the internet rather than a shopping list, for example - is that there are things we need to get out, things that wouldn't otherwise present themselves in the course of our normal conversations, things that need to be said because they rattle around in your brain like a ballbearing in a bucket and create quite a racket until you condemn them to paper - or, rather, electronic characters, and then they're gone, and they're quietened down a bit, and things become a bit more normal again. That's my experience, and that's why I take to blogging so enthusiastically. It's those things you can't say in ordinary life, or which you can't really get out in a couple of sentences, the slightly more complicated thoughts which take a while and which would usually be interrupted by a telephone ringing, or someone telling you that you're talking garbage (which may or may not be the case) or just some other obstacle being put in the way.

Writers - even failed writers like me, or should I say less successful writers - are frustrated speakers, sometimes, people who would like to be able to say out loud the things that bounce around in their consciousness. So I hope you can forgive the self-indulgence of this. It's not going to happen all the time. But it might happen sometimes. If it does, we can push through and forget it ever happened - except for the fact it's logged down on the blog, but never mind that, just look at the good bits and forget the banality like this.

So, essentially, what I am saying is: No more just posting for the sake of posting. I'll only post when there's something interesting to say. Unless I feel like posting something that isn't interesting, in which case I just will, and we'll pretend it never happened. I think that makes everything clear.

Ennui and Abba

Let's get over this 'Blue Monday' nonsense for a start, though. Today is the day that is, apparently, the most depressing of the year - some combination of some random figures, multiplied by bollocks and lazy journalism, and hey presto, you get stuff like this in the Independent, which offers as a handy suggestion to beat those January blues:

10 Visit Australia (it's lighter).

Do you think if I could be in Australia right now, I'd be here? It's not really a choice that I find myself making particularly often. "Ooh, shall I pop down the Co-op and stand in a queue of miserable people tut-tutting at Littlejohn while they're waiting to buy a boiled ham, or shall I fly off to Australia? Well, I do love the Co-op so very much, so I'd better stay here for the time being, despite the fact that this entire existence sucks the life out of me, leaving a dessicated, gaunt shell of despair and anxiety behind, repeating the same actions, day after day, so much so that I could pretty much be replaced by an inflatable idiot who pressed a few buttons on a keyboard every now and then and no-one would bloody notice, except if a bit of air got let out when someone spiked me with a staple by accident" - do you know what I mean?

I find it interesting, as someone who's struggled with depression through the years, that people try to think of complicated things like depression or ennui as something that can be traced back to a set of ingredients - a certain day of the year being the most depressing of all, for some reason. It detaches people's experiences from themselves, and puts in a host of external forces, rather than the real causes. As ever, I might find it easy to think of it as evidence that our newspapers aren't just lazy but prefer to think of complicated things, like mental health, in terms of A causes B, forgetting C, D, E through to Z, because that is a simpler narrative, one that's more easily explained, one that can be neatly tied up and forgotten about. Feeling fed up today? It's probably because it's the first Monday in the month - nothing more than that. All those feelings of ennui, tedium and torpor aren't because there are real problems, real things you should be bothered about... it's all because of the day of the year. It's pseudo-astrology. And it's balls.

Culture, other than news culture, can actually be much better at depicting stuff like ennui, or gloom, or brooding disappointment. I think that might be because the event-focused news media are not especially good at getting to grips with complicated, long-term stuff. Books are good at this - I of course love Georges Perec's Un Homme Qui Dort, especially its second-person accusatory tone of self-mockery and the escape into nowhere at the end - but it's not just books. I'll get onto Wallander at some other point this week, as it's the most brilliantly dark, introspective thing that's been on TV for ages, but we'll stick with Sweden for a bit of Arctic shade. I was listening to the radio this morning and heard the majestic "The Day Before You Came" by Abba. If you've not experienced this wondrous thing before, it sounds like this:



Oh, isn't it? A life so nondescript, so bland and tedious, that the central character can't even remember the details and so has to assume that they must have been the way they always were, even if they weren't. A life so unchanging and so repetitive that one day runs into another, the details unimportant, like episodes of Dallas or Marilyn French books 'or something in that style'. Lovely. In literature we're always expecting the epiphany; in The Day Before You Came, it's the moment before the epiphany, the ennui before the storm, the gloom preceding the transformation. And there's something else too: a sense in which there is no happy ending; the sense, perhaps, of separation between the subject and their lover, and, perhaps, that this ennui is returning again, and that life is, once more, 'without aim'. That's great art. That's ennui, and tedium, and never-changing despair, reflected upon from the point of view of someone who has been through an epiphany, but has seen it fade away.

