The enemies of reason

New Enemies

2010-02-08T19:22:00.001Z

We've moved. To here. Go and look, and enjoy.

They don't care

2010-02-08T10:07:00.005Z

The Express says sorry about telling a complete whopper last week:

FURTHER to our article “Now the EU spouts off...about our milk jugs” on February 3, we have been asked to point out that there is no proposed EU ban on milk jugs or any other milk containers.

The tests referred to in our articles were carried out by the University of Valencia, not at the behest of any agency of the EU.

The European Commission entirely shares the advice of the UK’s Food Standards Agency, that milk jugs that are clean and stored appropriately before and after filling are totally in line with EU legislation.

In fact, it wasn't just the EU 'spouting off' according to the Express. As Tabloid Watch recorded, they'd actually said "Euro meddlers rule we can't have milk jugs". Which is something entirely different and implied that the EU would be banning them. Which of course they weren't.

I imagine if you're a teacher you often have to deal with kids who won't accept any form of punishment, and keep doing the same thing; or if you're a magistrate you'll keep seeing the same recidivist faces turning up in court, for the same old crimes. The Express is a bit like that, I think. It's never going to change its ways. It'll say sorry when there is a subject of the story who can prove they've done wrong, or threaten to sue.

Much easier, then, to simply target a huge mass of people instead:

The use of the word 'handed' is ridiculous - immigrants presumably get jobs by turning up to job interviews. The use of 'invasion' is unforgivable, and a disgrace to any pretence of journalism at the Express.

Just like those pesky kids in school, or recidivist cons, it's not that the Express doesn't know any better; it knows better, all right. It'll say sorry sometimes, but then just keep on doing what it's doing. Keep on spreading the same old pack of lies; keep on using the same dog-whistle terminology over immigration. They're not going to change because they just don't care.

Liz Jones fucks it up

2010-02-07T18:44:00.003Z

This article, by Liz Jones, is perfectly acceptable:

The body of 16-year-old Medine Memi – her first name means ‘civilisation’ - was discovered tied to a chair in a hole in the garden of her home in a small village in south-eastern Turkey.
She had been buried alive as punishment for having talked to boys on the telephone. We know she was buried alive because of the amount of soil found in her stomach and lungs. Her father and her grandfather have been arrested.
Medine lived in a country mired in the dominance of a medieval, backwards-thinking, feudal patriarchy, albeit one that has been taking steps to stamp out violence towards women in its bid to be allowed into the European Union.
In 1998, the country’s supreme court overturned a law that criminalised adultery. In 2004, it introduced mandatory life sentences for those who carry out so-called ‘honour’ killings.
But despite these measures it continues to fail to protect its women and children. Four out of ten women in Turkey are beaten by their husbands. Half of all murders are ‘honour’ killings.
In an attempt to circumvent the stiffer sentences, ‘honour suicides’ have mushroomed.
Batman, a town in the south-east of Turkey, has been nicknamed ‘Suicide City’: three-quarters of all suicides here are committed by women – nearly everywhere else in the world, men are three times more likely to kill themselves.
Women who are told to kill themselves are usually given three options: a noose, a gun or rat poison. They are then locked in a room until they have done the deed.
Despite all of the above, President Obama made no mention of this shocking record on women’s rights in the speech he made during a visit to Istanbul last year in which he urged the EU to welcome Turkey with open arms.
He concentrated instead on the far less controversial issue of global warming.
Girls in Afghanistan are staying home because of a spate of acid attacks. In Italy, a country where until 1981 ‘honour’ was an ‘extenuating circumstance’ for murder, a young Moroccan woman was murdered last autumn by her father for wearing jeans.
In Iran, honour killings are legal. In Pakistan, a 17-year-old girl who, it was claimed, became pregnant by a man who was not her husband was forced to give birth before having her baby thrown to its death in a canal. The teenager was then mauled by dogs before being fatally shot in the head.
But can we in the West really claim the moral high ground when it comes to condemning these ‘honour’ killings’?
I would counter that the number of women harmed psychologically and physically by the West’s obsession with extreme youth far outstrips the number of women who are murdered for adultery, or even for the ‘crime’ of being the victim of rape in Islamic countries.
Every society has things it should be ashamed of. We have battered wives, domestic violence, child abuse, rape. These crimes are not done in the name of religion, other than as part of our cult of worshipping only women who are barely adolescent.
Violence against women is widespread in all countries. In Britain, 45 per cent have experienced some form of domestic abuse. In Germany, that figure is 37 per cent. Let’s not make this a war against Islam.
Let’s make it a war between genders, and try to fix it with education and emancipation, not prejudice.

Unfortunately this isn't the article that appeared in today's Mail, because for some reason it was decided by someone - presumably Jones herself - to introduce Emma Watson into the article, not with a shoehorn so much as a nine-pound hammer:

You could be forgiven for thinking the 'we' in that instance refers to 'we at the Daily Mail'. Let's not forget the newspaper's delight at her 'wardrobe malfunction' and how they used the opportunity to use another upskirt photo; or how they used paparazzi photos of her in a bikini; or how they said:

Emma Watson shows how much she's grown up at Harry Potter premiere

Jones isn't criticising her own employers, though, but society at large for valuing 'virginal' beauty above all other characteristics. I'm not so sure that you can uncouple that from what the mainstream media have to say about women's bodies from how women are seen, but there you are. Perhaps you can, perhaps you can't. All I do know is that Liz Jones had a perfectly reasonable article there, wrecked beyond belief by a clunky, jarring comparison between successful, young Emma Watson and the fate of Medine Memi. Surely there are better cases to choose when highlighting Western hypocrisy towards women's rights?

So, it's not that bad really. It just could have been so much better. Someone could have turned around, at any point, and said: Do you know what, Liz, this doesn't quite work... but no-one did, and so we're left with something pretty feeble instead.

A bit icky

2010-02-07T09:43:00.002Z

The Mail is covering this story today:

And on every photo of the seven-year-old girl, there's this:

For me, that's just a little bit icky.

Terry's not All Gold

2010-02-06T15:57:00.003Z

If nothing else good comes out of the John Terry saga, at least we won't ever see the "Terry's all gold" headlines ever again. They started surfacing at the start of the millennium and have carried on, pretty much unashamedly, ever since. Yes, his name's Terry. Yes, he's quite good at things. Yes, you could say he's "all gold". And yes, "Terry's All Gold" is a chocolate box assortment, the sort you'd buy if you you're too cheap for Milk Tray and don't like all that dirty dark chocolate in Black Magic. But that's pretty much the end of it. If John Terry played a really good game of football then celebrated with a low-end chocolate box assortment, then you could really go to town on the whole Terry's All Gold thing. But no matter. There won't be any of that shit any more. Actually I say "there won't be any of that shit any more" but I'm pretty convinced there will be a lot more of that shit in the very near future, as soon as he's promised to clean up his ways and stop being such a silly boy. I'm sure the 'Terry's All Gold', which is presumably on a template on tabloid newspaper subs' desktops, can get dusted off for a new outing, sooner or later.

Poor old Terry. It takes quite a lot to make me feel sympathy for such an odious character, but I did a bit this week. A bit. Don't get me wrong, I don't love him all of a sudden or something, and I certainly don't think any more of him this week than I did last week, but blimey. Being John Terry must feel a bit like being Ray Liotta in Goodfellas - constantly followed, knowing you're going to be found out, with a helicopter circling overhead - except it doesn't belong to the CIA or FBI, it belongs to Sky News. Ah, what would the BBC's detractors have to say if Auntie had taken a helicopter up to film a man's car driving along a road? All of a sudden, Terry was OJ. Except he hadn't fled from police and wasn't a suspect in a murder investigation; he got caught doing the nasty on his wife and family. What a spectacular week for Sky News - having made Peter Andre cry in a fairly tawdry bit of telly, they decided to aim just that bit lower. Many congratulations for trying to outdo themselves, though; it just goes to show they're always striving to be thought of as more awful than they already are.

But after all this, the England football team has a new captain. In place of someone who cheated on his wife, which was nothing to do with football, is someone who's currently going through a four-match ban for being violent on the football field; someone who previously forgot to take a drugs test and went out shopping. It's nice to know that the England football team, like Sky News, is always aiming a little bit lower. In case Rio Ferdinand - catchphrase "YOU'VE BEEN MERKED BRUV! HAHAHAHA!" during those never-to-be-forgotten World Cup Windups of years gone by - gets injured, there's always Steve Gerrard, a man who covered himself in glory last year by punching a DJ in the face, but who got away with it because he claimed he was punching the man in the face in self-defence because he got threatened. You might say "Ah but he wasn't convicted", which is true; but nor has Terry been convicted of any criminal offence, yet he still hasn't punched anyone in the face, has he? Well, not yet anyway. Perhaps tomorrow's News of the World will bring further revelations and perhaps that will make it even worse for him; we'll have to wait and see - well, I won't because I won't be buying it, but everyone else can make up their minds.

Everyone's aiming lower. Terry aims to outdo himself; the journalists reporting him aim to outdo themselves; and those replacing Terry as the figurehead of the England team haven't exactly covered themselves in glory in the past. Perhaps the thinking is that they've got their misdemeanours out of the way and the captaincy - the thought of holding that trophy aloft if England were to win the World Cup and to be taken into immortality - will be a good behaviour bond for them. That might be smart thinking, if it's been done that way. Might be.

In the meantime, the Terry story shows no signs of going away; as much as it's damaging to him it's obviously more damaging to those close to him, his family and friends. But now it's reached the point of no return, and it's a fairly easy free hit for everyone to have a bash at writing about it - and I'm no different, of course. I see (but which I hadn't seen) Jan Moir and Liz Jones have had a bash at it in the Mail, in their usual insipid and largely unreadable way. I almost end up feeling sorry for them as well. They must really hate themselves, having to write that guff every week, having to dredge up such clumsy tedium.

Hmm. It seems I've ended up feeling sorry for everyone. I must be a soft touch. This will pass, I'm sure, but in the meantime I can only apologise.

Listen up. Things are going to change

2010-02-05T15:08:00.002Z

...though not completely, so don't worry.

As I wrote about a little while ago, there are going to be a few changes around the shambles that is here. I've already started making some of them - you may have noticed; you may not; you may be one of those people who stumbles across this place looking for some other place, or runs off in despair, having read a couple of paragraphs. I don't mind.

There will be a couple of other things changing too. Not just cosmetic, though that's going to happen. And soon. And I hope you like it. But I'll let you know about it all once it's done. Or rather, you'll see it. And go "Wow, how exciting!" or something.

Let he who is without... and all that

2010-02-05T14:13:00.004Z

Sometimes it's wrong to sneer. Sometimes it's perfectly right, because some things deserve to be sneered at, but sometimes it's wrong. I find today's Guardian article by Roy Greenslade* about the new London Weekly newspaper a bit too sneery for its own good:

But it has launched. To wide derision. We have finally got a copy in the office and are scanning some more pictures for your delectation.

What a hoot!

Page two asks: "Do you have any celebrity gossip? E-mail showbiz@thelondonweekly.co.uk" above stories such as "Bruce Willis won't say No to kids" and "Jude Law maturing into happiness".

Yeah, it's not like the Guardian would ever do celebrity news, is it? Oh hang on, what's this? Speaking of Bruce Willis, here's an interview with his daughter, Rumer, in the pages of the, let me, see, Guardian!

Do your parents [Demi Moore and Willis] give you acting tips?
They've always given me advice. If I had an audition or something, I'd work with them on it, or if I had a script that I was reading I'd ask them to check it out. They're extremely supportive. I couldn't ask for anything more.

Ah, I see. Those are the lofty heights to which the London Weekly should aspire. Greenslade blog again:

Page three may actually includes some fresh, "exclusive" content: "The London Weekly talks to Former England cricket professional, jungle king and dancing star Phil Tufnell who is set to make 2010 a year to remember with his New Year resolution to quit smoking." So, Phil, drop us a line and let us know how your interview with London's newest paper went.

Ho ho. Searching for Phil Tufnell in the Guardian's website, though, brings up this masterpiece of journalistic brilliance, the Strictly Come Dancing Liveblog:

6.41pm: A big drum-roll to welcome the finalists. Ola is wearing a dress that has horrific shoulder-pads. Natalie's dress has a pretty sequinned bodice and a feathery skirt. Bruce makes a funny-because-it's-true joke about Chris crying if he loses because Ola will beat him.

And you have to admire the sheer nerve of the Guardian of taking the piss out of someone else for making spelling mistakes. Here's today's Corrections and Clarifications column, by the way:

In an auction story, Giacometti's thin man makes fat price, the artist made additional appearances as Giacommeti and Giacommetti (4 February, page 5).

Oh well, it was only page five of a national newspaper. Carry on having a right old laugh at the London Weekly, eh!

It might look a bit amateurish, this newspaper, but blimey. Let he who is without... and all that, surely? I make more than my fair share of speling errers here, after all...

* Or someone else, in fact. If he's not writing it, why is his enormous face at the top though? You don't get "Littlejohn - written this week by a putrid hyena that's been run over by a truck" do you? Though that may, of course, be an improvement.

Orly?

2010-02-05T12:56:00.003Z

The Telegraph is proud to bring you this breaking news:

Danielle Lloyd 'targeted' by Tesco pyjama ban despite wearing £120 tracksuit
Danielle Lloyd, the glamour model, has complained that Tesco staff tried to bar her from a store after mistaking her designer tracksuit for pyjamas.

Orly? Because I thought the ban was only in one Tesco store, in St Mellons:

A Tesco store has asked customers not to shop in their pyjamas or barefoot.
Notices have been put up in the chain's supermarket in St Mellons in Cardiff saying: "Footwear must be worn at all times and no nightwear is permitted."

According to the Telegraph:

The supermarket giant has introduced a dress code banning people from shopping in their pyjamas, it emerged last week.

I'm pretty sure it was just in one store. Perhaps Danielle Lloyd lives in St Mellons, in which case, fair enough. But she doesn't:

But Lloyd, 26, said she was wearing a Juicy Couture tracksuit when staff at the Tesco Express in Theydon Bois, Essex, accosted her over her attire.

I think it's fair enough to ban anyone from wearing £120 tracksuits anyway - unless they're Jimmy Savile. But I can't help wondering if this is just a bit of maggot-dangling from Lloyd, which has been eagerly snapped up by the ~~celebrity obsessed tabloid press~~ top-selling quality broadsheet in Britain. As it was, the original story is a fairly brilliant bit of news about nothing anyway, getting Tesco bang into the headlines for no good reason whatsoever. And now a bonus - a double dose of churnalism. Well, every little helps.

It's compassion Friday!

2010-02-05T10:28:00.005Z

The story - a teenage girl tried to enter Britain illegally by hiding in a car dashboard. The newspaper - the Mail. The response?

Not all comments were voted as popular by fellow readers, though, and some received red arrows of disapproval:

Ah, it makes you proud, doesn't it. No...?

ZaNuLab jumps the shark

2010-02-04T16:35:00.005Z

You thought it was only ham-faced idiots greencrayoning ill-thought-out responses to online news articles who thought that 'ZaNuLabour' was still funny, didn't you? As with 'Harperson', it's the kind of feeble poo-throwing that provokes not even so much as the chortle it probably didn't even bring about in the first place - but it's been so long ago, and I've seen it repeated so many times, that it's almost become the real name of the Labour Party*. But... it's not just the online comment bumgrapes who use the term. Now it's real MPs.

Now I'm all for MPs being allowed to say what they like and not being tied to some kind of on-message party machine, and to have the ability to express themselves in whatever way they see fit, but Jesus. ZaNuLabour? In what way are Labour supposedly acting like ZaNuPDF, according to Rob Wilson MP? Oh, by introducing electoral reform. They're just like them in that regard, I see. Silly me. I didn't realise that introducing electoral reform - and we can argue later about the late, late stage at which it's been brought in, the hastiness of it, presumably as a sop to the left or to attract wavering Lib Dems, or whatever, and the supposed rubbishness of the story itself - was a bit like how Robert Mugabe might behave. Now it all makes perfect sense. It's 'rigging the electoral system'. Somehow. And there's even a hilarious joke about Lib Dems in there!

Sparkling.

Thanks to @liquidindian for spotting it!

* Ah, you might say, but wasn't 'Tory' originally an offensive slang term? It was, yes. But it was reclaimed. People like the Tory Reform Group**, the sort of Tories a dripping-wet leftie like me can think of as being anything other than despicable, are quite happy to use the term.
** Ah, you might say, but surely they just chose that name to avoid the rather oxymoronic idea of 'Conservative Reform'. Which is possible but I'm sure they could have thought of another name if Tory had really been so much of a problem.

Ban this sick filth!

2010-02-04T14:47:00.008Z

I do love the spam-handedness with which newspapers try to grasp hold of Twitter, like whoever wrote this headline in the Daily Express. Twitter page? But yes, I am sure that 'Diana fans' will have been upset by this - as upset as they ought to have been by the ridiculous conspiracy theories constantly dragged out repeatedly on the front page of one daily newspaper, over a period of years... ah, but if only I could remember the name of that newspaper...? Hmm. I'm sure it'll come to me.

Ah. Hang on... yes...

And this isn't the first time that the Express have thrown their hands up in faux outrage over a Diana spoof, either:

Quite right too. We wouldn't want to besmirch the memory of Diana with anything tawdry, would we?

Via, of course, the brilliant @dianainheaven.

MigrationWatch job application

2010-02-04T12:35:00.003Z

Dear Sir Andrew,

I am very excited by the opportunity advertised on your website for the position of director of research, with a corking starting salary of £45k. I mean, kerching! But I'm getting ahead of myself. What I mean to say is "I should like to offer my humble services and I am looking forward greatly to the challenge. I'm a confident self-starter with a bulging contacts book and yadda yadda you get the general idea with all that."

Admittedly, I haven't attended one of the 20 universities you consider good enough, and I don't know very much about statistics. But I think with this role, an absence of knowledge about statistics is very much an advantage. How else could I be expected to prepare a press release which implies that it's Britain's immigration policies which have meant our total of migrants is three times the world average, when the reality is very different, other than being ignorant about statistics? How else, other than by an ignorance about statistics, would I be able to put together an opinion poll with the options "Delighted", "Wouldn't mind", "Slightly worried", "Very worried" and "Don't know", about some extrapolated figures that may not even prove to be accurate? If I knew about statistics, surely I wouldn't do that.

