Saturday, October 31, 2009
Friday, October 30, 2009
Dissenters
The Arnolfini art gallery, of which I have been but am not currently a patron (despite its excellent bar), emails me with news of an exciting event in its season C Words: Carbon, Climate, Capital, Culture:
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home - two adults and three children - proposes a holiday for autumn half-term. …Accompanied by eco-Au Pair Branka Cvjeticanin, they will set up an interim activist cell in Bristol with guest dissenters and visitors to take action against carbon, climate chaos and capitalism.
This leaves us with an interesting philosophical and/or semantic question: if every single artist and the government and most of the mainstream media agrees with you about carbon and climate change, can you justifiably describe yourself as a 'dissenter'?
The Institute for the Art and Practice of Dissent at Home - two adults and three children - proposes a holiday for autumn half-term. …Accompanied by eco-Au Pair Branka Cvjeticanin, they will set up an interim activist cell in Bristol with guest dissenters and visitors to take action against carbon, climate chaos and capitalism.
This leaves us with an interesting philosophical and/or semantic question: if every single artist and the government and most of the mainstream media agrees with you about carbon and climate change, can you justifiably describe yourself as a 'dissenter'?
Jane Elliott’s Hammer
Do you remember Jane Elliott? She was that terrifying teacher who divided her all-white class into blue-eyed and brown-eyed children to illustrate what it was like to be on the receiving end of racial discrimination. It was powerful stuff, almost unwatchable.
That famous progamme was made in Iowa in 1968. Amazingly, Elliott is still doing exactly the same thing forty years later. Last night Channel 4 featured her performing the exercise on a group of multi-ethnic British adults. Did it work in the modern context? No, it did not work, not at all. In an all-white class of Iowan schoolchildren, the eye colour divide would have been arbitrary; here it effectively put the whites (blue-eyed) in the oppressed role and the rest (brown-eyed) in the oppressor role, which made it look like some sort of revenge fantasy. And indeed it became clear that Elliott thinks that all whites are inherently racist, conditioned to feel superior from “even before they’re born”, and the purpose of the exercise was to make them see this and feel bad about it.
Time has not mellowed Elliott, it has made her madder (in both senses). The President of the United States is mixed race, but she doesn’t seem to think that the world has changed since Martin Luther King was murdered, or indeed, that there is such a thing as ‘mixed race’. She believes in reinforcing distinct racial categories: the pure whites and the rest. One chap in the brown-eyed group – himself mixed race - spoke about his concerns for his daughter (one-quarter black) if her schoolfriends found out about her ‘blackness’. Elliott made no comment about this, or whether the three-quarter white girl in question had been three-quarters conditioned to feel superior from even before she was born. Elliott’s vision of a post-racist world is one where the ‘whites’ are sufficiently racked with guilt and self-loathing that they’re basically too knackered to discriminate, rather than one where nobody gives a toss one way or the other about race because it has become unimportant as an identifier.
It was a sad thing to see. Elliott had one Big Idea in her life, which at the time was brave, brilliant and made her famous. She misunderstood her own Idea, and forty years later it has become a Very Bad Idea. But she’s still hammering away at it, hammering in the morning and in the evening and all over this land.
Talking of which, and on an otherwise completely unrelated note, read this humdinger of a Hoot.
That famous progamme was made in Iowa in 1968. Amazingly, Elliott is still doing exactly the same thing forty years later. Last night Channel 4 featured her performing the exercise on a group of multi-ethnic British adults. Did it work in the modern context? No, it did not work, not at all. In an all-white class of Iowan schoolchildren, the eye colour divide would have been arbitrary; here it effectively put the whites (blue-eyed) in the oppressed role and the rest (brown-eyed) in the oppressor role, which made it look like some sort of revenge fantasy. And indeed it became clear that Elliott thinks that all whites are inherently racist, conditioned to feel superior from “even before they’re born”, and the purpose of the exercise was to make them see this and feel bad about it.
Time has not mellowed Elliott, it has made her madder (in both senses). The President of the United States is mixed race, but she doesn’t seem to think that the world has changed since Martin Luther King was murdered, or indeed, that there is such a thing as ‘mixed race’. She believes in reinforcing distinct racial categories: the pure whites and the rest. One chap in the brown-eyed group – himself mixed race - spoke about his concerns for his daughter (one-quarter black) if her schoolfriends found out about her ‘blackness’. Elliott made no comment about this, or whether the three-quarter white girl in question had been three-quarters conditioned to feel superior from even before she was born. Elliott’s vision of a post-racist world is one where the ‘whites’ are sufficiently racked with guilt and self-loathing that they’re basically too knackered to discriminate, rather than one where nobody gives a toss one way or the other about race because it has become unimportant as an identifier.
It was a sad thing to see. Elliott had one Big Idea in her life, which at the time was brave, brilliant and made her famous. She misunderstood her own Idea, and forty years later it has become a Very Bad Idea. But she’s still hammering away at it, hammering in the morning and in the evening and all over this land.
Talking of which, and on an otherwise completely unrelated note, read this humdinger of a Hoot.