Compared to which, "Ooh, it's Monday the 13th, no wonder we're all feeling a bit shitty" isn't quite the same.

The Two Davids

Just when you thought the era of sparkling British comedy was over, here come The Two Davids to brighten up your world. With their brilliant "We don't really understand Twitter, but we'll have a go at it, because it vaguely bashes the BBC, and no-one will even check any of this shit, and it'll get published, despite being spectacularly wrong, and yes, it really did take two of us to write this absolute fucking wankstain of an article" sketch, you'll be rolling in the aisles.

Just when you think the Express can't get any worse, it always goes and surprises you.

The Liddle Defence

He's doomed. He's finished. And it's his own fault.

Ever since Rod Liddle started getting so near the knuckle he'd gone down to the marrow, people have been defending him. You see racism everywhere where it isn't there, they say. He isn't racist, they say. It's not racist to be ignorant about crime, they say. It's against freedom of speech to want someone more skilful than this boorish twit from being a national newspaper editor, they say.

And now? Now he's left with his own feeble wafer-thin defence. Vile and racist things were posted to internet forums from his password-protected account, yet his story is they weren't put there by him, and he still carried on being a member of the forums and not asking for posts to be removed under his username, nor deleted them himself seeing as he had the fucking password and it was his account, nor switched username... well you can believe all that if you like, but god bless you if you do. There is a flimsy, teensy-weensy possibility, after all.

Go and have a laugh about the jokes about Jews being burnt at Auschwitz, you'll love it! Still not racist enough for you? Still a big leftie witch-hunt? How about calling Turks 'semi-house trained Muslim savages'? That one tickle you? No? Still thinking it's all a bit conspiracy against the big cuddly uncle? How about 'niggermeat'? Do you think that's a hilarious and clever word? Do you? Still not racist somehow? Do me a fucking favour. Whoever wrote that should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves as a human being. Even if he didn't write them - and there's a teensy-weensy possibility he didn't - he let them stay up on the site, under his username. He's gone. He's doomed.

Props to Sunny at Liberal Conspiracy for digging into the sewer and finding the really unpleasant examples, which the Mail on Sunday couldn't bring to its readers at the breakfast table.

It's a good investigation by the Mail, though with some caveats. Obviously, Liddle is referred to as a 'former Today editor' despite losing the job several years ago, just to get the BBC reference in first. Second, they complain about Liddle having a go at black-only organisations, which is a bit rich when you consider Richard Littlejohn was doing exactly the same in their own daily paper on Friday - and getting it entirely wrong. And finally, the story attracts some delightful comments like:

His language is appalling but his sentiments are spot on. They are not racialist but commonsense.
- Mike, Heraklion,Crete, 17/1/2010 12:02

How about the burning Jews joke, Mike? That one 'spot on' as well?

The tide is coming in

I won't link to it, because I'm pretty sure that it's a chunky bit of bait wiggled around for people to get angry about, like a jam sandwich in the middle of a picnic rug, awaiting ants, but Catherine Bennett writes today, somewhere or other, badly, about how it's not fair that anyone should try to stop Rod Liddle from being editor of the Independent, because, oh, something about free speech or something. It's cobblers. Of course it's cobblers. For a better description of why it's cobblers, go and read Sarah Ditum's splendid post over at Paperhouse.

What I want to concentrate on is why there's so much hostility towards Twitter, and other ways for proles, amateurs and riff-raff to have their say about things, and why it particularly comes from the dusty old corduroy world of print journalism, disapprovingly peering over the top of its spectacles at this rabble-rousing nonsense which is, as we read time and time again from people who often write about things so much more banal and dismal, "just about what you had for lunch".*

It's the same with journalists' frequent disdain for blogs, bloggery, bloggers and the blogosphere. Occasionally - or you could even say often - blogs are a source of tedious repetition, infantilism, ranting and poo-chucking; but that's not to say that, in being so, they're any much worse than what you might read from certain columnists. And yet, and yet... there's a sense in which columnists don't like taking potshots at each other, at their 'craft', for fear of denigrating their profession, their beautiful life. And who can blame them? But the trouble is, blogs and Twitter are here. They're here now, and they're getting bigger, and better.