I mean, the only other explanation would be that you deliberately skew statistics in order to reach a pre-decided conclusion or create the wrong impression, misleading journalists and their readers alike; but I know that's not the case, because in your job advertisement you're very clear about being an 'independent' think-tank - and independent think-tanks wouldn't have agendas, would they?

You say in the job advert that "MW is now recognised as the leading source for independent expert commentary on matters relating to migration into and out of the United Kingdom," and that sounds like an organisation I'd love to be part of. I should love to highlight the positive effects that immigration has had on Britain as well as those that may be perceived as negative. I know that as a leading source of independent expert commentary, you wouldn't want to be seen as being just a bunch of red-faced old bastards going "Wuurgggggggh! Foreigners!" and complaining about every aspect of immigration; so I'm sure you would like to use statistics to show that immigrants aren't all bad, and have benefited our country greatly. At MigrationWatch, we - look at me! "We". Feet under the table already! - need to provide the real facts that will help the public decide about immigration; and I know that, as an independent think-tank, you wouldn't simply want to say the same thing again, and again, and again, and again, always putting one side of the argument and never the other - that's not in the spirit of independence, is it?

We could, for example, use some statistics to try and calculate how much tax and national insurance our hard-working immigrants are paying - not just the big-earning footballers, of course, but the humble shopworkers and tradespeople as well - and compare it with greedy tax avoiders who are draining the life out of Britain. These are just a couple of suggestions; I hope you don't mind. I'm very keen to show you that I'd be able to take on a variety of roles for this vacancy.

If you do not consider me suitable for this position, I do have another suggestion as to the ideal candidate: Chris Grayling. I have a feeling he might be seeking alternative employment in the very near future, and he clearly has the kind of grasp on statistics that you're looking for. If, for whatever reason, you would prefer not to have me working for you, it would be nice if he could get a look-in, as he's having a hell of a time at the moment.

Thank you very much for your consideration. I look forward to hearing from you soon.
With love,
Anton.

Hooray for freedom!

2010-02-04T10:18:00.002Z

Last year a tabloid newspaper reported that a Premier League manager had been caught visiting a brothel, but did not name him or identify the location.
At the time, the newspaper blamed “creeping privacy laws” for preventing it from publishing further details.
It followed a number of cases in which wealthy and famous individuals had successfully used the Human Rights Act to gag the media.
But a landmark ruling by Mr Justice Tugendhat last week swung the pendulum back in favour of freedom of speech, when he revoked an injunction granted to John Terry, the Chelsea and England captain, which had blocked reporting of his extra-marital affair.

Thank goodness for that pendulum swinging back in favour of freedom of speech - otherwise we wouldn't know which football manager it was who visited a brothel. I mean, can you imagine a world in which we weren't allowed to be told about who had done that? You know, someone who'd never said anything about family values, or campaigned on such, and so wasn't a hypocrite, but who just happened to visit a brothel, because he wanted to pay someone to have sex with them? Can you imagine a world in which we weren't allowed to know that?

Isn't it a much more wonderful world in which we can look around us and thank ourselves for the freedom - freedom! - to know who's been to a brothel and who hasn't. Ah, freedom. Free at last! Hooray for the pendulum of freedom!

I imagine the newspapers will use the pendulum of freedom, so wonderfully swinging back in the direction of the righteous and just, in order to expose genuine corruption, point out wrongdoing, and set things to rights. And it won't just be a series of shabby exposes of sex antics of celebrities, will it? I mean, they will use this freedom properly, won't they...?

Now the claws really come out

2010-02-04T08:18:00.004Z

John Terry has been rightly vilified for what he's done to his wife and family. I might not think he deserves to lose the England captaincy for his off-the-field awfulness - there'd be a pretty short list to take over from him if that was how we judged our footballers - but he's not some misunderstood diamond geezer either.

Liz Hunt guessed - and that's all it was - in the Telegraph that men were more sympathetic towards Terry than women after the revelations came out. Oh, and wrote some shit as well:

For obvious reasons, I'll dispense with the claims made for Terry's virtues off-pitch. Consider instead whether he's still deserving of the accolades applied to his performances on-pitch. "Bonkers bravery"? Well, he's been bonking bravely, for sure. "Faultless positioning"? Faultless indeed – until he was exposed, very publicly, as having played off-side. Still, his ''distribution'' remains impressive, if you take into account the alleged liaisons with Jenny, Karina, Nicola and Shalimar et al that filled the weekend tabloids.

Yeah, hilarious.

YouGov, on the other hand, came out with something that said women were more forgiving of Terry than men. Who knows whether that's true or not? What you can be pretty sure of is that the claws were eventually going to come out for the woman involved in this story, Vanessa Perroncel. And so they have.

There is a word the French use to describe women like Vanessa Perroncel. The word is effronte, and it means barefaced, or shameless.
One could think of a number of other adjectives to describe the pneumatic Miss Perroncel, but 'shameless' is probably the most polite.

One? Who's 'one' when one's at home? Four people - count them, four people - laid this cable in the Mail today. Were they all wondering, as one, these things?

We have now been given the names of another two Stamford Bridge stars who allegedly succumbed to Miss Perroncel's charms, bringing the grand total to seven - four of whom were named publicly in a red-top newspaper yesterday.
Perhaps by the end of the week she will have been linked to a full team of 11 highly paid Chelsea footballers.

Yeah, brilliant. Keep going, this is tremendous.

Who else but Miss Perroncel could have had an affair with England captain Terry, fallen pregnant by him, had an abortion, wrecking God knows how many lives in the process, then touted her story around Fleet Street - for a figure in excess of £250,000 - promising to set the record straight as though she was the victim of this shabby debacle which threatens to derail England's World Cup campaign?

I don't quite understand that. Who else? Well probably someone else, I don't know. I don't think the pregnancy was really planned, hence the abortion. And I love the disdain with which "someone touting their story around Fleet Street" is regarded by a newspaper which has gleefully joined in with the story - including articles like this one. They don't want to miss out on the feeding frenzy, but of course they want you to know it's a very shabby business.

Of course, as we know, poor Wayne was not the first Chelsea player to fall for the French beauty.
Let's go through the list.

Let's not.

The men in this story, then, are portrayed as mere victims of the sexually insatiable Perroncel. "Poor" Wayne Bridge, for example. They are just a list of unfortunates who were incapable of not having sex with her. It's a fairly dismal way of looking at women - the predatory female who leaves a train of victims in her wake, as if all her partners were somehow powerless to prevent themselves from succumbing.

There is also a fifth player, who cannot be named for legal reasons.
Our own inquiries have also linked Miss Perroncel to another two current Chelsea stars.
One wonders what her family makes of it back in France.

One wonders, does one? I don't know, how about bothering them to try and find out? Oh, you have. There are some fairly bland quotes from an uncle of Perroncel's, presumably the only slightly derogatory things he said in an hour-long interview, plucked out of thin air and transported to this story, to give the maximum impact against her.

The judge initially granted the gagging order.
The following night, Miss Perroncel was living it up at London's Chinawhite nightclub with Elen Rives, the former partner of Chelsea star Frank Lampard, who was celebrating her 35th birthday.
Miss Rives is believed to be one of the few WAGs standing by Miss Perroncel.
Might the two have toasted the judge who ruled that John Terry's dirty secret was to remain just that?
'Wayne (Bridge) was horrified that Vanessa and Elen Rives spent that Saturday night drinking and partying at Chinawhite,' says a friend.
'She was there throwing herself about on the dance floor, flirting and thinking she had escaped.'
As we said, shameless.

How dare someone go out and enjoy themselves, ever? With someone else, as well - how could they? Shameless! Might they have toasted the judge? Who knows? Who cares? Does it matter? It's something that no-one will ever know, and it's pointless to speculate.

Terry has emerged from this mucky saga as very damaged goods, and rightly so of course as far as his public profile is concerned. But this just goes to show that it's always the female for whom the real venom is reserved. Why that might be, it's hard to say. But the claws are coming out.

In for a penny, in for a pound

2010-02-03T19:07:00.003Z

After ensuring my place in hell yesterday thanks to calling the Pope a "ridiculous old cunt" and "an elderly virgin who believes in magic", I may as well add treason to the list. I say 'treason' but I wouldn't think it treacherous to label a well-meaning twerp a well-meaning twerp. And yes, it's Prince Charles, the future face on our stamps and banknotes, that I'm on about.

''I was accused once of being the enemy of the Enlightenment. I felt rather proud. I thought hang on a moment, the enlightenment started over 200 years ago," he said.

Hang on, so did the entirely unfair and unjust principle of hereditary monarchy - I imagine you'll distance yourself from those outdated ideas as well, Charles? No, thought not. Put the Enlightenment into context, in an era when this fool's ancestors ruled through the 'divine right of kings', and it's perfectly understandable why Charles should dislike it so much. Gone are the dog days when monarchs fought it out among themselves to see who had the biggest guns and the fastest ships; now the wretched proles are allowed to take charge through some ghastly principle of democracy. Ugh. Isn't it?

The Prince also proclaimed that he battled hard on issues despite facing ''unbelievable abuse''.
This comment came as he talked about his recommendations that bird boxes be built on Foundation properties.

I'm with him on the bird boxes though. Nice to have birds nesting in places. But don't ideas about conservation come from, oh I don't know, more than 200 years ago? Should we ignore them, because they're old, and therefore automatically outdated, unlike the principle of some people getting huge privileges just because of which fanny they slipped out of, which is somehow all right in Charles's modern-thinking world?

Our future head of state, ladies and gentlemen.

Express Have Your Say: My brain hurts

2010-02-03T13:11:00.007Z

If you've ever listened to the Jeremy Vine show and thought "Blimey, some of the rum old suspects who phone up are a bit on the bewildering side", or even popped onto the BBC's Have Your Say forum and thought that the people posting messages were often a tiny bit angry, you've not seen anything until you've been onto the Express Have Your Say section.

Here's today's subject up for debate:

Ho ho. Has the 'Harperson' hilarity still not gone away?* Is it still just as pant-wettingly jocular as it always was? See, she's a woman, but the word 'man' is in her name, and she does equality shit and all that, so she's 'Harperson', do you see? Do you get it? It's brilliant, isn't it? It's all grown up and funny and that. Isn't it? Yes. Harperson. Not HarMAN, but HarPERSON. It's the joke that keeps on giving. Just when you think it's not possible for it to be funny any more, it creeps up on you and surprises you, and gets you roaring with laughter again. No point trying to fight it. She's Harperson now. Our journalistic discourse is so advanced that national newspapers can simply change someone's name, it's all funny, and everyone laughs. Can't wait until David Camercunt takes power, that'll be brilliant.

Well, there you have it. These are the lofty heights scaled by Express Have Your Sayers. I'm underselling it really. You try and wade through the debate and you'll find yourself incapable of carrying on. I think it's a first, because this is something that's genuinely unreadable. You can't read it. Go on, try. I'll be here waiting. Try reading the comments. You can't! No-one can. No-one could possibly be able to read it all. There is no way of getting through it all - if you can manage it, I salute you.

But then that level of debate is brought about by the SHOUTY RUBBISHNESS of the questions:

And I think it's there that I've found one of the most perfect internet comments ever. In fact I'm beginning to suspect there are ever more sophisticated bots that turn up on internet sites and leave random comments from a template. Surely it can't be real people doing this, can it?

They will have to get used to beening a Christian country, though, that's true. Ah well, not quite ironed out all the bugs yet.

* You may well, at this point, call me out as a hypocrite for my frequent use of 'Littlecock' to refer to the Daily Mail's star columnist Richard Littlejohn. You may well, quite rightly, suggest that it's not particularly grown-up of me to do so, when there are so many more ways of making him out to be stupid than simply mucking about with his name. That is true, and, insomuch as I do these things, I am a hypocrite. However, for as long as slightly changing people's names in a pointless attempt at humour ("Ram Jam Choudhary", for example, in a recent column that was so brilliant and so incisive, he should be Prime Minister) is Littlecock's stock in trade, he'll always be Littlecock around here.

Everybody Geerts

2010-02-02T17:46:00.002Z

In all this excitement about some bigoted old ex-Hitler Youth fool popping over to Britain to ~~spread prejudice~~ develop closer links with the many millions who adore him up and down the country, another story has slipped under the radar. It's a story about another hatemongering idiot making a visit to the UK - Geert Wilders, the anti-Muslim filmmaker who was previously invited over by UKIP big cheese Lord Pearson but wasn't allowed into the country over security fears.

I wonder if there aren't some comparisons we could make between the two, both of whom should, I think, be welcomed through gritted teeth and allowed to do whatever the hell they like, so long as it's not chucking horse-shit at a mosque or absent-mindedly doing Nazi salutes. They're both deeply unpleasant human beings who cause division and anger - but that doesn't mean they should be prevented from visiting. I'm a little squeamish about the red-carpet treatment offered up to them, from the politicians who court the hateful ferret Wilders and those who will welcome Il Papa, but I suppose that's the price you pay for being a free society. A little squeamishness is OK.

One thing that strikes me is that there shouldn't be double standards. For example, I'm very relaxed about immigration, and about allowing immigrants to behave pretty much however they want and say whatever they like, so long as it's within the law of the land. I think that's fine. So it would be a bit wrong if I suddenly said that different principles should apply to guests or visitors. If the Pope wants to visit Britain and tell us we're all shit, that's very much up to him. Unlike the Vatican, we're quite comfortable with dissent. And if Wilders wants to pop over here and spout his bullshit, that's fine too, as long as he isn't especially provocative about where he does it. Freedoms of this country shouldn't just be there for those who were born here, in my opinion.

And yes, we'll be footing the bill. I don't like it, but I'm afraid these things happen. My tax pounds, few though they are, go to paying for all kinds of things I don't like - including wars and needless deaths. They pay for a lot worse things than simply allowing some ridiculous old cunt to be prejudiced without getting a bullet through his head. And all sorts of murdering bastards have been welcomed on state visits down the years, munched swan with Her Maj and had cheery talks in Number 10; sometimes you wonder if the carpets are coloured red because it hides the bloodstains. For diplomatic purposes, Cardinal Ratzinger, like dignitaries from other vile regimes, is someone we bow and scrape to. I don't like it any more than I liked seeing George Bush getting all chummy with the royal family or Tony Blair. But. It's one of those times when you have to wince and remember that you're being the bigger person.

I know the odious Ratzinger is not just a very nasty piece of work, but also someone who has openly criticised the policies of the current Government, but that shouldn't affect our ability to be decent towards him either. We can't just say that we'll provide decent security for the people we like, and not the ones we don't. Ratzinger, like Wilders, deserves not to be assassinated.

The same freedoms of course extend to anyone who wants to protest about the visits of these hideous men. If they want to shout abuse at Il Papa while he's on his way to a meet and greet, then that's fine, and people doing the protesting should have their right to do it protected. If people want to call Wilders all kinds of names as the silly-haired bastard is on his way into the House of Lords, that's fine too. And our tax pounds will pay for that, as well, and I don't object at all.

All I would say is that Wilders, unlike Il Papa, would probably delight in a victim mentality. He'd love to be prevented from screening his shit-smeared film and claim that he's the one on the receiving end of prejudice, rather than being the instigator of prejudice. Little racists like him love to portray themselves as being the true minority; they crave the victim status of the genuine minorities they loathe so much. Let anyone have their say, by all means, but not prevent him from speaking, as that's playing into his hands. As well as that, it plays into his agenda, and that of certain media outlets; they will get to show Muslims as being shouty, aggressive, people who close down debates and squash freedom - they may well be portrayed that way anyway, but the less ammunition that gets handed over for free, the better, I think.

Taxi for the Mail

2010-02-02T15:26:00.004Z

Let's assume I am in the PC Brigade. I wouldn't mind being a member, after all. I'd like to hope you get a nice uniform with shiny buttons which is tailored to meet all cultural sensitivities, and you get to drive a big A-Team style van, and burst out the back of it with M-16s whenever someone does something naughty, and chomp cigars, and fire at the ground so no-one dies but they all get a bit scared, or something. Imagine that! You'd all want to be in the PC Brigade then, wouldn't you?

Anyway, replace the phrase "PC Brigade" with "vast majority of people, who think that unnecessarily upsetting others is a bad thing", and yes, I'm in the PC Brigade. One thing that really intrigues me about those lodged against us in 'the Brigade' is their constant feigning of surprise whenever they do something provocative, as if there couldn't possibly be anything offensive or derogatory about what they're doing. Sometimes, though, the mask slips just a little bit, so you can see the horrors that lie beneath. And sometimes the journalists who take aim at we proud footsoldiers of political correctness (which is, no doubt, shortly to go mad) reveal a little bit about their agendas too.

The charade that these drivers, as well as the Mail, are playing is to imagine that there might not be anything offensive or derogatory about what they're doing, and to ask why on earth anyone might be upset by such an innocent and entirely reasonable thing. "Us?" they'll say, doing that 'looking over the shoulder for someone else and then pointing at themselves' bit, "but what have we done?" - and they buff their halos and get on with things.

The Mail reports the story with the usual outrage over the outrage of others - outrage being a commodity that only they're allowed to have, after all:

But the flags have been branded 'racist' by trade representatives, councillors and racism campaigners who have demanded they are removed.
Taxi drivers have hit back, claiming the stickers are simply a protest to force the council to make sure new drivers can speak good English.

At which point you, me, just about everyone in the world, says: "Oh come off it, for fuck's sake". But the Mail doesn't. And look what else it does:

The stickers were placed in the cars after drivers received complaints about the standard of spoken English among them.
There have also been complaints from passengers about drivers using sat navs and over-charging.

All reported as fact, and designed to lead you into a certain direction: that drivers who don't speak good English - i.e. the evil foreign ones - are also inherently dishonest. But there is no evidence to back it up. We've just got someone's word for it. Like the story about someone who says she wasn't allowed to buy a quiche without getting her ID out, it's just one person's word. Perhaps Mail journalists live in a world in which people always tell the truth, or don't make stuff up - stop giggling at the back - and they're just so naive they don't realise that these things go on. Or maybe they don't give a shit about what's fact and what's opinion.

Where else do we find evidence of the 'use of sat navs' or overcharging? Nowhere. Still, it's been said now, hasn't it? But that doesn't matter. The story has gone up like a big bat-signal to the anti-PC Brigade types who electronically green-crayon in their responses, including:

I hate these sort of stories Im annoyed I even read it,whos country is this anyway the PC brigade move somewhere else.
We have to do as we are told in other countries.
- beansontoast, woolacombe, 02/2/2010

Beansontoast has captured the classic outraged anti-PC frenzy of anger. He or she is angry, but not quite sure why. They're annoyed they even read it, but they aren't sure why they're annoyed. Who's country is it anyway? Yours and mine, Beansontoast, yours and mine, and seeing as I'm a fully paid-up member of the PC Brigade, we have to try and get along with each other, or things will get awfully tricky. I'm not sure whether they want the PC Brigade to move somewhere else - that's not clear - or whether they think these taxi drivers who aren't the sort of people to put flags in their windows saying "English speaker" should move somewhere else. And yes, we do have to do as we're told in other countries - and in this one. If you're told your poxy dog-whistle flag campaign is racist, then it might well be because it's racist.

The freedom to be a bigot

2010-02-02T09:22:00.005Z

It's often the people who dislike freedom the most who fight the hardest to gain ownership of the word. So it is with Pope Benedict. Here's an elderly virgin who believes in magic, who oversees an organisation which concealed systematic child abuse for decades, whose views we're supposed to take seriously.

But then it dovetails in nicely with certain agendas. This isn't an attack on any kind of equality, you understand: it's an attack on the Labour party.

Labour equality, not equality. Are the Tories likely to be voting against, then, out of interest? Ah, but that doesn't matter: this is all about the PC evils of Labour being forced onto poor unsuspecting clergy, who only want to make sure the 'natural law' of being able to discriminate against people based on their sexual proclivities is carried out. How on earth can we possibly see anything wrong in that?

The Telegraph's story puts it like this:

Harriet Harman’s Equality Bill, currently going through Parliament, contains a new, narrow definition of religious workers. It means clergy will not be allowed to opt out of the rules and so will either have to go against their teachings by employing homosexuals, or face prosecution.

Let's suppose a highly respected Muslim cleric had told his fellow believers that the law in Britain should not apply to them in certain aspects of their lives. Do you think the coverage would be the same? Would it be discussed in terms of religious freedom, or the freedom to be a bigot?

The greatest lie ever told?

2010-02-01T16:13:00.005Z

Here's an interesting decision from the Pathetically Craven Commission, about an article by Christopher Booker in the Telegraph:

The article [headlined Rise of sea levels is ‘the greatest lie ever told'] was a column by Christopher Booker on the subject of climate change. The complainant said that this piece - which was primarily an account of the views of Dr Nils-Axel Mörner - contained a number of inaccurate and misleading statements, including that sea levels had dropped around Tuvalu in recent decades, when the scientific evidence indicated that they had, in fact, risen (this was repeated in a second article published on 25 July 2009).

The complainant argued that Dr Mörner's visits to the Maldives ‘to confirm' the position had subsequently been disproved by other scientists. The article had also inaccurately stated that the satellite-based evidence of the IPCC (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) had been altered to show a global sea-level rise based on the findings of a single tidal gauge in Hong Kong. In fact, this alteration had been scientifically justified, and the final conclusion on the global sea-level rise was based on multiple measurements from satellite altimetry and tidal gauges based around the world.

The PCC made it clear they couldn't judge accuracy or otherwise in sources' comments or arguments, which is fair enough. Imagine how much work they'd have to do if they did:

In this particular case, the Commission started from the position that a complex issue such as climate change will inevitably lead to robust and ongoing debate. It is not of course for the PCC to make findings of fact on where the truth about climate change lies, but to consider whether newspapers have abided by the terms of the Code when presenting information to their readers. For instance, they have the right to publish controversial or minority opinions, but they are obliged to distinguish between comment, conjecture and fact.

But did Brooker's article do this?

Similarly in Tuvalu, where local leaders have been calling for the inhabitants to be evacuated for 20 years, the sea has if anything dropped in recent decades. The only evidence the scaremongers can cite is based on the fact that extracting groundwater for pineapple growing has allowed seawater to seep in to replace it. Meanwhile, Venice has been sinking rather than the Adriatic rising, says Dr Mörner.

Is that fact or opinion? Only the third sentence is couched in "Dr Morner said". You could argue that the first two are covered by that, but I don't think so.

Also interesting is how the Telegraph offered to remedy things. Initially:

The complainant had submitted a letter for publication after these articles appeared, which the newspaper had declined to publish.

Then, much later, when the PCC had become involved:

At a late stage, it offered to publish a letter from the complainant, and to mark its cuttings with it in relation to the Tuvalu issue.

So there's the power of the PCC. To make newspapers publish letters they wouldn't otherwise publish. Long after the initial article has appeared. Good skills, too, from the Telegraph, really maintaining its position as Britain's top quality paper.

Terry and the tabs

2010-02-01T13:18:00.005Z

It's hard to rouse a great deal of sympathy for John Terry, but I'll give it a bash.

True, he has behaved despicably. Yes, he's got form for being deeply unpleasant. And it goes without saying that he represents the kind of weasel, untouchable arrogance that people think of when they think of Premiership footballers. He's a walking stereotype. He's not the victim in all this, as he was responsible for his choices. Not only that, but he attempted to use big-shot lawyers to try and hush it all up.

Bearing all that in mind, though, let's climb down from that high horse for a moment. Amidst all the self-congratulatory "justice has been done" articles in the News of the World yesterday, what was the substance of the actual story that demanded such a huge legal fight? A married man has had an affair with a colleague's partner. I don't think this is the first time in history it's happened, unpleasant as it is for those people involved.

As I said during the Tiger Woods saga, we don't really learn anything new by all this. I would appear to be in the minority by thinking that people are entitled to their own privacy during these times - though of course that would mean everyone wanting things to stay private. Clearly, someone wanted this to go public, and I don't think it's beyond realms to suspect that a little bit of money has changed hands at some point, via Max Clifford and associates.

Maybe these stories shouldn't be banned altogether by some kind of restrictive law; maybe I am wrong on that one, if there's a danger it could be used by those in power to shield themselves from genuine scrutiny. But then, that would suppose that newspapers actually do a lot of genuine scrutinising rather than just mucky kiss-and-tell stories about famous people, which add nothing whatsoever to our understanding of the world. Might it not be enough to hope that they could be outnumbered, by better stories that are really in the public interest, rather than just detailing the sex lives of the rich and famous for people to pore over on a Sunday morning? It might be too much, I think. And let's not forget, for every celebrity endorsement-gatherer like Terry, there will be hundreds of Mr and Mrs Nobodys, whose privacy could be invaded at any time, if the tabloids - and others - deem that it's necessary. That's the price we pay for our brave boys of the fourth estate having the freedom to write about people having sex with each other.

And yes, Terry is England captain, but what he does in his private life won't really affect his ability to call heads or tails, or hand over the England pennant at the start of an international match. I don't think the parents of the England mascot will demand that someone other than this person who has had an affair holds their son or daughter's hand while they go through the tunnel at Wembley. At least I don't think it will. It's stretching it a bit far to complain about an 'England crisis' just because the skipper has had an affair. Terry was made captain by dint of the fact that he could shake hands properly and was so good at football that he's a shoo-in for pretty much every game, not because of some moral probity which has now been found to be lacking. (I realise that in this view I find myself in agreement with Rod Liddle, but these things happen. I'm sure it would upset him as much as it would me to find we are pointing in the same direction on this issue, if he knew who the hell I was.)

True, these celebrities do court positive coverage by appearing in those ghastly magazines and inviting us into their lovely £3million gated mansion complete with toilets the size of swimming baths and giant pictures of themselves scoring goals plastered all over the walls. And I daresay they do make a bit of money from the odd bit and bob of baloney here and there - Terry's appearance as 'dad of the year' has been cited as evidence that we had the right to know about this affair, for example. But as I said about Tiger Woods, no-one sponsored him just because - or even because at all - he was a clean-cut family guy; they did so because he is the second best golfer in all history. With Terry, it's the same - the vast majority of his endorsements have come about because he's a highly talented footballer, not because of the now-proven-to-be-wrong perception that he's not the kind of bloke who'd have an affair with a fellow England player's partner. The sponsors didn't seem to mind when he roared abuse at Americans after 9-11, though; if they didn't have an inkling he wasn't an all-round stand-up citizen then, then they were being slightly naive.

I'm not saying Terry isn't a ghastly human being, because it appears that he is. He's not committed any crime but he has not exactly acted with a whole world of decency. But in our delight at another sporting personality's fall from grace, let's not clutch our pearls too tightly.

I wish, instead, that we didn't find out about these stories at all. Not because they didn't happen, but because there are so many things out there so much more worthy of talking about. So many more deserving scoops, which might really impact on our lives in a meaningful way. They say you get the press you deserve. Do we really deserve this?

Further reading:

Obsolete: Modern media values
A Very Public Sociologist: John Terry and press freedom

You'll see glimpses in the deluge

2010-01-29T00:29:00.002Z

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

2010-01-28T19:06:00.002Z

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

2010-01-28T13:24:00.005Z

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

2010-01-28T01:26:00.005Z

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

2010-01-27T17:17:00.003Z

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.

2010-01-27T10:19:00.004Z

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

2010-01-27T02:00:00.004Z

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

2010-01-26T19:26:00.002Z

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

2010-01-26T13:03:00.016Z

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

2010-01-26T09:20:00.002Z

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

2010-01-26T08:55:00.004Z

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

2010-01-25T16:43:00.003Z

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

2010-01-25T15:53:00.003Z

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

2010-01-25T12:43:00.004Z

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

2010-01-22T19:43:00.003Z

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'

2010-01-22T08:36:00.004Z

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

2010-01-21T16:02:00.002Z

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

2010-01-21T12:42:00.002Z

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

2010-01-21T10:03:00.002Z

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

2010-01-19T13:50:00.007Z

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

2010-01-19T10:40:00.003Z

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

2010-01-18T14:19:00.003Z

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

2010-01-18T13:01:00.004Z

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

2010-01-18T09:22:00.005Z

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

2010-01-17T19:12:00.003Z

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

2010-01-17T16:46:00.002Z

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

2010-01-17T14:33:00.005Z

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

2010-01-16T08:09:00.003Z

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.

Thanks

2010-01-15T16:18:00.002Z

Look, I'm overwhelmed. Genuinely. I have agonised about writing this morning's post for a while; it's been building for some time.

Thanks for all the comments on the article earlier, I do mean that. And all the emails and Twitter and everything. I will reply to everyone, but there have been quite a lot, I've been really surprised - pleasantly surprised.

I'm not going anywhere. That's the main thing. It might change here a bit, but I'm not going anywhere. For all the support, the kind words, the fact you turn up and read this every day, thank you. It does mean a lot.

And that's that for now.

What do you think?

2010-01-15T10:31:00.003Z

So, here it is. I've been writing this for a good couple of years, and it's been fun. There are about 10 times more people reading this blog now than there were a year ago, which is quite something.

But I'm kind of at a bit of a crossroads with this, and with everything else at the moment. I won't bore you with personal shit and I'll try not to sound wanky, but I really don't know where any of this is going.

I think if I keep this going, I might need to expand the scope of it a bit. I like being a so-called 'political' blog but that way lies dragons - or, more precisely, trolls. I don't know how much happiness there is for me in endlessly debating "Yes it is" and "No it isn't" below blog posts for the rest of my natural life. It's a thought that fills me with dread and sadness, because I don't really enjoy that at all, I might as well tell you.

Not that I don't appreciate feedback, as of course I do - but I look at the more successful political blogs, particularly on the left, and how they become basically battlegrounds for the kinds of arseholes I despise most of all in the world. I don't know if I have the will to deal with all that here, if this became a more successful 'political' blog. I don't know if I could. I do this in my spare time as it is, and it's got to the stage where it's a bit wearying seeing dozens of comments to be looked at and moderated - which is the only way to do it, in my opinion, as I'd never want to do the 'see no evil' business, as I regard it as essentially deceitful.

Sorry. I said I was going to try and make sure this didn't sound wanky, but it sounds wanky already. No point trying to correct that, though, so I'll just plough on through this...

What I'm trying to say, I think, is that I don't know where to take this. I think it's important to try and address the misdirection and distortion of things you read in the papers and online, but there are a lot of other people who do that. I kind of want to write other stuff, and I hope that's all right with you. I don't know why I'm even asking, I should just do it. But I don't know.

The thing is, in my 'real life', it turns out that I have no skills or experience which are of any interest to potential employers and that I am doomed to remain in my existing job, which I find somewhat tedious and unfulfilling, until I get made redundant, or lose the will to live, whichever comes first. I won't bore you with a tale of woe and I'm not looking for sympathy. Don't feel sorry for me. Because here, writing this, I have found something which I enjoy, and which other people actually seem to like me doing. Here, I don't get judged for decisions I took 15 years ago or what university I went to; here, I either write something good and you like it, or write something shit - like this - and you don't. I rather like that because it seems like a level playing field. It seems the only place where there is one.

So, the thing with this blog is, I do love it. And I want it to be more successful so that there's that the ever-dwindling possibility that I might ever be able to write things for a living doesn't disappear down the toilet altogether, I might want to write about more things than just tabloid bollocks, and politics. It's not that I won't do those things any more, I just won't do them as often. Less often, but better, maybe.

And I know the layout isn't very good, and I have no way of rectifying that really, because I have no skills in designing things like this, so my efforts are fairly poor. So you'll have to bear with me on that until I can learn to make it better. But I will, eventually, make it look a little less amateurish, even if I can't make it read that way.

If you've made it this far, thanks. If you have any suggestions or ideas as to where I can take this or what I can do, then you can email me at the address at the top of the page and let me know. Normal service will be resumed later.

Links 15/1/10

2010-01-15T08:48:00.003Z

A few things I've read and enjoyed recently. Read them and enjoy them. Or don't. See if I care.

Heresy Corner - Libel: Counting the costs

Jackson, it is clear, has a particular sort of claim in mind: that of an ordinary citizen who is libelled or has had their privacy invaded by a national newspaper, backed by an in-house legal staff and with the resources to hire the most fashionable QCs. He writes that "in the paradigm libel case the claimant is an individual of modest means and the defendant is a well resourced media organisation." For this reason, he argues that in most cases there are "strong policy reasons why the claimant should be protected against liability for adverse costs."

Sounds like a good thing, then? But it's not quite that simple, as you'll see.

Septicisle: How to destroy the BBC without menitioning Murdoch

It's been obvious for some time now that the BBC under a Conservative government is going to be facing a vastly different climate to the one that it currently enjoys under a somewhat supportive Labour party. Facing not just the accusations from the usual suspects of an innate liberal bias, but also now the outright fury of the Murdochs for daring to provide a free to use news website, with many certain that the deal between Cameron and Murdoch for his support must involve some kind of emasculation of the BBC once the new Tories gain power, there still hasn't been a set-out policy from how this is going to be achieved. Thankfully, Policy Exchange, the right-wing think-tank with notable links to the few within the Cameron set with an ideological bent has come up with a step-by-step guide on how destroy the BBC by a thousand cuts which doesn't so much as mention Murdoch.

Lenin's Tomb: Haiti - Opportunity Knocks

You want to hear about chutzpah? You want to hear about sheer gravity-defying audacity? Well, ladies and gentlemen, comrades and friends, prepare to catch your lower jaw. Forget Limbaugh's racist anxieties. Forget about Pat Robertson drooling about Haiti's 'pact with the devil'. He's a senile old bigot, and his sick provocations are familiar by now. This is the Heritage Foundation on the Haiti earthquake, which is estimated to have killed 100,000 people...

Five Chinese Crackers: Shameless, unrepentant and still lying

'SHAMELESS, UNREPENTANT AND STILL LYING' shouted yesterday's front page headline in the Daily Mail. It was shouting about a man who had made sure information was misrepresented to the public to make things seem much more definite than they were, and far more threatening than reality.
You know what's coming now, right? You just need to guess what articles I'm going to use as examples. Seriously, I might as well just fling random pages up in the air and pick the ones that land face up.

Feminazery: I think I am going to be sick

Really? Gang rape is ok if a woman has entertained group sex fantasies? Would slitting my throat because I once had a dream that I talked about with a friend that I was being murdered be ok? Really? Would it be ok to burgle my house if I said I wondered what it would be like to be burgled?
Really.
Fuck you, Judge Robert Brown. Fuck you, Prosecutor Michael Leeming. You are worthless sacks of donkey gobbling pond scum and right now I am entertaining fantasies about smacking you round the head with a large bit of wood marked "clue-by-four".

Speak You're Branes: Where do yellow stains come from?

It looks like the idea is that, instead of actually thinking and giving useful information, you just make up a bunch of incoherent wank based on your own half-baked opinions and the very little you actually know about anything at all. I felt like helping so I’ve done the same with questions one to ten.

Daily Quail: The Mail - Like a drunk, leering step-uncle, only less tasteful

Speaking from his tree-top spy house, the sweaty Reporteur told us: 'Clearly they're just filming a movie in which they kiss and stuff and only a simpleton would consider that even remotely newsworthy but you have to suspend your disbelief with this sort of thing. I mean, she's 23 and he's 57. See what I mean? Yeah. I've got an eye for it.'

Chicken Yoghurt: Hobson's Choice 2010 - The patronising begins

You can just picture the warm little thrill she got when she said that, can’t you? I bet she did her best ‘aren’t I clever’ look. I sometimes think that some people are against all-women shortlists for parliamentary seats for no other reason other than the fear that such a system might turn up another Harman.

Angry Mob: The Daily Mail face of crime

And that's about it for now.

Collector's item - Mail apology

2010-01-14T13:12:00.004Z

You read that right. Following on from the response to the Mail's poll on the existence of ME the other day, which I wrote about here, those who complained to the newspaper have received the following message:

Thank you for your email, which has been passed to me by Martin Morgan.

First of all, let me apologise sincerely for any offence that may have been
caused.

The poll to which you refer was posted by a junior member of staff of Mail
Online in response to a story which questioned once again the causes of ME.