Things like Facebook campaigns over the editorship of a national newspaper show, in fact, that people really do care about their media, and where it comes from. You can, wrongly, think it's playing the man where Liddle is concerned, but the trouble is, it's his own silly fault. If he wants to bring attention to himself by walking the racism tightrope, and quite frequently falling off, that's up to him. But this is not a world as it was a few years ago, where there weren't the opportunities for people to respond to such things and say, do you know what, Liddle, you're not even particularly funny, or good, or clever, and the racism isn't even the worst bit; it's just evidence of a laziness, a shitness, a lack of quality.

Old-style journalists who fear Twitter and Facebook and all those things probably do so because they can see what's happening. They can see that the tide's coming in and it's going to wash their sandcastles away. In order to prevent that from happening, they have to try and man the barricades for as long as possible. Blogs are trivial and banal, they'll say, not accountable, not as good as real proper journalism; Twitter is just a rent-a-mob of people who don't really know what they're talking about, getting whipped up into a frenzy, a baying rabble of people who don't know any better, who are urged into taking certain positions; and Facebook groups can simply be dismissed as the same kind of sheep-like mentality.

To do that, though, dismisses all those people who might quite independently think about things, and decide they want to make their voices heard. No longer should we imagine that it's only the bright little buttons of national newspapers who can achieve those lofty heights; I read five or six articles a day by amateurs which blow the pros away - though there are, of course, writers for national papers who are fun, exciting, interesting and think about things in a way that can be contrarian or provocative, but which can also be insightful. Rod Liddle is not one of them. He is just an arse. I say 'arse' but I mean 'twit'. And it's not impugning anyone's freedom of speech to say, using your own freedom of speech, that you think someone with more intelligence and skill should be editing the Independent. It's fair comment. More fair comment than saying "Fuck off back to where you're from, you Muslims", for example, and slightly less pathetic, I'd say.

The tide is coming in. Where once people could court controversy with their ill-thought-out drivel and there'd be no way of letting them know just how dumb they were being, now there are opportunities. That seems to be the way that things are going. You can either ridicule the entirety of Twitter, and imagine that you're the big clever people who've got the keys to the world, by dint of being slightly better at writing than other people, but the truth is that isn't the case. It's not mob rule. The mob are your readers. The mob are real people, who think for themselves. And if lots of them are saying you stink, it might not be because someone else has told them you stink; it could just be because you stink.

The tide is coming in.

* I had a cornish pasty from Lidl. It was ace. And a can of 29p generic energy drink, which tasted like it might well glow in the dark. There. That's what I had for lunch.

Comment policy: updated updated

You'll remember some time ago I attempted to put some ideas together for a comments policy. I just have a couple of additions to that:

11. Don't use 'Lie-bore'. If you use 'Lie-bore' or 'Nu-Lie-Bore', you're a twat. For me, the comment ends with 'Lie-bore'. You could go on, after saying 'Lie-bore', to make the most startlingly brilliant point in the history of the world, but guess what - no-one's going to read it because you said 'Lie-bore'. I'm the only one here allowed to use silly phrases to describe things. Actually, that isn't true, I'm not, but that's beside the point.

12. Actually, that'll do. I might let you get away with 'NuLab' if I'm feeling generous, but you be careful now.

Dispatches from Bongobongoland

I was just about to make a donation, then read this article, talk about tribal culture, how much of our money will be whittled away to these gangs of animals, catch the looters by all means but hand them to the authorities and get on helping each other survive, this behaviour belonged in the jungle 150 years ago. The problem is these people are damaging the relief funds for all the innocent people
- Paul Hutton, Abingdon UK, 17/1/2010 13:32

When there's a natural disaster, society inevitably breaks down. Horrific things happen when human beings are starving. And luckily we who aren't in Bongobongoland can sit in our comfy armchairs, grab a mouthful of popcorn and watch the madness, the misery and the despair unfold, all the time passing judgement on people in the most appalling of circumstances. Isn't it fun?