As I am sure you are aware, there is still a great deal to learn about what
lies behind the condition. However, I entirely accept that this is
completely different from suggesting that the condition itself is not real,
regardless of the cause.

I am pleased to report that once the clumsy nature of the poll was drawn to
more senior staff's attention it was immediately removed from the website.

The Mail - both the paper and online - prides itself on its coverage of
medical matters and has devoted much resource over the years into covering
the search of the causes and a cure for ME. Rest assured that we will
continue to do this and that its sufferers continue to enjoy our full
sympathy and support.

We do appreciate all feedback - whether positive or negative - and I am
particularly grateful to you for taking the time and trouble to draw this
to our attention.

With my best regards,

Charles A Garside
Assistant Editor

So there you are. Props to the Mail for admitting it got it (horribly) wrong, though I think it's a bit naughty to blame a 'junior' member of staff and say only the 'senior' people could sort it out - I think senior people in any organisation should always take responsibility for what their staff do, even when they get it wrong. Well done to those who campaigned hard to challenge the error. I doubt there will be an apology on the site, of course, but you can't have everything.

Mail once again shocked by passing of time

2010-01-14T09:02:00.007Z

Last year, the Mail was horrified to learn that 1970s heart-throb Richard O'Sullivan had grown older than he used to be in the 30-odd years since he was at the peak of his fame:

Old Man About The House: Frail 70s heart-throb Richard O'Sullivan looks unrecognisable

Unfortunately, during the past year - in which time, presumably, no-one at the Mail has gained a single grey hair or wrinkle, or started forgetting where they left the car keys - Mail writers have not learned about the ageing process. Nor have they learned that it's not an especially pleasant thing to do to write things like this. Because here's today's bit of sawdust to fill up the website:

Can it be him? Well, it appears to be the same human being, and he actually looks pretty much the same, but...

But while the re-runs of Friends will forever immortalise him as the youthful Joey Tribbiani, time has not been so kind to actor Matt Le Blanc.

Yes, it's hard to understand I know, but in television programmes, people don't actually get older when the shows get repeated. However, in real life - and hold onto the safety rail if you feel yourself spinning - people do get older with the passing of time. Comparing anyone to how they looked in 1994 to how they look now isn't going to be a 'spot the difference' competition. We have all, I'm afraid, got a little bit older.

As I've said before, you can always compare certain Mail columnists' older pictures

with how they look now, and who'd have thought it -

- they look older too*. And so what? People get older and look a little older. It's no big deal, and it's not even something to be bothered about, except for when you need some pointless celebrity guff to churn out to fill some space, I suppose. Yes, people get grey hair and put on weight, or lose weight, or change their appearance slightly, but that's a positive thing, surely? Wouldn't the Mail's ageing readership be happy to see Matt Le Blanc turning into a silver fox, rather than pouring scorn on him for becoming slightly, well, like them?

Thanks to Adam Bienkov for discovering the awfulness of the story!

* Surprising that the author of the Matt Le Blanc article, Georgina Littlejohn, hasn't noticed the ageing process on that Mail columnist pictured above, but there you go.

Is my enemy's enemy always my friend?

2010-01-13T09:11:00.003Z

For example, today I find myself in total agreement with the Daily Mail's lead story

which represents my own views perfectly - or so it might seem at first glance. But it's not always as simple as that. My anger with Campbell, for helping to justify a war that has killed thousands and not regretting a single thing, is perhaps not the same as the Mail's, who may see anger over the war as a way of damaging Labour, particularly in the run-up to a general election. So can I say I really agree with the front page? I don't know if I can, because I don't really know the motivation behind it. It appears to represent my views, but there's a good chance that it doesn't - and I'm particularly wary, given who it is, of course.

Similarly, while I found myself opposed to the idea of Anjem Choudhary and his mates marching through Wootton Bassett as an inflammatory protest, I don't know if the Facebook group set up against the march was really coming at the issue from exactly the same place as me. Something seemed a little wrong. And if you read this article you might think there was something very wrong about it, though it's worth some time sitting down and going through the evidence yourself to see what you make of it.

Have a look at the group itself today and you'll see it has now changed its name, and used all the people who joined it to protest about the Islam4UK march as leverage for a plan to change the name of Wootton Bassett High Street into Highway for Heroes - which isn't why people joined in the first place (a similar plan to do this has failed in the past after locals didn't give it very much support). All of a sudden, the issue has been changed.

I suppose it's all a bit of a lesson in what you give your support to. Quite a lot of people dislike Alastair Campbell, but that doesn't mean we all dislike him for the same reason. And quite a lot of people didn't want Islam4UK marching through Wootton Bassett, but we're all coming from different places on that one, as well. Your enemy's enemy isn't always your friend. Sometimes people who seem to be your friends aren't your friends, either.

Cameron, Myleene and tabloid tales

2010-01-12T13:42:00.004Z

Last year, David Cameron proved he was happy to take the tabloids' rubbish at face value with a 'Gorblimey, it's all gone mad, health and safety, innit?' rant.

At first, it seems like he's at it again today, portraying himself as the voice of reason in a world gone (health and safety and PC) mad, in relation to Myleene Klass and what may or may not have happened at her house - but it's not quite that simple. Cameron:

The Tory leader said he did not know the full facts of the case but said the police "do seem to do things that slightly fly in the face of common sense".
Asked about the incident on ITV's This Morning, he said: "If that is the case I think it is ridiculous to complain about someone who is obviously worried about what people were threatening her with."
He went on: "I don't know the facts of the case and sometimes when you look at these cases and you find a bit more detail, you find it is not quite ... what it appears.
"But we want some common sense in policing. One of the things that has gone wrong with all this red tape and form filling is that we are taking away discretion from the nurse, the teacher, the doctor, the police officer. We have got to give them back that discretion."

To be fair to Cameron, he does couch his response this time in lots of ifs. And he's right to do so, as we'll see. But what's the betting that his careful "This might not be the whole story" attitude is not reflected in stories in tomorrow's papers? Particularly when the story in which his quotes are contained is so certain about what happened:

Klass was warned by officers about waving a kitchen knife to scare off intruders who had entered the garden of her home near Potters Bar in Hertfordshire.

Was warned. Reported as fact.

C64Glen first alerted me to something a bit whiffy about the Klass story. Because while the BBC at first report:

TV presenter Myleene Klass has said she has "no regrets" after being warned by police for waving a knife at youths who entered her back garden.

Klass was warned. Reported as fact. But wait:

But a police spokeswoman said that "at no point" were any warnings given.

That's not reported as fact, that's reported as opinion. Essentially, then, the word of a celebrity TV presenter is regarded as being more credible than that of the police. C64Glen:

Google news now has 200+ reports of this story where Myleene’s word is taken as fact giving us more Britain’s gone ’elf and safety mad tabloid nonsense while giving Myleene lots and lots of free publicity.

So was she warned or not? It doesn't seem to matter. Because the story fits nicely into a familiar narrative - PC police telling householders they can't defend themselves in their own homes, no matter what intruders do, isn't it terrible the way that PC is ruining our lives and giving the criminals all the rights? - it's not questioned. People just assume that Myleene, via her publicist, has got everything right, and if the police say that's not the case, well they must have got it wrong.

You can see it as the power of celebrity, the laziness of churnalism, confirmation bias or whatever, but we just don't know for sure. What we do know is that the vast majority of reports of this incident couldn't care less. It's the big bad police telling a poor innocent homeowner off for defending their property - people want to believe that. They don't want to think about the alternative. David Cameron, at least, is a bit more reserved in his judgement - but will that be reflected when it comes to tomorrow's papers?

Let these nutters have their say

2010-01-12T10:08:00.005Z

While I didn't think it was right to allow an al-Muhajiroun protest through Wootton Bassett, given the inflammatory nature of the march, the whole coverage of the event has been a spectacular own-goal for everyone except this one, small, extremist group, who have been given acres of publicity - well beyond their wildest dreams, well beyond the amount their tiny influence deserves, and well beyond what they should have been given.

That the protest would definitely go ahead was always in doubt - Anjem Choudhary and his chums have form for getting maximum publicity and then suddenly running away. Yet the media ploughed on with horror. These were not just a few nutters trying to rabble-rouse a tiny protest at the site of repatriations; they became the bogeyman.

That's why the media love Islam4UK - the catchier name of al-Muhajiroun, used so that readers don't have to try and wonder what those unfamiliar letter groupings sound like, and besides, it's better branding for the bogeyman. They represent fear. They are Islamists, militant, angry and aggressive. They are dhimmitude. They are Londonistan. They are the scary image that people who are scared of Muslims see. They would struggle to pack out a cub scout hut, let alone any bigger venue, but that's not the point; they punch well above their weight because they're what the media think we fear most. And in a lot of cases they're right.

They cause awkward questions about freedom of speech, and freedom in general. These are people who, after all, would almost certainly seek to deny the freedoms of others, in the extraordinarily unlikely event that they ever managed to get any kind of political power. But that said, I've always thought the best thing to do would be to let them have their deeply unpleasant say - not necessarily all over the media, which is where they've been delighted to be over the past couple of weeks, but in protests they organise themselves, so long as they're not set up to be taunting and aggressive, or located in particularly inflammatory places.

I've said it before about extreme right-wingers and racists - they shouldn't be banned from the country. They should be allowed in, with no fanfare, no hand-wringing, no worries, unless they pose a genuine threat to security, which these jokers don't - and which Islam4UK don't either, as far as I am aware. It's the deep intake of breath and the screaming that gives these people the publicity they crave for their vile views; and it's a lesson that this Government has failed to learn time and time again.

But the Government is wrong to ban this organisation, poisonous and awful though it is. That does nothing other than play into their hands as well. It's not as if this handful of extremists will do anything other than regroup somewhere else, as something else; they're not going to change their views or their intent overnight, just because they've been told they can't be Islam4UK any more.

Let these nutters have their say. Just don't give it any more credence than it deserves. Don't say they represent Muslims, because they don't. Don't say they're anything other than extremists, because they aren't. Don't give them so much airtime and column inches if they're a small group that shouts very loudly. Is that possible? Or is it the desire to tap into people's fears that means they're given immensely more coverage than they deserve?

Alan Johnson:

"Proscription is a tough but necessary power to tackle terrorism and is not a course we take lightly.
"We are clear that an organisation should not be able to circumvent proscription by simply changing its name."

If these people have committed offences, then let them be tried in a court of law - yet there are no charges, despite the thought-crime offences brought in by this most illiberal of Governments. If they haven't committed any crimes even under those laws, then they are not terrorists. Yet banning them just makes terror exist where there was none: it creates a climate of fear and suspicion of a real and persistent threat, which is exactly what any terrorist wants.

Well done Alan Johnson. You're a greater threat to freedom than Islam4UK ever were.

See also: Septicisle - The impossibility of freedom of speech

Gritting & ice clearing update

2010-01-11T18:31:00.003Z

Following yesterday's post about ice clearing, I've been sent a press release from the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health aiming to clarify the situation as regards gritting and ice clearing.

It's worth repeating this chunk in full to see how the IOSH feel they have been misrepresented and how these things happen:

[The Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday] ran stories, yesterday (Sunday 10 January), claiming IOSH was warning businesses not to grit public paths because this could lead to legal action.

The Sunday Telegraph stated that, “in guidance to its members”, IOSH said: “When clearing snow and ice, it is probably worth stopping at the boundaries of the property under your control” and that clearing a public path “can lead to an action for damages against the company, eg if members of the public, assuming that the area is still clear of ice and thus safe to walk on, slip and injure themselves.”

This is not the IOSH position on gritting public areas. Neither has IOSH issued this as guidance. The words are, in fact, taken from a Croner [Consulting] contribution to the “Just Ask” column of SHP magazine, in February of last year.

IOSH was contacted by The Sunday Telegraph about the story on Friday 8 January and offered the following comment from its Policy & Technical Director Richard Jones: “Deciding whether to grit beyond the boundaries of their property needs to be carefully considered by companies. If access to the premises is covered in ice, companies may choose to grit the access to help their staff and visitors arrive and leave safely, even though it’s not their property. However, in this instance, if they failed to grit the surface properly and someone had an accident as a result, then they could incur some liability.

“As a general rule, though, it’s sensible for firms to consider the risks and take reasonable steps to prevent accidents from happening. If this means gritting outside the boundaries of your workplace, then it’s better to do that than to have people slipping over or involved in car crashes on your doorstep.”

In other words, the IOSH position is to encourage businesses to be a good employer and neighbour by gritting beyond property boundaries and to make sure that the task is carried out thoroughly.

This comment was ignored by The Sunday Telegraph and the wording from the Croner article used instead and attributed to IOSH. This was done without the knowledge of the IOSH Media team, with no follow up check being made.

So you see how easy it is for an organisation's views to be misrepresented - not through malice or a desire to misrepresent them, I hasten to add. Though it is curious as to why certain quotes were omitted, if they were offered, and why others were chosen.

More weather/climate confusion

2010-01-11T16:59:00.004Z

You'll remember the other day that Richard Littlejohn explained that the difference between weather and climate was just 'semantics', and that I said it was a bit more complicated than that.

It's tempting to imagine that Littlejohn is just a squawking buffoon who either doesn't understand things properly, or a crafty weasel who wilfully ignores things and misrepresents things in order to get the facts to fit his prejudices. But there's another option as well: it may just be that his newspaper has decided that it holds its readers in such contempt that they must have everything slightly scientific presented in such simplistic terms that it doesn't represent what people have actually said. There may be no agenda at work here, no plan to make man-made climate change out to be bunkum; it may just be that, in a quest to make things so straightforward that anyone can understand them, not only do people not understand them but people end up understanding the opposite to what they might otherwise understand, when presented with the more complex data or ideas.

Maybe. Whether or not that's the case could be answered by what the Mail's response is to a complaint by Mojib Latif about the Mail on Sunday (and subsequently the repeating and reheating of that article by the Daily Mail and Telegraph) and how they represented his research. The Guardian reports:

He told the Guardian: "It comes as a surprise to me that people would try to use my statements to try to dispute the nature of global warming. I believe in manmade global warming. I have said that if my name was not Mojib Latif it would be global warming."
He added: "There is no doubt within the scientific community that we are affecting the climate, that the climate is changing and responding to our emissions of greenhouse gases."

That seems fairly unequivocal by him, doesn't it? Then how did his research get used like this?

Latif explains that's not what he meant at all, and not what he believes to be the case:

It said: "The BBC assured viewers that the big chill was was merely short-term 'weather' that had nothing to do with 'climate', which was still warming. The work of Prof Latif and the other scientists refutes that view."
Not according to Latif. "They are not related at all," he said. "What we are experiencing now is a weather phenomenon, while we talked about the mean temperature over the next 10 years. You can't compare the two."

It's what happens next that will determine whether it's a simple mistake of oversimplification, and more weather/climate confusion; or whether the Mail really believes, despite a refutation by the scientist it quotes in the story, that his research proves something other than what he claims it does; or whether there might be an agenda at work. Will the Mail let Latif explain, in their pages, and let him clarify and explain the complex issue so that readers might not be misled? Just on the off-chance that they don't:

The recent articles are not the first to misrepresent his research, Latif said. "There are numerous newspapers, radio stations and television channels all trying to get our attention. Some overstate and some want to downplay the problem as a way to get that attention," he said. "We are trying to discuss in the media a highly complex issue. Nobody would discuss the problem of [Einstein's theory of] relativity in the media. But because we all experience the weather, we all believe that we can assess the global warming problem."

Only another 59,971 to go

2010-01-11T13:16:00.002Z

From the BBC:

At least 29 people are thought to have died as a direct result of the cold snap.

There's still some way to go, then:

That snow had better get a wiggle on if it's going to get another 59,971 before the end of the cold snap.

The Indy's in a Liddle bit of trouble

2010-01-11T10:04:00.004Z

You'll know I'm no fan of Rod Liddle. I'm not really much of a fan of the Independent nowadays either, though I still read it from time to time. So which is worse? There's only one to find out... make Liddle the editor!

Incredibly, that's what a real human being has thought up as a viable idea to actually happen. Really.

Roy Greenslade has a good post up today about the shockwaves that the possibility of Liddle turning up and editing the Indy has created:

High-profile writers and editors are privately expressing grave concern about the decision by the editor-in-chief, Simon Kelner, to appoint Liddle. They believe his views run counter to the paper's ethos and, in the words of one critic, it will prove to "a recipe for commercial disaster."

Not just commercial disaster, though, I'd wager - disaster for that newspaper in particular, and disastrous for the press in general. We've already got half a dozen or so "Climate change is bollocks, isn't it, of course you can't say anything nowadays for fear of upsetting minorities, and the PC liberal elite, who run everything, are ruining our country" newspapers; it's hard to imagine how Liddle would do anything than create another one.

There's an ever-growing Facebook group, now with 1,588 members at the time of writing, to try and stave off the threat of Liddle becoming editor and dragging the Indy into the toilet, which I think is an excellent idea. Paul over at Though Cowards Flinch is a bit more sceptical than me about that and hopes the NUJ will ride to the rescue - well I'd love to imagine they might, but I think the chances are remote. Still, a few days ago no-one would have thought that anyone in the world could have possibly considered Rod Liddle to be anything other than a miserably bad columnist who occasionally says things that are racist and whose blog entry about Marcus Brigstocke marked a new low water mark in his once-mediocre career.

There is another possibility, though, and it's one that I've considered for a while. Liddle might just be writing for his target market at the Spectator. He knows the kind of shit the readers there expect - ill-thought-out but provocative polemic about how liberals are all bastards and how it's actually the white people who are the good guys, and everyone in Bongobongoland is savage scum, written with enough conviction, if not evidence, to create a stir. You're faced with a choice if you're a writer like Liddle - you can write about what you want for buttons and a hearty "well done" every now and then; or you can abandon everything you believe in, all those principles you hold dear, and dive into the cesspit in order to keep the money coming in. I dare say he makes a decent enough living by dancing along the racism tightrope at the Spectator - who cares whether he believes in it or not? It's certainly effective, even if I find it blood-vomitingly offensive.

So there's a possibility that the liberal-left are worrying too much about Liddle. He may not be a borderline racist with keyboard-in-the-face stupid views about a great deal of things; he may simply be a canny journalist who knows exactly what his readership want from him - in the case of the Spectator, I think he's got them fairly well nailed down. It may be that ability to anticipate the demands of his readership that could lead to him being a great success at the Indy, you see.

All right, obviously not - of course not - but I thought I'd throw it out there anyway. I think the reason he's being picked is that someone, somewhere thinks he will be the kind of provocative, attention-grabbing editor who can turn up on the kind of TV programmes who need someone to make Quentin Letts not look so appalling and idiotic; he can generate publicity for the paper and attract people to it, people who might not otherwise be interested in the Independent and who might think that he'll bring a bit of fun to it. It's wrong, and it's doomed, if that's the strategy, but that's all I can think of.

Liddle gets the last laugh in all this, of course. He gets to chuckle about the people setting up Facebook groups, knowing that quite a lot of print dinosaurs are still lumberingly suspicious of anything electronic and wouldn't know social media if it came and bit them on the eyeball. He gets to arrive in his job with a pre-packaged controversy helping him get noticed. And, most of all, he gets the job. That said, I still think his presence as a national newspaper editor is another nail in the coffin of the dead-tree press. And I can't find myself thinking that's a good thing.

See also: Sarah Ditum at Liberal Conspiracy

"Is ME real?" asks Mail

2010-01-10T19:03:00.008Z

This poll

on the Daily Mail's website might seem surprising when you consider that ME is a recognised illness worldwide - indeed, as the Mail reported way back in 2002:

So what on earth are they thinking? Well, the Mail carried a story last week, headlined

which reported on a disagreement over whether ME is caused by a virus or not - not whether it exists at all. Having reported the research which claimed to prove ME was caused by a virus last year, the Mail says:

Symptoms of ME, which affects 250,000 Britons, include extreme fatigue and painful limbs. Some sufferers are so weak that they become bed or wheelchair bound.
But lack of a clear cause has led to scepticism that it is a genuine illness.

It's hard in the black-and-white world of newspaper journalism to try to understand a difficult concept like an illness which doesn't have a specific bloodtest or symptom to identify it; or one with such a tricky diagnosis. But that's what ME is. Newspapers can either try to explain that difficult concept to readers, or they can bring up unsourced 'scepticism' and then ask its readers to decide whether an illness is real or not.

This has, understandably, sparked quite a response from people who have ME - not just in the comments under the article itself, but on a Facebook group which has been set up to challenge the Mail about the existence of the poll and how it harms the public perception of people with ME.

I asked Rachel, someone who has ME and who is one of the organisers of the Facebook group, to explain more. She writes:

I've been an ME sufferer for over 5 years now, I was 17 when I was diagnosed. When everyone else my age were getting degrees, socialising, and exploring the world, I was bedbound. The exhaustion, nausea, dizziness, light-headedness and headaches were so severe that I could barely sit up or eat.

I’m now 22 and am still housebound but that’s an improvement to my previous state. I’m currently involved in a Facebook group - created to show ME sufferers' dislike of this poll.

ME sufferers across the UK (and the world) have enough trouble when it comes to being understood. Even when the illness is believed to be real, having understanding of its symptoms and variations are hard to come by. Some people have trouble with the medical profession, getting benefits they desperately need can be a nightmare and they can even have lack of understanding from friends and family.
So when a poll appears asking “Do you think ME is a genuine illness?” it’s a wonderful slap in the face.

Some people say it provokes debate - yes, perhaps. But debate on what? Whether the current treatment for ME is working? The new research findings? Local support for sufferers? No, I’m afraid not. This is an outdated and hurtful debate on whether we’re lying or not.

ME is classified as a neurological illness by the World Health Organisation so ANY question about it being genuine is no longer valid.

As co-admin of this group I am gathering sufferers' experiences to send to the Daily Mail. Perhaps the Daily Mail didn't intend the hurt they’ve caused. But I want to show them the stories of the people whose lives have changed dramatically because of this apparently still questionable illness.

I am hoping to make the point: Would these people make this up? Would we force this upon ourselves? Some people are housebound, bed bound. If we can’t be free, at least let us be believed.

Thanks to her for writing that. I wanted to have the perspective of someone with ME to explain how upsetting and disappointing the Mail poll was. Now it may just be the case that someone at the Mail website has looked at the headline on the most recent story and thought that new developments had cast doubt on whether ME was a genuine illness - but that's not the case at all. Asking the question is, therefore, as pointless as asking "Is AIDS a genuine illness?" next to a story about that.

As ever, I like to think the Mail doesn't cause hurt or upset deliberately - sometimes it just does it accidentally, and steamrollers over people's feelings for the sake of a few clicks on the website. But having made that mistake, surely they could do the sensible thing and listen to readers who have ME and who were upset by what they read? Well, we'll see.

And there is some good news. The vast majority of people voting on the Mail's poll believe it is a genuine illness

- though clearly there is still some work to be done to change people's perceptions; and surely polls like that don't help in the first place.

Further information on ME can be found at Action for ME and Invest in ME, among other places - my links don't indicate support for any charity, it's just a suggestion. Please contribute your experiences of ME to the Facebook group, if you want the Mail to know the illness is real, and how it has affected you.

Ice clearing: What's the truth?

2010-01-10T16:44:00.007Z

There's a lot of confusion at the moment about what the legal position is over clearing your path (or a neighbour's path, or the path outside your house) of ice - with urban myths and elf'n'safety bollocks getting trotted out, of course. Most news outlets have had a bash at the story, including the BBC and the usual suspects. Richard Madeley has been banging on about it almost all day on Twitter, bless him; but is the Express columnist right when he says:

Legal knowledge mine Jack of Kent, however, is a little less worried by the whole thing. If you do clear a neighbour's path, for example, he says:

Ah but where's the fun in that? Surely the most important thing for a news outlet to do is not represent the facts of the situation, but instead create a nightmarish vision of the world in which the spectre of elf'n'safety or compensation ambulance-chasing bastards who SHOUT AT YOU DURING THE ADVERTS IN JEREMY KYLE are taking over the world, and there's nothing we can do to stop them. Why bother with accuracy, when you can take your readers for a ride in the ghost train?

The Daily Mail's effort appears to be rather similar to the Telegraph's on the same subject - notethe use of the word 'could' and 'may', carefully crafted on this occasion to represent "could well" whereas in fact the truth is "could possibly, under extremely unlikely circumstances". The Mail says:

Householders and businesses have been warned not to clear snowy pavements - as they could be sued if someone slips.

The Telegraph says:

Yet the professional body that represents health and safety experts has issued a warning to businesses not to grit public paths – despite the fact that Britain is in the grip of its coldest winter for nearly half a century.

Householders and businesses with the Mail; just businesses with the Tele. Who are these experts, anyway? Telegraph:

Clearing a public path “can lead to an action for damages against the company, e.g. if members of the public, assuming that the area is still clear of ice and thus safe to walk on, slip and injure themselves”.

I would say that if that's the case, it's not really 'clear' is it, but then I'm probably nitpicking. Both the Mail and the Telegraph quote John McQuater, who gets a nice bit of publicity with this quote:

John McQuater, president of the National Association of Personal Injury Lawyers, admitted: 'If you do nothing you cannot be liable. If You do something, you could be liable to legal action.'

Which is odd. Because look at this quote in a Guardian article which mentions ice clearing:

4. I've cleared the snow from our driveway. Am I opening myself up to a claim if someone slips?

This is an urban myth. If you do the reasonable thing and clear your drive, you are not opening yourself up to a possible claim, except in very exceptional circumstances.

"This is a common misconception," McQuater says. "By clearing the snow from your paths, you do not invite any extra liability that wouldn't have existed had you done nothing and left the snow on the ground. The only circumstance in which you might invite a claim was if you acted completely unreasonably, and somehow created a new latent hazard that had not existed before your actions."

Yes, it's our old friend John McQuater! Funny how the 'except in very exceptional circumstances' in the Guardian from McQuater becomes 'could be liable' in the Mail and Telegraph. I wonder if he qualified that quote when he spoke to them with an 'except in very exceptional circumstances' and that bit didn't make it into the final printed copy?

Who knows. But as ever, news stories aren't about the truth - they're about a certain worldview which needs to be reinforced. So if you think compensation culture is running rampant and elf'n'safety has truly gone mad, why bother finding out what the facts actually are, when you can go looking for the quotes that support your point of view, and which will infuriate your readers most?

Thanks to Iain for the tipoff!

Panic! No, don't panic. Wait, panic!

2010-01-10T13:23:00.006Z

The Express isn't sure whether it's the snowpocalypse or not.

Tuesday:

Aargh! Gas running out! Looting! Murder! People turning to cannibalism! (Of course, gas is always, by its nature, running out so it's not entirely false - it's just that it hasn't run out quite yet, so it's a teensy weensy bit misleading)

Wednesday:

Wuuuuurgh! Help! Panic! Chaos! Cars not moving quite as freely as they would otherwise do! Flakes of white stuff falling to the ground! Panic! Death! Roasting headless babies on a spit! Murder! Barricade yourselves in! Evil! Coldness! Fear!

However, Thursday brought this:

That's right. You see, the GAS IS RUNNING OUT and it's SNOW CHAOS, and you should be panicking... but, on the other hand, don't let that panic mean that we're ground to a halt, obviously. I mean, yes, it's is chaos, but on the other hand, it's not as if it's chaos, is it?

Panic returned for today, though, in a delightfully responsible piece of journalism that reports the facts without having to resort to simplistic scaremongering:

Yes! PANIC NOW! Panic! Stock up on tins of spaghetti hoops and firewood - this is going to be the snowmageddon! Doomed, I tell you, doomed! A far cry from "Don't let the snow bring us to a stop" - now the Express says that the snow definitely will bring at least 60,000 of us to a stop, permanently. Sadly, then, it's the "Don't panic" that's the island in a sea of "Aaargh, we're all gonna die!" - and when 60,000 of us haven't snuffed it because of the weather? Well we should just think ourselves lucky we're still around to enjoy such beautiful front pages.

Who cares what words actually mean?

2010-01-10T12:03:00.003Z

Uponnothing and Left Outside have already dismantled Richard Littlejohn's feeble attempts to understand the difference between weather and climate, in which he concludes that weather and climate must be the same thing, even though there are different words for them:

Ah, say the 'experts', there's a difference between 'weather' and 'climate'. They are forced to resort to semantics to sustain their insistence that the science is settled, even though they are all sitting there shivering like brass monkeys. They'd still cling to their belief in man-made warming if Hell froze over.

Luckily for us, we know for sure that hell hasn't frozen over, because Littlejohn has yet to write anything funny ever. But what I want to focus on in particular is what is either genuine coarse stupidity or wilful ignorance. After all, the reason why there are different words for different things is often because they're different. Climate means something very different from weather, although they both talk about rain, and sun, and so on. Either this is too hard for Littlejohn to understand - and I do wonder sometimes - or he's decided that he can dismiss what anyone else says on the basis that they're simply using two different words that really mean the same thing.

Using Littlejohn's reasoning, there's no difference other than semantics between a cat and a dog - if I think they're the same thing, then they're the same thing, and it's only people trying to pull the wool over our eyes who try to use different words to describe them. It's the same kind of idea that people use to tell you that the BNP are left wing, or that apples are hovercraft - I think this, therefore no matter what other people say, or what the words actually mean, it doesn't matter. I'm aware that using a dictionary definition in any argument automatically makes you lose (I can't remember whose law this is, but I'm fairly pleased it exists) but such definitions exist for a reason: different words mean different things.

Or, to put it another way, you could say that if I call Richard Littlejohn an ignorant twat, I'm actually calling him a genius. Because there's no difference, other than semantics, between 'ignorant twat' and 'genius', they're completely interchangeable things.

I'm pretty sure that's what Littlejohn tells himself, anyway.

There's a television programme on!

2010-01-08T19:38:00.004Z

"There's a television programme on!" is one of those news stories that's as unfathomably popular as "There was weather!" - yet I find it hard to work out what it is about it that I get so grumpy about.

I mean, where's the harm in it? There's a TV programme on. What's wrong with discussing how the TV programme might go, and wondering how the people taking part in it might succeed in their quest to learn how to dance / dance on ice / sing / sing and dance / sing and dance, on ice. And it's not that I don't like reality TV, because I do. I even watched Todd Carty scamper about like a modern-day Buster Keaton in last year's Dancing on Ice, and I thought it was good fun. So why do I feel so fed up when I read news stories about it? Is it just that I'd prefer to have news about news, rather than this kind of fluffy sawdust to bulk out the output?

I think there might be something more. And I think I've worked out what it is about this BBC story

that makes me so annoyed. It's the whole bending-over-backwardsness of it, a necessary evil in some ways from the Beeb, but still unpleasant. We all expect them to rabbit on about Brucie and Tess and whichever minor celebrities are doing the cha-cha-cha this year, because Strictly Come Dancing's on the BBC; but they feel the need to be excruciatingly fair about the whole thing, and mention what ITV are up to. It's not as if the ITV website is going to start blethering on about powder-puff reality TV shows on the Beeb, is it? It's just some couldn't-get-panto stars scraping about on ice for a few weeks, after all. Who gives a monkey's?

But no, the BBC must plough on and be fair to ITV. They hand-wring. They think: well, we mention Strictly on our website, so we must mention the X-Factor and that one with the skating as well, just to be fair. Why be fair? They'll never be fair back to you. Go on, ignore them. What happened to the glorious days when the Radio TImes wasn't allowed to mention ITV shows, and you had to get the TV Times separately, and each pretended the other didn't exist at all? Where did all this fairness come from? I demand war between commercial and non-commercial broadcasters, not chummy pats on the back!

Oh well. Mind you, if the BBC's public service remit extends to alerting me to the possibility of Bobby Davro skating into a wall live on television, then that's worth a couple of extra pennies on the licence fee...

Comment poison and advertising

2010-01-08T12:49:00.006Z

Jamie at Mailwatch asked a while ago if online commenters could create a toxic environment for brands. It's something I've wondered about for a while. It's all very well creating traffic for your website by allowing people to be as offensive as they like - but does there come a point when a line gets crossed, and advertisers on those pages don't want their brands alongside something truly unpleasant?

You may remember the other day I wrote about Rod Liddle's fans*, and included this snippet from an online forum discussion at the British Democracy Forum about one of his columns:

I emailed John Lewis to ask them if they felt their brand belonged alongside that kind of discussion, and they responded today:

Dear Mr Vowl
Thanks for your email . The advertisement has now been removed and we wont be advertising on this website in the future .We have a rigorous screening process for where our advertisements appear , but on this occasion, it would appear that this inappropriate placement has slipped through the net .We are reviewing how this happened currently .
Kind Regards
Kelly McAdden
Online Marketing
John Lewis Direct

I had thought it was most likely a genuine mistake from the company concerned and had wanted to alert them to placement they might not agree with. It's tempting to advertise on certain platforms but when your brand appears alongside views that are verging on the extreme, then that might change people's opinions. In the end, advertisers will decide where they want to put their brand names and whether certain discussions are toxic or not for them.

* Incidentally Liddle has, today, done something so shit-in-the-eyes bad on his Spectator blog that it's done the impossible: it's made me take Marcus Brigstocke's side. It's so dismal that it really doesn't deserve a link, but luckily I have the power of the screengrab:

I wonder if Spectator advertisers want their brands alongside something that bad? "Funny things said: 0" - oh, the irony.

The Guardian hurts my brain

2010-01-08T08:35:00.006Z

I'm often quite accurately accused of spending too much time obsessing about the Mail and Express (and Telegraph, and Sun, and Star) at the expense of other media outlets. "What about the Guardian?" people say to me. "What about the BBC? Surely they're just as shit."

It's a fair cop. The others are just as capable of being terrible; though I'd argue they do it less often - much less often when the words "Tanya Gold is away" appear in the Guardian, for example. I've got nothing against the woman personally, but it would seem to be the case that the Guardian have hired a Daily Mail journalist so their readers don't have to go to the Mail itself to exercise that Mail part of their brains - you know, the bit that starts pulsating when you see coppers pulling someone over for speeding, and before you know it, you've started foaming at the mouth about catching law-abiding motorists when they should be out there going after the real criminals, and I'm paying for this, and it's not right...

We've all got it, our Inner Daily Mail. I think it sits in between the bit of your brain that tells you that you need to go to the toilet and the part that makes you go "awww" when you see a puppy. It's quite an ancient part of the brain, I think, but what it also does is make you feel suspicious about new technology. And Gold brilliantly (or not, if you don't like dying in a sea of witless banality) taps into this with this article, about iphones:

Customers, you see – actually, I prefer the word hostages – cannot be bothered to say "application". That is three syllables too far for the avatars. They have better things to do with their time – like having a virtual pint with iBeer. (Hilarious if you are six years old or, because you are a software designer, other people have only ever been a fascinating but terrifying idea to you.) Not drinking? Have an iMilk. It's the same, but it's milk. Except it isn't.

In labour, trying to squeeze a baby out? Try the Birth Buddy app – it will help you track the frequency of your labour contractions. "I can't remember anything about the moment I brought you into the world, child, because I was playing with my iPhone." "I hate you, Mum." (This sentiment was brought to you by iPhone.)

Want to fart, but can't? iFart will fart for you. "Set your phone on a flat surface. The next time the phone is moved, it will fart." Is this where science has brought us? To a farting telephone in a joke shop world?

Gold has a bewildering talent, in that even when I actually broadly agree with what she's writing, I find myself getting angry. Do you know what I mean? There's something excruciating about the whole thing. Sure, a lot of people with iphones are total arses, but on the other hand, that's not the phone's fault; it's the people who are arses' fault. Gold annoys me not in the same way that the Mail or Express annoy me - she's not making up crap about immigrants to suit a prejudiced agenda, for example - but it's the sheer "is that it?"ness about the whole thing. When I read something in a national newspaper, particularly the nationa newspaper I buy most often, I kind of want it to be good. That isn't. It's feeble space-filling.

And yet, it's pretty much Proust when compared with Deborah Orr breathlessly telling us that Sadie Frost is an attractive woman - more than that, that Sadie Frost has 'flesh' like 'flesh' she has never seen before.

No, really.