So you can imagine the excited lip-licking and "Oh this is going to be terrible" as Mail readers slowed down to look at the wreckage of this car accident in Haiti:



You mean to say people aren't queueing up in orderly lines for a pat on the head when their homes have been destroyed and they've had no food? How strange. It must be the fact that they aren't Westerners that's doing it, then. No wonder these savages are struggling - after all, it's important to mention voodoo, above all, when discussing Haiti, just to emphasise the point that these people are somehow backward, somehow savage, somehow less deserving of any sympathy, or indeed empathy if it ever existed in the first place. They aren't like us. That message is clear. And vigilantism and violence has taken over - vigilantism which, as you'll remember, was perfectly OK with Mail readers under other circumstances, but which is mysteriously suddenly a bad thing when it's Haitians doing it. I wonder why?

The narratives are clear. Here are the savages, in Bongobongoland, barely civilised at all, believing in voodoo, looting and turning to anarchy - because the white rescuers haven't come to the rescue yet. And there's a graphicness about the way in which these situations of violence are shown that wouldn't be acceptable under other circumstances:



The normal rules of journalism change, when there's a disaster involving non-whites. The bloated bodies can be shown. The bloodstains can happily be sprayed across our screens. The whole eviscerated unpleasantness can be put right in front of us - after all, only 16 Brits were believed to be among the tens of thousands of dead in Haiti. Brown bodies, well they're unpleasant, but they're OK, aren't they? It's not like we're looking at white people suffering, is it?

If we're going to show corpses, fine. Let's show some freshly-cremated corpses caused by drones in Pakistan. Let's see some people ripped to pieces by 'our boys' and their heavy artillery. Let's see some of them blown to bits rather than in a coffin with a union jack on top. If we want news that's red in tooth and claw, then fine, I'm all for it, but let's have it all. Let's not have different rules for different races. Let's show everything, the whole disturbing, dirty, horrible shooting match. Or would that be too much for our readers? Is it only a fun spectator sport when it's happening in Bongobongoland?

I began this article with a quote from a reader brave enough to voice the unspoken racism - and yes it is* - that tarnishes this whole smelly coverage. That a disaster has happened is without question. That people are suffering, and that lawlessness happens under these extreme circumstances, is understandable for anyone other than the sort of total witless cunt who hamfistedly crayons in their hate-filled "all others must suffer" response beneath Daily Mail articles. Is looting as prevalent as the focus on it suggests? Or are other things happening at the same time, communities pulling together, helping those in need, looking after others even though they have little - or is it all the sneery westerner's wet dream of savage blacks turning into anarchy without a firm hand keeping them under control? Is people helping others more or less common than looting? Why don't we see pictures of that instead of the looting, or the violence? Or are we just being shown pictures of what it's expected we want to see?

* As ever, there will be those who say that racism isn't racism, even when it's racism. I don't care for such people. You go telling yourself that. I don't care.

Terrorists and radicalisation

It's a common perception that some terrorist suspects get more coverage and attention than their fellow nutcases, but why might that be?

Terence Gavan's story is in almost all of today's papers in one way or another - a dangerous man who has thankfully been brought to justice. But what is it about his story that's different? Look at the first part of the story:

A former BNP member who turned his bedroom in his mother's house into a bomb and weapons factory has been jailed for 11 years.
From the outside, the house in Batley, West Yorkshire, betrayed no sign of Terence Gavan's sinister pastime.
But when officers from West Yorkshire Police entered the property with a search warrant as part of a firearms investigation in May 2009, they were to discover the largest cache of home-made bombs and other weapons ever seen in the region.
The rest of the house that the 39-year-old bus-driver shared with his mother was "immaculate", according to police, in stark contrast to the tangle of bomb-making equipment, improvised weapons and materials filling the locked attic room.

What religion is he? It's not there. Because it's assumed that it's not part of the story, and not relevant to the threat he posed. How did he become an extremist? That's not mentioned either. It's not been investigated, or if it has, it's not been deemed relevant by either the prosecutors or the media reporting it.

Compare that to the story of another terror convict, Nicky Reilly:

A Muslim convert has admitted launching a failed suicide nail-bomb attack on a Devon restaurant.
Nicky Reilly, 22, pleaded guilty at the Old Bailey to attempted murder at Exeter's Giraffe restaurant on 22 May.
Reilly, from Plymouth, had been preparing the attack when a bomb went off in his hands in a toilet cubicle.
Police believe Reilly, said to have learning difficulties, was "preyed upon and radicalised by others". He will be sentenced on 21 November.