That's what the whole story's about. You think I'm making this up, and that actually there's more to it, and I'm being reductive and pretending it's worse than it really is. Oh no, go and see for yourselves. And read this, if you can:

I've seen Sadie Frost very close, very recently, with hardly any clothes on, when she appeared on stage in camisole and knickers for a charity fundraising event I attended last year. So I know that her body has very little to communicate to other women at all, except that it is quite exceptionally wondrous.

Sure she's slender, she's toned, and she keeps herself in good nick. Anyone can do that, given the motivation. But Frost's flesh has a special quality. It looks both soft and firm, like no female flesh I've never seen.

I know. You're probably softly crying into the keyboard, having pummeled yourself around the head with your fists, and now you're wondering why I subjected you to this. You may even be thinking: "Jesus Christ, Vowl, I've seen some shit from Littlejohn or Moir in my time - I've even read Allison Pearson and survived - but this is a whole different level of badness." And you'd be right. Drooling over someone's flesh, synecdochising someone into their bare components - it's like something Buffalo Bill might do in Silence of the Lambs, not a proper writer in a proper newspaper. Is it? If it is, it hurts my brain and I don't like it.

And then, just when I think it can't get any worse, it goes and employs Zac Goldsmith to write some crap on Comment is Free:

Actually, I was going to try and put a quote in there. But there's not a single sentence that lends itself to appearing in an article with the Guardian banner. It's dreadfully written, poorly thought out, smearing by association, unreferenced, and comes to a miserably pissweak conclusion which isn't stacked up by anything that's gone before. Is this really how low the bar is for Comment is Free? Or is it only this low if you happen to be some non-dom Tory prick who's about to be sedan-chaired into a nice cosy safe seat, despite having the intelligence of a freshly-coiled dogshit?

You might imagine - or hope - that it's a "Give this twit enough rope" exercise but I'm not so sure, given the context of Gold and Orr. I don't think we can give the Guardian enough credit to do that, when they're happy to fill their space up with such utterly unbearable crap on a regular basis. Of course, Goldsmith's nonsense is demolished in the comments - one of the few occasions on which I haven't looked at the comments under a CiF article without losing the will to live - and there's a good article about it at Liberal Conspiracy here. Now I don't mind the Guardian giving space to Tories, of course not - but I would like to see things that are interesting to read and well written, even if I don't agree with them, rather than the kind of desperate tosh spluttered out by Goldsmith.

While the Mail might make me angry, the Express might make me despair, the Guardian just makes me think: What the fucking hell was that? I know it has a lot of really great writers, but that's what irritates me all the more when it bulks out its content with sawdust. I want to like it; I want to enjoy it. But it won't let me.

It actually says that

2010-01-07T11:48:00.005Z

It does*. It says 'Phew what a scorcher'.

I sometimes wonder if the poor drone who has to blu-tack together the Daily Express front page secretly puts in little touches to show how much they think it's jumped the shark as a cry for help.

"Look," I imagine them saying, "We're not a proper newspaper any more. We're even using 'Phew what a scorcher' - the kind of jokey headline that people think of when they think of the Sun in the 1970s, as a headline below a picture of a woman in a bikini. We've given up, can't you see that? Why are any of you still buying this dreadful soggy excuse for a newspaper? Why are you putting it in your shopping baskets or rolling it up under your arm? It's over. We're finished. We've given up all hope of producing anything remotely good, so we're trying to tell you, in as subtle a way as we can, that this is shit. And yet somehow, miraculously, people go into newsagents, without any hint of despair, and buy the bloody thing. Whether they're mad or stupid we don't know, but they do. We could put a great big turd on the front page and a headline saying WE HATE YOUR NAN and people would still go and buy the sodding thing, thinking it was a newspaper. What else are we meant to do?"

That's what I think anyway, but I could well be wrong. Perhaps people really think that 'Phew what a scorcher' is postmodern genius. Or that Naomi Campbell really is a 'scorcher', and after having viewed a photo of her we really ought to say 'Phew'. I don't know.

Nice of them to try and tell everyone not to panic about the snow, after yesterday's

though.

* In case you ever wondered where I get these front pages from, they're from the Sky News website, which pops them up late every evening or first thing in the morning. Who knows - Perhaps the Express sometimes send over very early editions which have been put together as a joke. That's the way it looks sometimes, though I often walk into the Co-op later in the day and see they are, in fact, depressingly real.

Snow panic

2010-01-06T08:11:00.008Z

Panic. Panic! PANIC! Do you not see how important it is to panic? We haven't had a decent panic since swine flu - remember that? And that wasn't even around long enough to panic about. So now it's time to really panic. PANIC! It's not too late to panic. Get out there and panic. No, stay in and panic. Stockpile salt, water and Ovaltine at the Co-op. Then panic. And buy a newspaper while you're in there, elbowing people in the head for a can of de-icer and a bag of oranges to ward off the scurvy.

I've written before about how people like Iain Dale and Richard Littlejohn - ah, and I'm sure Wogan would be doing it, if he were still on the radio, but thankfully I don't have to listen to him ever again - do the "Hey look, it's snowing outside, therefore there's no such thing as climate change ever, hooray, I win" silliness every now and then. Which is fine, because it's a nice little joke for their readers and makes them feel more comfortable about not having to understand something quite complicated, like the seasons of the year and the fact it's colder in winter than it is in summer, especially in a generally cold country like Britain*. But you'd think that kind of silliness would be reserved for comment pieces rather than the front page of a national newspaper. You'd think so if you didn't read the Express:

Aaaargh! SNOW CHAOS! Eeeep! Martyn Brown was the Express writer charged with sellotaping together their snow story, writing:

AS one of the worst winters in 100 years grips the country, climate experts are still trying to claim the world is growing warmer.
With millions of Britons battling through snow and ice to get to work today, scientists claim that the cold conditions should not be used as evidence against man-made climate change.

As one of the worst winters grips the country, climate experts claim the world is growing warmer. Whyever might that be? Could it be that not every country in the world is seeing a really cold winter? Possible. But to imagine all that, and to imagine that today's weather in Britain is slightly different from the global climate, is quite difficult if you don't want to look beyond your own back gate. This story says there's a heatwave heading for South Australia. Conclusive evidence of man-made global warming, then? Well no, not quite either. It's a bit more complicated than that. Why can't newspapers handle things that it's hard to describe in ten words or fewer?

Even the Mail - even the Mail, for god's sake - is a bit more upbeat about things, saying that we'll get through it with true British grit and determination:

That's a bit more like it! I imagine the online articles about snow have ten billion billion billion comments underneath saying "WHATEVER HAPPENED TO GLOBAL WARMING LOL?" but at least the Mail are trying to suppress their natural instinct to panic as much as is humanly possible.

The newspapers, though, are bastions of responsibility compared to the dumbed-down rolling news channels, desperately trying to out-Day Today each other with increasingly apocalyptic predictions of snowmageddon. I think if I see one more breathless reporter in a bobble hat out in a snowy field telling me that it's snowing - which I can see with my own eyes, by looking with them - I'm going to go insane.

And now, of course, news channels and their websites have turned into Tony Hart doing 'The Gallery'. Send us in your pictures of snow so other people can have an idea of what snow might look like, in case they've strained their necks and can't look out of windows - and people do, they really do. "Here's my picture of snow, it's in my back garden" - "And here's a lovely picture from Doris Racist of Guildford, and here's some lovely snow in her back garden, oh and look, there's a little dog turd by the bird bath there, lovely, keep those pictures coming in" - is this what we've become? Is this the bright new world of citizen journalism? Is this what rolling news was meant to be all about - people sending in pictures of their back gardens because there was weather?

Apparently, yes. Sky plead with readers to send in their snow pics:

I'll send you a picture all right. Here's a picture of my hairy arse, which is about as relevant to news and as interesting as your bloody snow pictures. Ooh, here's a gate with some snow on it. Christ! Oh, people made snowmen did they? I would never have known they did, if you hadn't been there to tell me. Thank goodness there's no other news in the world at all, that you could just clear the news schedules and stop people dying and being nasty to each other right across the planet, because there was a bit of a flurry in the home counties and some kids had a day off and went sledging, the jammy bastards.

I might sound a bit curmudgeonly, but no. I like snow. I think it's great. I like going to the pub as well, but I don't think Sky should have a reporter outside telling the world about it. There are lots of banal details about the world that aren't interesting enough to be put on the news, with warnings of CHAOS and DANGER and BLOODY SNOWBOUND APOCALYPSE WITH PEOPLE MURDERING EACH OTHER AND TURNING TO CANNIBALISM - all right, I made the last one up. I know the election stuff was tedious, and the snow's a bit more fun than that, but surely - surely - there are other news stories as well, somewhere, about something. Aren't there? Or is this all there is? Panic and weather, the two great British obsessions - it's a perfect storm.

See also: Lenin's Tomb - today's headlines

* Even if you're looking at pictures of it on the TV from Florida or popping over on holiday to the UK to see how your kids are doing in their journalism jobs (which they obviously got through talent, determination and sheer skill alone) in the case of Littlejohn

Links 6/1/10

2010-01-06T07:48:00.004Z

I haven't done links in ages, which is bad of me. So here are some blogs and websites and stuff I've enjoyed reading and looking at lately:

Bloggerheads: All hail the big giant head
Beau Bo D'or: And what the David Cameron poster should have said
Chicken Yoghurt (back at last!): Hobson's Choice 2010
Newsbag: Man smuggles dangerous pen on board aircraft
Speak You're Branes: Curse of the curmudgeon
Five Chinese Crackers: Winterval - The beast that wouldn't die
Septicisle: Scum-watch - Nutted
Though Cowards Flinch: Who is the imbecile, Rod Liddle or the nutcase suicide bombers?
The proletarian tide: Guardian extracts the urine from its readership
Bad Fairground Art: Tinkerbelly

'Non-standard issue' and Gurkhas

2010-01-05T14:49:00.010Z

You know earlier I was explaining why I moderate comments? Here are some good examples of why, underneath an article about Gurkhas 'overwhelming' military charities if they take up residency in the UK thanks to Joanna Lumley's campaign:

Yes, you read that right. All non-white people are 'non-standard issue'. Pink is the 'standard' colour for human beings, you see. And yes, immigrants are 'besmirching' our landscape.

LT also points out the difference between good immigrants (Gurkhas) and bad immigrants (everyone else):

That thought is quickly picked up and carried:

You see, certain types of immigrants have all done NOTHING for Britain. As opposed to those other brilliant types who have contributed such sparkling comments on Daily Mail stories. LT's view, however, that some immigrants should be allowed in is a little too mild for some commenters:

But others reserve particular venom for Joanna Lumley herself:

I imagine what will happen next is what usually happens with stories of this type. Having allowed this soup of witless cunts to outracist each other for a good while, comments will suddenly become suspended and will disappear into the ether, as if they never happened at all. The Mail will get to have its cake and eat it - set up the story (which isn't particularly unpleasant in itself, yet which presses a few of the hot buttons with phrases like 'influx' and 'overwhelmed'), get a ton of clicks from the usual suspects, then let the poison melt away like snowflakes, leaving no trace, as if it was never there.

It's a fairly smelly way of doing stuff - allowing loads of comments which you then withdraw at a future date. Unless the Mail thinks views like these are perfectly acceptable under its brand name and alongside its advertisers? But I don't think it does really. This fairly naked racism highlights why these commenters have come here - they know they're welcome, and it's not hard to see why, because others happily buy into the bollocks tabloid mythology about immigrants - you know, how those asylum seekers get given massive tellies and great big mansions and there's nothing anyone can do about it, the sort of stuff you read in the Mail on a regular basis:

I do agree with one thing: you have to wonder about the mentality of some people.

Comments and that

2010-01-05T10:18:00.002Z

I spend a small part of every day moderating comments. I prefer moderating to not moderating, and I don't like anonymous comments. These are the rules, such as they are. But if you've ever submitted a comment and wondered why it hasn't turned up, it may be due to any one of these reasons:

1. I made a mistake. I do this from time to time, pressing the wrong button and so on. Don't take it personally, I promise I try to approve as many comments as I can.
2. I was a bit grumpy that day. This can happen as well. I get in bad moods and do tend to disregard the rest of humanity as being essentially worthless. This is wrong of me. It doesn't happen often, and I'm sorry when it does.
3. You said something I thought might be possibly defamatory. Since I choose to have moderation up, I'm responsible for the content of comments. I may just be being careful or oversensitive. It would be a bit daft to take the piss out of newspapers libelling people, and then end up doing it myself.
4. You wrote too much. No epics, please. A general rule: if it's longer than my actual post, you've overstretched a little bit.
5. I am busy doing something else. I don't always get around to moderating comments all the time. Please be patient and I'll get around to it.
6. You're a fucking troll. I say 'fucking troll' because that's the right way to put it. Bugger off to HYS or CiF if you want to bother other people and annoy them all day. I don't have the time for it or to get involved in lengthy discussions.
7. You're making the same bloody point again and again. To which you could understandably reply: But that's what you're doing on this blog. To which I would equally understandably reply: But this is my blog.
8. You're a spamming bastard. In which case I'll piss through your letterbox tonight, see how you like it.
9. It's been two years since I wrote that article. Time has passed, and I can't really see the point in putting new comments up on it.
10. You're being a martyr about the whole thing. I rejected something you wrote once and you decided to end every subsequent comment with "I bet you don't approve this" - again, fuck off to HYS or CiF if you want to play those infantile games. Even if you write the most brilliant comment in the world and say "I bet you don't approve this" at the end of it, I won't approve it, just to piss you off, because you did that.

However, please bear in mind:

I love each and every one of you. Even when I disagree with you. I may not always have time to enter into a debate but I do appreciate all the comments that are left.

The Wootton Bassett protest

2010-01-05T07:08:00.003Z

Paedophiles have a right to free speech, for example, much as we might loathe the content of what they're saying - but it's probably best they don't do it outside a primary school. If that were proposed - and I'm guessing it won't ever be, but stick with me - that would be provocative, inflammatory and would run the maximum risk of creating a violent reaction.

I have similar feelings about Al Muhajiroun and the idea posited on the Islam4UK website about holding a parade through Wootton Bassett to remember Muslim victims of the Afghan war. Now, as I strenuously try to point out at all times, I'm not a 'no platform' kind of person - but I think it's disingenuous to neglect the context of where the platform might be, and whether somewhere else might be a bit more suitable, and a bit less provocative.

Which isn't to say I don't find the Wootton Bassett parades mawkish and exploitative of service families' genuine grief, because I do. As Matthew Parris so eloquently put it a little time ago, there's a danger that we end up depicting dedicated service people as little more than victims, which isn't quite the case. Yes, these are underpaid, badly treated, underequipped public-sector workers, often young men barely out of school, but that isn't to say we should treat them with the kind of lachrymose sentimentality reserved for children with cancer or special-needs folk - they know the risks, they are dedicated to their job and they very often enjoy what they're doing.

What the repatriation ceremonies - streamed live on news channels with reporters describing the hearses' procession in hushed tones - have done is to distill the war into one set of casualties - specifically 'our' soldiers who have died. And I think that misses the point in two ways. Firstly, it's important to remember that war doesn't, unfortunately, kill good guys and bad guys, ie 'our boys' and the evil Taliban - mistakes can be made, soldiers can be killed by friendly fire and civilians can be caught up in it too. Secondly, it takes attention away from the living repatriations - those soldiers who come back to Britain injured, disabled or deeply traumatised. Also, I think it runs the risk of becoming a tool for propaganda - Nick Griffin, of course, has turned up at a repatriation, but there's another side, too. Who wouldn't want to harness the positive feeling towards service personnel, and try to ride on the back of it, however carefully? The BBC's Question Time even came from the town recently, showing that broadcasters recognise how the town's name resonates with the public. What better place to hold a protest - or worse?

Still, if these repatriation events give families a genuine chance to grieve in public when they want to, and for others to show their appreciation of the efforts of those fighting on the other side of the world, then it's not for me to stand in judgement, thinking I know better. I may not agree with the conflict in Afghanistan but I do understand how others do value its importance, and how it's important for families to make some ritual sense when a loved one dies, whether that's in private or public.

Is it right to allow someone to hijack the Wootton Bassett 'brand' (as it has now sadly become) for the purposes of furthering their own agenda? Even the odious Griffin managed not to be an inflammatory presence, but then he didn't announce his arrival with bells and whistles beforehand. You have to wonder whether the announcement on Islam4UK was really a well thought-out plan for a genuine march, or something to generate as much publicity as possible for the group - which of course it has ended up doing. A loud and noisy march through central London wouldn't have created as much heat and light as this intention to march through a sleepy Wiltshire town has done - so it's a propaganda win, in that sense, regardless of how much condemnation there has been.

You also have to bear in mind the idea of creating a precedent. If this group do get to protest through the town, others may see the huge amount of publicity generated and may want to as well. And I'm inclined to agree with Dave Osler, who says:

But context is everything, and this move is an obvious provocation from what is effectively a front organisation for banned Islamist faction Al Muhajiroun, who are manifestly not peaceniks of any description.

It has been suggested that the announcement is simply a stunt on the part of the publicity-savvy [Anjem] Choudary, and I very much hope that is the case. If it goes ahead, it will inevitably generate a huge counter-mobilisation likely to boost the fortunes of the fascist British National Party ahead of an impending general election. Choudary either does not care about this, or positively relishes the prospect.

And that's the real problem. If this whole business is about creating a punch-up rather than genuinely honouring Muslim war deaths, then it's pretty shabby. It brings to mind the English Defence League plans to protest outside mosques - provocative, nasty and downright stupid, leaving you with a suspicion that violence or an angry reaction wouldn't be entirely disapproved of, if it did happen. The people of Wootton Bassett didn't ask for troops to come through their high street in coffins, but that's what ended up happening due to their proximity to an air base. Do they deserve other protests cluttering their streets? I'm not so sure they do. This isn't 'no platform', it's 'maybe the platform shouldn't quite be here in such a provocative place'.

I note that the Islam4UK website appears to be down at the moment, presumably under the enormous weight of traffic this stunt has created. So it's a victory of sorts, without ever having to have the protest in the first place. I can't think that Al Muhajiroun will have garnered very much more support from this whole business, though.

A lesson in deception

2010-01-04T09:27:00.007Z

I had lessons in maths at the age of five, yet I didn't become a mathematician at the age of five. I had lessons in French at the age of 11, yet didn't become French. But...

...of course. Having lessons in parenting at 14 will make you become a parent at 14, won't it? Won't it? No, I imagine it won't. But that's the leap of logic we're meant to try and achieve with this story. Here are the ingredients the story has going for it, as far as the Mail's concerned:

New Labour
teenagers having immoral sex
teh evil state (even, remarkably, being a 'nanny' state by somehow encouraging teenagers to be parents. Is that what nannies do nowadays?)
liberals secretly running our country
poor people all want to live on benefits (and guess who's paying?!)

And here comes the conjuring trick:

Watch that 'alarming rise'... watch it... keep your eyes on it... are you watching it...?

Inner-city areas are more likely to have teenage pregnancy than the Cotswolds... wow, who knew? But hang on, where's that 'alarming rise' gone? Like any great conjurer, the Mail distracts you with the "Look at the difference between nice rural people and EVIL URBAN TYPES, MANY OF WHOM ARE PROBABLY... WELL YOU KNOW" bit of misdirection, and then, all of a sudden, the 'alarming rise' is gone. Now for all I know there may be an alarming rise, but it's not mentioned in the story, or referenced anywhere. Those figures are just comparing different regions, not plotting a 'rise' of any kind. The Mail's said it's there, it's told you it's there, and then... all of a sudden, it's not there. But you're too busy being angry about the poor people on benefits to notice.

The moral compass of the story comes here:

Who are these experts? Expert experts or just someone from a pressure group who could be found to prop up the Mail's pearl-clutching panic? I sense you know the answer to this already, but:

It 'might create an interest where the was none', according to someone somewhere. Because that's what happens. Children live in this isolated bubble where they don't notice things like babies and families, and then all of a sudden school tells them it exists, so they decide that they're going to be a parent. Is that what we're expected to believe? Is that really what happens? And what if the 'parenting' lessons are going to reflect the true difficulties of parenthood, the financial costs, the strain on relationships and so on? Will that really make it more attractive?

It's such a piss-weak argument, the Mail can't even get the Tories to back them up:

A neat side-step there from Michael Gove, who fails to join in with the outrage but attempts to make a political point anyway - which is fair enough.

What the story promised, though, has failed to materialise. There is, as far as we can see, no 'alarming rise' in teenage pregnancies referenced anywhere. There isn't even much outrage over the plans - even the Tories fail to agree with the Mail's argument, and the only 'experts' they can find to back it up are a single pressure group. Indeed, of the sources named in the story - Margaret Morrissey, Michael Gove, David Paton and Lynn Edwards - only one spoke out against the plan, two expressed neutral views (though David Paton asserted that sex education has very little impact on behaviour) and one spoke in favour. The elements of the story, then, are balanced - but the presentation doesn't quite appear that way, does it?

This whole diabolical mess is backed up by a screamingly angry comment piece, though:

Not content with imposing lessons on sex, 'relationships' and domestic violence, Children's Secretary Ed Balls is adding yet another subject to the overcrowded school curriculum.
Incredibly, this inveterate social engineer wants 14-year-olds to be given compulsory lessons on parenting.

There's a childishness about the presentation of this whole policy as being Ed Balls's idea as a 'social engineer' - as if Government policies are things that are dreamt up by one person acting alone. The Mail says schools should concentrate on the "Three Rs" instead, which is face-slappingly stupid - if you need to do that by the age of 14 then pupils are really beyond help; but it's the kind of 'common sense back to basics never did me any harm' attitude to schooling that the Mail probably thinks its readers hold dear.

That aside, it's still trying to squeeze the outrage out of the situation of children and young adults being given some preparation for the world they'll face outside. Which doesn't seem like such a bad idea to me at all. But no, let's just manufacture some pointless outrage instead, shall we?

BBC discrimination

2010-01-03T11:19:00.004Z

The BBC discriminate, we're told today in two different stories - but what sort of discrimination is it? If you're Harriet Harman, it's ageist and sexist discrimination against older women; if you're Lynda La Plante, who's an older woman and who could use that very justification if she wanted, it's discrimination against anyone who isn't a young male Muslim.

They could conceivably both be right. Harman's assertion comes from anecdotal evidence - she says she spoke to an unnamed former BBC executive who told her there was prejudice against older female newsreaders. But we don't know how long ago that policy was in place - and as the article itself points out (as you'd imagine it would, given that the BBC are doing the usual sackcloth-and-ashes "Oh look it's a story about how shit we are, we've got to cover it, unlike every other media outlet ever, otherwise people will think we're somehow evil and they'll want to get rid of the licence fee" self-flagellation) some changes have been put in place recently because of previous criticism:

Following the row the corporation announced it would be recruiting more older women presenters.
Veteran newsreader Julia Somerville is due to return to the BBC as a TV news presenter after an absence of of nearly 23 years.
She will join Westminster correspondent Carole Walker, former ITN newsreader Fiona Armstrong and BBC World presenter Zeinab Badawi on the TV news service.

It's not clear in the article whether the 'row' in question is one involving Moira Stewart or Arlene Phillips. Phillips, of course, now has a primetime BBC show almost all to herself now, so you could say she hasn't done badly at the hands of the 'ageists' - although you could also argue that she might not have been first in the queue to host such a programme if there hadn't been such a furore in the first place over her departure from the other show.

The truth is, we don't know. All corporations have slightly opaque hiring and firing procedures, which doesn't necessarily mean they're hotbeds of discrimination. Harman, perhaps, has come to this story a bit late, with possibly outdated information from someone who no longer works fot the BBC, who may well have described to her a prevailing view some time ago. But there's no way of knowing. All you can say is that it's another "BBC ageism" story all over the other media outlets, who always take particular relish in attacking their state-funded rival.

Which brings me to the Mail and Lynda La Plante. It's not just the Mail who have carried the Lynda La Plante "Poor me, a Muslim would probably have more chance of getting a script accepted, wouldn't they, somehow?" story, but their treatment of it is very different from the Independent, for example, who did it this way:

"If my name were Usafi Iqbadal and I was 19, then they'd probably bring me in and talk," the scriptwriter, who has mainly worked for ITV, told The Daily Telegraph.

But Muslim writers hit back, accusing La Plante of "old-style racism" for reinforcing stereotypes. Max Malik, a novelist and playwright, called her comments "divisive, unhelpful and discouraging for young writers". Mr Malik, who won the Muslim Writers' Award two years ago, added: "She's trying to force me and my ilk into a corner. I don't call her a ginger-haired, middle-aged, female writer. That would be insulting."

Sarfraz Manzoor, journalist, broadcaster and author of the memoir Greetings from Bury Park, said Ms La Plante should "get that chip off her shoulder and return to the real world rather than playing the misunderstood victim in the fantasy world in which she is currently residing." He added: "I would love to meet the Muslim writers whose output is currently clogging up the television schedules: can she name any of these mythical individual,s or are her comments simply a headline- grabbing way to yet again bash the BBC and blame Muslims?"

That's one way of covering it, isn't it - getting both sides of the argument. Or you could just put La Plante's views in unchallenged and then carry on with a bit of BBC-bashing to fill up the space. That's what the Mail does, with a series of unconnected attacks on the BBC in the space of the same story:

PD James criticised the BBC over its 'extraordinarily large' salaries for managers.

the BBC has a target that 12.5 per cent of employees should be from ethnic minorities by December 2012.

In October, BBC Director General Mark Thompson admitted that programme-makers tackle Islam differently from Christianity.

comedian Ben Elton, who accused the BBC of being scared to make jokes about Islam

This week Thompson was also given an unexpected drubbing by P.D. James, the 89-year-old crime writer and former BBC governor.

The Conservative peer likened the BBC to a 'large unwieldy ship' and grilled him over the fact that 375 executives at the corporation earn more than £100,000 a year, and 37 of them more than the Prime Minister's salary of £198,000.

What a shame that the Mail didn't have the space to tell its readers where Thompson got given that 'unexpected drubbing' - was it in the privately-owned media? On a commercial channel? On TalkSport perhaps? No, of course not, it was Radio 4. (and hang on a minute, PD James appears to be an older woman - don't tell Harriet Harman!) Hands up who thinks we'll see James Murdoch get crucified on Sky News primetime... anybody... no...?

The Mail have simply re-hashed the Telegraph article, and can't be bothered to find a new angle, since that might require picking up a telephone and speaking to another human being, wasting valuable C&Ving time. Not that that matters to their readers - any mention of positive discrimination, even if it's anecdotal and totally unproven - why didn't La Plante simply submit a script under an assumed Muslim-sounding name to test out her theory? Or would it then mean she'd have nowhere to hide? - brings out the roars of disapproval against the evil Stalinist BBC:

All these anti-Beeb stories are good news for those commercial operations which would like to see them blown out of the water - and for those politicians who would like to dismantle the licence fee. If there are genuine concerns, beyond an anecdotal level, then these of course need to be investigated.

But what would the reaction be if a freelance made a big song and dance about not getting articles submitted to the Telegraph because they're not a hoary old Tory? Or to the Mail because they write accurate stories about immigration? Do you think we'd see their cause valiantly taken up by the rest of the media, with the publications in question happy to report on their own attacks? I think not. Which to me is one good argument for why we need the BBC.

My top 10 of 09

2010-01-02T20:53:00.004Z

I see other bloggers have done a top 10 posts of 2009 thingy, so I thought I'd put mine up. These are the top 10 by traffic, mind - not by how good I think they are.

1. Why there is nothing 'natural' about the life of Jan Moir - Jan Moir wins new internet friends
2. Hmm... Remember this? - tabloid hypocrisy over Nick Griffin on Question Time
3. 100 Reasons why the Express isn't the world's greatest newspaper - climate change arguments and a history of rubbish from Desmond's organ
4. A whiff of something unpleasant - a news story led to fairly thinly veiled racism in the papers (and almost entirely unveiled by Rod Liddle)
5. A new low for the Express - Dunblane survivors daring to act like normal 18-year-olds
6. Don't let the facts get in the way of the scare story - vaccination lols with our responsible friends at the Mail
7. Spot the difference time - looking at the arguments as to whether a minaret ban in Switzerland was a nice architectural bit of preservation, or something slightly more sinister. Yes, people actually argued about this.
8. Who fancies a quiz? - Can you tell Melanie Phillips from Geert Wilders?
9. Why this isn't about a 'bad apple' - More on the Dunblane story and the ineffectiveness of media self-regulation
10. Let's chortle at the poor - with the same article twice - Jan Moir again, copying a previous "Ooh look, pound shops!" story

Simon Heffer and cheap shots

2010-01-02T16:42:00.004Z

Simon Heffer in the Telegraph:

Since Labour has an election to win, and since if it doesn't win it Jack Straw will probably be a candidate to pick up the poisoned chalice of leading the party, it is little wonder the Justice Secretary has jumped on the police-bashing bandwagon. He knows most people only encounter the police when being stopped for a minor motoring offence, or when the police are failing to clear up a deeply distressing crime. He knows how dismayed the public is by stories in the media about the police pursuing people who (for example) express disapproval of homosexuals, while failing to pursue burglars. So, in the words of one senior officer who disliked Mr Straw's remarks, this was a cheap shot.

Do 'most people' only really encounter the police when being stopped for a 'minor motoring offence'? Does Simon Heffer never go outdoors, to his town centre, where he can see police officers at work? He may not approach them, that much is true; but that's not their fault. You could just as easily say "Most people, of course, do not encounter doctors when being treated for some minor illness, or when they are failing to clear up a very serious disease."

~~The police, though, do not pursue people who have 'expressed disapproval of homosexuals'.~~ (see comments - sometimes they do, if it's possible someone could be breaking the law. But burglars, unlike writers of things denouncing gayness, don't generally leave signatures saying "I did this" unless they're particularly stupid; and police don't make the laws up, they simply enforce them. If a law exists, it's there to be enforced, including things that Heffer might disagree with, like traffic offences or saying gay people are bad; or other stuff, like burglarly or murder) It's Heffer's cunning way of introducing the classic 'PCgonemad' gambit into his article. Poor old middle-class man, driving at 85mph outside a school, for some reason gets stopped by PC Plod, yet burglars smashing into a nearby house are sent on their way with a cheery wave - but look what happens when you try and write "Gays must die" in dogshit on someone's car, then for some reason everyone makes a big PC song and dance about it and for some reason that's a so-crime in Bonkers Britain... Heffer really isn't even a notch above Littlejohn and the like. He's worse. He's not even trying to be funny, which Littlejohn does (and admittedly fails at, but hey, he has a bash); he's being deadly serious.

What's his evidence for police pursuing people who 'disapprove of homosexuals' but not pursuing burglars? Is there any?

They ceased to be a crime-fighting operation and became instead an instrument for the imposition of political correctness. New Labour came in to power with a set of beliefs about minorities of all sorts, and sought to make the police the enforcers of that creed. The wheels fell off at that point.

Examples? Oh, there are none. It just happened, therefore it's true. Cheers Simon, I don't need examples, if you could just make the aeroplane noise while you're forcing the spoon into my mouth... actually, fuck it, just ram it down my throat like Robert Morley being force-fed his dogs in Theatre of Blood. I'd much prefer that, then I wouldn't even bother having to think about it. Could you do that, Simon? Could you? I mean, you don't have any evidence that 'minorities of all sorts' (can't you feel the seething stench off the words?) and beliefs about them drove New Labour's policies - but no matter. Let's carry on. Wasn't it all better when all coppers were like Gene Hunt?

The unlamented Sir Ian Blair was the high priest of this form of policing. The way in which he had Scotland Yard pussyfoot around the question of Islamist terrorism after the horrific attacks on London in 2005 exemplified his priorities: appease minorities first, fight crime second.

I'm sure everyone noticed how Sir Ian Blair 'appeased minorities first' when an unpale-skinned man was shot seven times in the head on the Tube. Ah, it must be wonderful in Heffer's world, where criminals are only not caught because of that damned PC Brigade chasing the cops in their big pink diversity van, ensuring that no-one is offended. Oh! If only the police weren't so busy being PC about everything - obviously I don't have any time to put in any evidence at all, just decide that I know best about everything, and you, solemn reader, will just believe me because I am a respected journalist and not a second-rate hack stitching together a stinking load of old cobblers with no substance to it whatsoever, essentially so I can say that no-one should vote Labour.

Didn't the Telegraph used to be better than this? Or don't we need any evidence for any arguments any more? Shall we just all give up and all shout a bit louder?

I may have been a bit unfair to Rod Liddle

2010-01-02T14:38:00.006Z

In the spirit of Janus, the god with two faces who looks both forward and back, who lent his name to this first month of the new year, I want to try and reassure you that I'm not just some kind of nasty person with a chip on his shoulder who's out to chuck kebabs at people.

So I thought to myself: perhaps I've been a bit harsh on Rod Liddle over the past year. Sure, what I may or may not write about him doesn't affect him in the slightest; he's more than happy churning out his "Ooh isn't inner city London terrible?" articles from his sleepy Wiltshire village in complete ignorance of my existence, among other things, and long may it continue. Who am I to try and rush in and save the day and say that he's a racist, or a dimwit, or that he gets things calamitously wrong, with a whiff of something distinctly smelly, in his polemical pieces? Is that really my job?

So I thought to myself: wouldn't it be a nice thing, for the new year, to try and find some people who agree with Rod Liddle, and to take their views on board, and wonder if I maybe am being a bit silly with my criticism of him? I think that's fair enough, isn't it, and it'll stop me hand-wringing for a while. So here's a nice post on a messageboard saying that Liddle's entirely right:

See, 'Quantum' agrees with Liddle's piece about black people and violence entirely. That's a good start. Now, where did he write that piece of congratulation...? Let me see... oh yes, it was the Stormfront website, for far-right extremists.

Well yes yes, but that's just a small example. Perhaps we can find an example of someone else entirely agreeing with Liddle. Ah yes, here we are. Here's someone who enjoyed a Rod Liddle article he repeated it in full, with his quotes in the brackets afterwards:

See, there's quite a fan base out there. And that was written by a Mr Lee Barnes. He's not an extremist, unless he's the same Lee Barnes who said the other day that burning down an immigration camp was not a crime, which I'm sure he isn't. Oh. Hang on, it is.

Right, let me try a bit harder now. I'll find someone else who agrees with Liddle, who isn't member of a far-right organisation, and then you'll understand the broad appeal, and not-at-all-racist nature, of what the Spectator's sparkling correspondent has to say. Ah yes, here's one:

There we are, that's not on a far-right website, that's the British Democracy Forum. They're not nutters and far-right racists, are they? I mean, they've got a whole forum dedicated to immigration that is specifically non-racist - that shows they value debate that doesn't descend into neo-Nazi racism. I mean have a look at this post from the Rod Liddle discussion page for an example of what I mean:

Oh. Ah. This isn't really doing my attempt to say sorry any good, is it. It would appear that a lot of people with some fairly smelly views do appear to be delighted that Liddle is voicing the opinions they believe in, which they encourage others to post onto as many news sites and message boards as possible. But that's not his fault, is it? I mean, it's not as if he's now started attracting people who think they can be genuinely racist to his stories, because they think it's acceptable under his byline, is it?

So another jiggaboo straps a bomb to his leg and trys to blow up an airplane but blows his leg off instead.

Oh.

Happy New Year

2009-12-31T13:56:00.002Z

So that's that, then. I'm off now for a while (only a couple of days in fact, but you know how it is) and then I'll be back.

I had meant to do a piece looking back at 2009, at all the awfulness I'd written about, and all the awfulness I'd written, but I didn't quite get there. I might do something like that in January if I have the time, but you can look back at this and this for a bit of reflection over the triumphs and atrocities of 2009.

As I was saying yesterday, this year has been one of quite amazing growth in traffic for the blog thanks in no small part to kind people retweeting and plugging things on Twitter, which I am proud of and a bit scared by - and I'll still keep doing it, for as long as it keeps me happy, and as long as some readers take some enjoyment from it. I'm also proud of the other blog I did in 2009, for as long as I felt it was necessary, and I'm pleased to say I don't think I need to write that one any more - but that was enjoyable, in its own way, and rewarding too.

So that was 2009. I hope the new year brings better things, but we'll see.

In the meantime, thanks for reading.