First of all, Reilly's religion is deemed important - he converted to Islam. Secondly, the idea of 'radicalisation' is mentioned, and that's an important thread in all this. The narrative we like to read about terrorists who want to bomb people is that they are either Muslims to begin with, or become Muslims, then become 'radicalised' somehow, then they're terrorists. With the far-right terror convicts, there's no such interest in the causes, no process of 'radicalisation' is deemed to have taken place - or if it has, it's not deeemed relevant. Look at another far-right terror convict, Martin Gilleard:

A neo-Nazi paedophile who had four nail bombs under the bed he let his five-year-old son sleep in, has been jailed for 16 years.
White-supremacist Martyn Gilleard was found guilty on Tuesday of two counts of terror offences and had pleaded guilty to possessing 39,000 indecent images and owning ammunition without a licence.

There, the man's paedophilia is listed alongside his terrorist intentions. Like Terence Gavan, there's no attempt to describe a process of 'radicalisation' that has taken place, to list his religion or anything like that - it's assumed that his political leanings have brought him to terrorism, but they is no equivalent radicalisation narrative in place. He was far-right, he became a terrorist. There is no list of places he went to or people he met who may have 'preyed upon' him; that side of the story isn't of interest.

Compare again, to another terror convict, Isa Ibrahim:

A former public schoolboy was today found guilty of plotting to carry out a suicide bombing using a vest packed with explosives at a shopping centre in Bristol.
Andrew Ibrahim, who changed his named to Isa Ibrahim by deed poll Andrew Ibrahim, who changed his named to Isa Ibrahim by deed poll Photograph: Rex Features
Isa Ibrahim, 20, made viable explosives, manufactured a suicide vest and carried out reconnaissance on the Broadmead shopping centre. Detectives believe he was about to launch an attack, possibly targeting the centre's busy food court area.
Police are heralding the case as a breakthrough as they say it is the first in which the information about a British would-be terrorist planning an atrocity in the UK has come just from a Muslim community.
Ibrahim's extremism did not come to the attention of the authorities until members of a mosque he attended grew worried about his behaviour and went to Avon and Somerset police.

Again, the 'radicalisation' element comes into the story. Ibrahim was a nice public schoolboy, then changed his name and became radicalised, then he became a terror convict. So is it just a case of a certain narrative being true, or something different going on when it's far-right terrorists as opposed to Muslim terrorists? Why do Muslim suspects get different coverage, and why is 'radicalisation' an important part of the story?

I think the answer, this time, might not be in the prejudices of the media. I think it has to do with how these people are brought to justice. Gavan was found as part of a firearms investigation; Gilleard by officers looking for pornography. Ibrahim, on the other hand, had been marked out as a terror suspect from the word go by fellow Muslims who were disturbed by his behaviour; and Reilly had actually got to the point of detonating his bomb.

So there's something else going on, I think. These far-right terrorists are stumbled upon - and there's no big fear about them, no worry about a wave of terror sweeping the country (although the Mail, bless them, did try to create such an impression last year). As well as that, there is no willingness to understand the process by which ordinary people with far-right views take that step to become a serious threat - there is no equivalent of 'radicalisation', and so there's a gap in the understanding of these people.

The Muslim terror convicts' story comes from a template - young man, preyed on by external forces (often forces with tentacles overseas, or so we're led to believe), converts and becomes radicalised, then is a terrorist. That's an easily understandable narrative, and one that is terrifying in itself - that any young man could be susceptible to that kind of change, with Islam playing a big part in it. Whether that's right or not, I don't know; but that's the story that people are told time and time again, and what we're led to believe is the case. But if that is the case, then what happens to convert far-right terrorists? We just don't know because there isn't the willingness to understand. I think that's because there isn't the willingness to see them as being as much of a threat.

We don't seem to fear the Gavans of this world as much as we do the Ibrahims, and that's reflected in media coverage. Of course, it's true that more Islamic terror attacks have been completed than far-right ones, and that's worth bearing in mind as to why people might be more scared. But it's assumed that there is a spectral force of Islamic terror driving these attacks, and they are evidence of the bogeyman. We don't fear the far-right terror types as much; we're not concerned about 'radicalisation' of young men and assume, perhaps, that individuals act out of their own steam rather than being controlled by scary foreign forces. Whether we're right to be less scared of them, I'm not so sure.