It's Have Your Say UK!

2009-12-31T11:36:00.004Z

People 'on the internet' are not stupid. If I thought that then I'd think I was stupid (although I occasionally do), and add to the kind of "wurrrgh, blogs and Twitter are rubbish aren't they?" drivel that you see regularly churned out in the mainstream media by people whose output is, somewhat ironically, a steaming shite compared to a lot of what you find via Twitter and blogs.

And I'd argue that there is some value in listening to voters rather than driving a steamroller through what they tell you they want. And if today's proposal by the Tories to create a Have Your Say for the UK were genuinely about creative policymaking, then that would be magic. But it isn't. You can see even from this distance that £1million for one website is ridiculously bad value for money - and taxpayers' money at that. But of course Tories - given that it's them who would be doing the wasting, were they to be elected - are roundly behind this pointless bit of pantomime posturing, arguing that it's crowdsourcing, brilliant, intelligent and wise.

I'm sure, of course, it won't be used to justify pre-existing policy decisions by sifting through the evidence to find people clamouring for the rich to pay less tax, the public sector to be burnt to death, etc etc, and will never simply ignore huge weight of public opinion towards matters such as not invading other countries and killing thousands of people. How many petitions on the Number 10 website, for example, end up as policy, affecting policy, or being anything other than ignored, unless they agree with what the Government wants to do?

It would be nice to suppose that the Tories would be entirely different, and would really want to engage with the people rather than simply cherrypicking the bits they want and rejecting the bits they don't; but their commitment to representative democracy hasn't yet creaked into life regarding a representative voting system, as it hasn't with Labour, so there's no reason to imagine they're desperately keen on anything other than being in power. This, like the Number 10 petitions, will just be a Cahier Des Doleances for the 21st century - a way of letting the non-political classes think they actually have some kind of influence, without ever going anywhere near giving them real power.

This Have Your Say UK could, in the end, be as valuable as the BBC's Have Your Say - in other words, not really valuable as anything but a cheap laugh at best, a virtual local library for enraged poor-me I'm-the-real-victim types to ejaculate giant lakes of bile. I'd like to hope it's not the case, and that this could really be a wonderful democratic tool, but the cynical part of me imagines that within hours of being set up it will be swamped by the "bring back hanging" and "our masters in Brussels" types who regularly spout such delightful dangleberries as are featured on the beautiful Speak You're Branes (this post on David Ethics, 'the most pompously petulant bumgrape I've seen for quite a while', gives you a flavour of the regular contributors to the debate.)

As I see it, there is a better way of 'crowdsourcing' than setting up a £1million website in a competition. It's called electoral reform. The Tories may claim the public know better than the politicians, but if that's the case then let them keep the £1million and put it towards genuine democracy in Britain, rather than attempting to create a cargo-cult engagement with the proles. If any major party did that, they'd get my vote - which wouldn't feel like it was being wasted, for once.

Twitter & blogging: a love story

2009-12-30T14:42:00.006Z

This list by A Very Public Sociologist makes for interesting reading, not least for me because I scraped into the top 10. Exciting!

It's easy (and so predictable that, oh look, the Guardian have had a bash at a bit of rubbish prolling) to dismiss Twitter as a dreary affair full of dull people who don't add anything to your understanding of the world, but I can only comment on the effect it's had on this blog. If you compare web traffic for this month last year

with this month this year

you can see there are a lot more people here. Now much as I'd love to think that's down to me being spectacularly brilliant throughout the past 12 months and much more clever and funny and so on, I don't think that's the case. It'd be wrong to attribute everything to Twitter either, but I definitely think it's helped - not just through my own shameless self-promotion on there, but also through other people being able to find the kind of articles they want without having to rely on the mainstream media to dish them up.

When you're trying to cultivate a bit of a readership, or at the very least get more of the sort of people who'd like to read the sort of stuff you write through the turnstiles, I think it's helpful to have a way of letting people know what you're up to - and the immediacy of a link on Twitter is a great 'read it now' incentive. I reckon if you are a keen amateur scribbler like me, or like the many others I've happened upon thanks to Twitter links, then it's hard to underestimate the power it has. The mainstream media don't get that, of course, because they couldn't care less. They just assume we come stumbling through the mist up to their trough every morning to feast on what we're given.

A lot is being made of the looming general election, of course, and the role that Twitter will play in it. Blogging and tweeting won't affect the outcome, of course, but they will provide an alternative backdrop to the tiresome and straitjacketed world of the mainstream at that time - and I'm looking forward to that, if not the result itself. In the meantime, I'll try and catch up John Prescott. It won't be easy, but I'm determined!

Is arson a crime?

2009-12-30T10:13:00.005Z

Not according to BNP legal officer Lee Barnes, who says on his blog of an arson attack on a refugee camp in Calais:

"This is not a crime, this is an act of national liberation". Really? I don't think this does very well in the BNP's campaign to develop a veneer of respectability; in fact, you start to wonder what other crimes BNP officials would regard as being 'not crimes' if they were to further the cause of 'national liberation'. Would this arson attack on a mosque and Islamic centre be considered a crime, for example? What about this attack on an Asian woman on a train in Lancashire, for example - is that a crime, or is it 'not a crime' it when it's in the cause of 'national liberation'?

Incidentally, I did notice this nugget from Barnes's blogger profile, under music interests:

I imagine those NWA albums go down a treat at the BNP disco.

The prolls creak into life

2009-12-29T10:08:00.009Z

I've written before about what I like to call "prolls" - professional trolls who, instead of trying to upset people on internet forums by posting provocative ill-thought-out nonsense with the sole intention of getting a rise out of others, write provocative ill-thought-out nonsense for a bumper pay cheque in mainstream publications.

One saddening aspect of the Jan Moir Twitterstorm earlier this year was the sheer amount of traffic the Mail must have got to boost its stats, albeit at the expense of its brand reputation and a lot of the traffic consisting of outraged or soon-to-be-outraged people who couldn't believe the awfulness of what they were reading.

And it's for that reason that I don't really link to the Mail very often any more. They won't miss the couple of hundred clickthroughs generated by me, I'm sure, and you all know where to get a look at the original article, if you want. I know it goes against the etiquette of blogging, but I've reached a point where I can't be bothered to give these jokers any more traffic than they absolutely need - particularly when there's a lingering suspicion that they're simply trolling for traffic, trying to be as provocative as possible in order to lure in an angry mob of confused and annoyed liberals.

Which brings me to the Mail, where it appears the trolls have creaked into life after Christmas. Leo McKinstry, who must have moved from the Express in a big-money transfer and charmed his new employers with his ability to write not very coherently but quite provocatively on a wide range of subjects, has a bash:

Bollocks, Leo. You're not sorry at all. You fucking love it.

And then there's Liz Jones, ah yes our old friend Liz Jones, with a couple of stabs at rousing fury over homelessness at Christmas.

Part of me thinks that she's a wily old writer, cleverly creating a dimwitted and ignorant persona in order to wind the rest of the world up; but I fear I think that because I don't want to think of a world in which she can really mean what she's saying and really agree with the things she writes. I don't want that world to be true.

And of course, they're just the headlines. But it's not as if they're not representative of the stories beneath. From McKinstry:

Nice try, Leo. Good attempt. But it's fairly predictable, and stumblingly written, and it's so obvious that you're trying to provoke a reaction that it almost inclines you to not be bothered at all with him. So he wants people killed for being drug smugglers, even if there are extenuating circumstances. Yeah yeah. Yawn. Oh and it's all New Labour's fault for not chucking everyone in prison who's ever had half a bifter, and everyone else's fault for Kate Moss being popular somehow. That's why it's OK to shoot someone through the back of the head. Mm.

Can Jones do better?

Not really, but again, a poor effort. "I didn't know poverty really existed in India, but then someone told me it did, and I made a sad frowny face, isn't it terrible what other people have to put up with?" - it's not even fun, or witty; and even if it is an act, which I'd really like it to be, it's still not a particularly good one.

The prolls are trying - so very, very hard, but so very, very ineptly - to get our attention. I just wonder if it's worth giving any attention to them - whether it's even worth writing this, for example, although I've started it now and I might as well finish it. I'm certainly not giving them a link; you know where to go and find their nonsense if you really want to.

There's nothing wrong with provocative, insightful, intelligent writing, of course. I just wish that we were well furnished with it. Look at this article by Matthew Parris for a good example of someone swimming against the tide and challenging received wisdom, but doing so in a way that neither screams for attention nor has to go to extremes in order to make a point, nor cultivates a faux-personality of extraordinary thickness (or just is that thick) in a feeble attempt to entertain. And that's why it's worth linking to.

Er... but... surely... and... but... eh?

2009-12-29T01:07:00.004Z

Just as we're coming to the end of the Noughties (as we must, wearyingly, call it I suppose, given the wave of 'Ooh let's make up lots of lists to bulk out the TV schedules!' programmes littering the screen at the moment) and just when you thought it was impossible for the Express to out-Express itself in terms of bewilderingly frying-pan-smashed-into-own-face dumbness, comes this late entry for most fuckwitted headline of the year, decade, century and probably millennium:

After reading that, I had to sit down in an armchair, quietly, staring at the wall, slapping my face at regular intervals with a piece of barbed wire dipped in sheep shit. I considered sticking my head in a bowl of ice-cold water, or, better still, licking the toaster element to try and wake myself up from what was surely a delusional episode, but thought better of it.

It's quite a revolutionary thing, though, that the Daily Express are proposing: that terrorists shouldn't be allowed on planes.

Fancy that! And there I was, thinking that they should be let onto aircraft with a cheeky wave and a "Mind how you go, sonny, hey, you've dropped your explosive device!" rather than not being allowed on planes, what with them being terrorists and all. Thank goodness we've got the trusty Express to set us right: whereas we might think it's perfectly acceptable, once we've identified people as terrorists, to think that they won't do any harm and they're all a bunch of loveable lads really, the Express - very cleverly and quite counter-intuitively, you really have to say - has decided that that's a bad thing, and that in fact people who are terrorists (you know, the sort of folk who might well try to attack mass-transit vehicles in order to create a spectacular news event to further publicity for their cause) shouldn't be allowed onto mass-transit vehicles carrying lots of passengers.

"Experts", furthermore, say that "only those who pose a genuine threat" should be singled out. And again, you have to marvel at the brilliant lateral thinking that's gone into that. Ordinarily, you wouldn't think twice about people who pose a genuine threat being allowed to pose a genuine threat; but in fact, the truth is that people who pose a genuine threat shouldn't be allowed to pose a genuine threat. Who knew? Perhaps, with hindsight, we should have noticed that people who posed a genuine threat were actually most likely to be the kind of people who might be more dangerous than people who don't pose a genuine threat. But it's not always that easy to see that at the time, is it?

Actually, I may have been guilty of being mildly sarcastic with those last couple of paragraphs. In fact, the Express is being a sight more coded than it normally is, and the startlingly dumb clusterfuck of a front page conceals something a bit smellier than downright stupidity:

MUSLIM travellers must be singled out for airport security screening to foil future Al Qaeda attacks on airliners, a terrorism expert said last night.

Ah, now it all falls into place. For once, the Express was being subtle. Well, I say 'subtle' but this is about as subtle as the Express gets - it's like being stabbed in the face rather than set on fire by a man dressed as a giant fluorescent crab. Not really subtle, but not as obvious as it could be.

For once, the Express is asking its readers to join the dots rather than telling them what to think. Only two dots, I grant you, but dots nonetheless. Dot one: TERRORISTS SHOULD BE TARGETED. And dot two: MUSLIMS SHOULD BE TARGETED. Now, I imagine a lot of Express readers will strain over that puzzler like a blank crossword grid with no clues at all, but I think there might be just the teensy-weensyest implication that Muslims are those who 'pose a genuine threat'.

Yesterday a spokesman for the Muslim Council of Britain said Abdulmutallab’s actions should not be used against the law-abiding Islamic community. He said: “The actions of one misguided individual should not tarnish the reputation of the majority.
“We will let terrorists win if bigotry is allowed to flourish.”

Oh, it's flourishing all right.

Compassion? You'll be lucky

2009-12-28T12:15:00.005Z

This is not a post about the Mail's coverage regarding Akmal Shaikh's imminent execution, because their coverage is fair, detailed and very good, despite (a) one article having been written by the usually awful Sue Reid and (b) slightly contradictory headlines:

From reading the articles it seems there's quite a shadow of doubt over his conviction, his intent to commit the crime and his mental wellbeing at the time he did it, all of which should, perhaps, be taken into consideration when deciding whether he should be shot through the back of the head or not. Or not:

It's this kind of bludgeoning, roaring "NO, I'M RIGHT" that allows people to be sneery and snobby about what they read on the internet, lumping we poor bloggers in with the kind of folk who type in CAPITAL LETTERS underneath Daily Express stories or who patrol internet forums looking to upset others.

I'm not saying that people shouldn't be allowed to say what they want, nor that only experts should be allowed to discuss things, nor that I know better than everyone else; it's just that comments like these are typical of a kind of compassionless, hate-fuelled contempt towards human beings that seems to be rather more prevalent in comments underneath Daily Mail stories, for example, than you might find elsewhere, or in real life.

It drags us all down - all of us 'on the internet' are tarred and feathered to be just the same as these jokers, those who would happily see a mentally ill man shot to death and couldn't care less about any of the doubts surrounding his conviction or the circumstances of the case. To answer the question that many will pose - 'well why don't you go on there and correct them?' - all dissenting voices are quickly crushed:

Some would say this just goes to show the classic equation - give people anonymity, and a forum to say what they want, and they'll be quite hatefully awful, in a sense that gives you a glimpse into why people used to be able to stand around smiling after lynchings or cheerily participate in genocide; it reveals the dark side of humanity. I'd like to hope we're better than that, but maybe we're not.

Michael Howard is right

2009-12-27T18:46:00.002Z

Michael Howard is wrong about a lot of things, of course, and was a truly terrible leader of the Conservatives (or a brilliant one, depending on your point of view) as well as an illiberal home secretary. But that doesn't mean he's wrong about everything, as this story shows:

Mr Howard told BBC Radio 4's The World This Weekend: "I think I am still the only party leader who went to Burnley and devoted an entire speech to confronting the BNP and saying that we've really got to take them on and we've got to take their arguments on.
"I don't think we can afford to be complacent. There are one or two constituencies where they are said to be a potent threat.
"I think you have to take them on, you have to confront them and you have to expose the appalling evil of their arguments."

What I like about Howard here is that he doesn't muck about. He doesn't wring his hands, as many other Tories and Labour politicians would, wondering whether the racists really have a point and whether poor white folk are right to feel 'disenfranchised' and upset by immigration. No, the BNP's arguments are 'appalling evil'.

Which I find myself agreeing with - though it's a kind of uncomfortable agreement. Imagine sitting on the train next to a man with a hideous cold whose nose is dribbling snot down his face. You don't want to be there, but it's late, you're tired, and you can't go anywhere else. There, I've said it: I agree with Michael Howard. As I've said before, a vote for the BNP is not a protest, and it's unfortunate if not entirely missing the point for politicians to wonder whether the racists are right - true, many may claim that the white working-class are the real victims of racism, but I think they're wrong.

There has, in recent times, been a thought in politics that the best way to deal with BNP voters is to say their concerns are genuine and to try and woo them. Phil Woolas is the classic New Labour example of this, but there are others right across the political spectrum. What Michael Howard rightly says is: bollocks to that. Racism is wrong, and the BNP need to be challenged, and fought.

Cough syrup confusion

2009-12-27T13:48:00.007Z

Sometimes you don't need to be a brilliant scientist to detect a whiff of bullshit when it appears in newspapers under the guise of health advice. Take this article in the Mail:

The intro appears to be saying: people have looked at the evidence around some of these remedies, and tested them, and found they're not as good as you might think. So why not try these untested and unproven remedies instead!

For a start, is this even news? Well:

That report from USA Today, you'll have noticed, is dated 2006. But the Mail appears to be regarding this as a current story, and has decided the best way of informing its readers about what's really effective in fighting a cough is to decide that they'd like to hear about herbal and homeopathic remedies instead, with unproven claims parroted unquestioningly by the writer. Is that really what readers want? Well, who knows, but:

Here are five options to soothe nasty coughs

would seem to imply that these aren't just pretty liquids in bottles with herbs in them, or water-memory stuff, or whatever, but things that will/might/could soothe nasty coughs. Despite that, the packaging on the remedies is a lot more coy, only saying "based on traditional use only" in the case of the Kaloba Oral Drops, "apparently used by Zulus for thousands of years as a remedy for upper respiratory tract infections". Well if that's not nailed-down proof that that'll soothe a nasty cough, I don't know what is. Hey, and it's only a bargain £14.99 a bottle, so why not get five?

You can see the level of probing journalism that's been applied to these remedies by the objective and sceptical reporting of their effects:

That honey one doesn't even mention anything about coughs. Still, it's only a bargain £7.82 for a bottle, so it's worth stocking up with a dozen to see you through Christmas and the New Year.

Finally there's Seagate Olive Leaf Throat Spray, at a cheap-as-chips £5.71 for 30ml:

a combination of three natural antibacterials: olive-leaf extract homeopathic remedy Baptista tinctoria and Xylitol

So artificial sweetener, water, and a bit of leaf extract. I suppose you pays your money, you takes your choice: but the Mail have unhelpfully not pointed you in the direction of any choice, preferring to state unchallenged the claims made by these remedies without wondering whether they do any good (or harm) or not. Who wants to ask those awkward questions about things? Certainly not journalists.

I know there's a school of thought that says that journalists, not being scientists and having probably done inferior humanities degrees at former Polytechnics for god's sake, are confused by things like this and are a bit bewildered by it, so you can't blame them too much for getting it so wrong. I disagree with that kind of pomposity for a start, but I have another problem with it. You don't even have to be particularly bright or inquisitive to see that something's up with this, with the unquestioning presentation of unproven claims, with the legitimisation of stuff that perhaps doesn't always deserve to be legitimised, with the offering of stuff that's unproven as an alternative to stuff that has been tested. That runs contrary to any sensible journalistic instinct.

And besides, we all know the best thing for a cough is a large glass of whisky. (It might not make the cough any better, but with a bit of lucky you'll be too pissed to care.)