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Tortoises and hares
Here’s another good game for imposing simplified Platonic categories onto the chaotic mass of humanity: work types. I’ve carefully avoided business management books as best I can throughout my career, so I expect this has already been written about many times, but two broad categories of worker I’ve noticed are tortoises and hares.
It’s obvious enough: tortoises fill the 9 to 5 day with a steady, even distribution of work, while hares work in short furious bursts of super-activity interspersed with long periods of idle, almost braindead doziness.
(I’m so much at the hare end of the spectrum that it’s possibly bordering on mental illness. Certainly it’s a running joke in my office. uh oh, he’s off on one again. Back here Martpol suggested that I must be having a ‘quiet Friday afternoon’ on the grounds that I posted three ridiculous missives in a day. In fact the opposite is the case: you can be pretty sure that if ToE is busy then I’m also simultaneously banging away at numerous real work projects, plotting strange and unrealisable epic prose-poems, compiling a fantasy all-time cricket XI etc*; whereas if ToE is quiet, then picture me sitting staring into the middle distance without a thought in my head, drooling gently onto my collar, and pound to a penny you won't be far off the mark.)
I’m very lucky in that my job is ideally suited to haredom – project-based, unsupervised and based on results rather than clock-punching. For small businesses, getting hares in tortoise jobs and vice versa can be disastrous. A hare in a tortoise job will be slapdash and demoralised; a tortoise in a hare job will never get anything finished because they’ll endlessly try to perfect the minutiae.
It’s up to employers to get the right ones in the right jobs. The problem being, of course, that humanity is a chaotic mass and most people don’t fit neatly into the categories, being Hartoises and Tares and so on, which is why business management books never work and why this whole post was, ultimately, a bit of a waste of time. Still, we soldier on, we soldier on.
*That's another stupid myth, isn't it, that only women can multi-task?
Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Sail to the moon
Feeling a mite rootless, I wandered yesterday up the usual lunchtime lanes. It was a beautiful sunny autumnal day.
“What a beautiful sunny autumnal day it is,” I said to the local character, who was standing alongside his big horse. He agreed that it was. I often encounter this wizened ex-leisure centre manager on the lanes and we always have a chat about how he wouldn’t want to be anywhere else. I pat his dog and admire his horse, his cowboy hat and his exceptionally broad westcountry accent. “Some people loike to garn retoire to Spain or whartever and sit boi a pool orl day. Fair play to them but oi think you carn’t beat this. But everywon’s diffrent, would be a dull world otherwoise.”
We stood in our respective shoes, socks, trousers, shirts, jackets, hair and skin and looked out across the fields. Photons from the world hit the lenses of our eyes and were focused onto the photoreceptive rod and cone cells of our retinas.
It occurred to me that if, unlikely as it seems, the warmists are right, then all these green valleys could be underwater soon. But I was comforted by the presence of the ex-leisure centre manager. He seems a practical sort who would calmly solve the problem. In the flood he would probably build an ark, and sail us to the moon.
Rootless
If the Ancestry post was your first contact with the Alarmingly Bushy Family Tree Problem, then I hope it didn’t upset you. I worry about these things sometimes because the ABFTP can leave you feeling rootless. It needn’t, logically, but when has logic ever mattered to human beings?
Feeling rootless or otherwise doesn’t really bother me particularly, but for some people, especially those claiming to be Scottish it seems, it’s a big deal.
It is significant that the genealogy TV show is called Who do you think you are? Some ancestry researchers get a shock when they discover the skeletons in the tree because it affects their sense of identity. Good heavens, I'm part Belgian and Jeremy Kyle is my fifth cousin! But they’d get an even bigger shock if they contemplated the Alarmingly Bushy Family Tree Problem instead - not dissimilar, in fact, to the effect of the Total Perspective Vortex torture device in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here”.
So now that you have the truth about ancestry, be judicious about where and when you reveal it, especially if Scots of a nervous disposition are in the room. Remember: along with great power comes great responsibility. Mind how you go, folks.
Feeling rootless or otherwise doesn’t really bother me particularly, but for some people, especially those claiming to be Scottish it seems, it’s a big deal.
It is significant that the genealogy TV show is called Who do you think you are? Some ancestry researchers get a shock when they discover the skeletons in the tree because it affects their sense of identity. Good heavens, I'm part Belgian and Jeremy Kyle is my fifth cousin! But they’d get an even bigger shock if they contemplated the Alarmingly Bushy Family Tree Problem instead - not dissimilar, in fact, to the effect of the Total Perspective Vortex torture device in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy:
When you are put into the Vortex you are given just one momentary glimpse of the entire unimaginable infinity of creation, and somewhere in it a tiny little mark, a microscopic dot on a microscopic dot, which says, "You are here”.
So now that you have the truth about ancestry, be judicious about where and when you reveal it, especially if Scots of a nervous disposition are in the room. Remember: along with great power comes great responsibility. Mind how you go, folks.
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Peper and solt it as you plese
A Pickle for the Knowing Ones, or Plain Truth in a Homespun Dress is surely the best title for an autobiography ever. (Thanks Nige).
Timothy Dexter's book sounds magnificent:
He wrote about himself and complained about politicians, clergy and his wife. The book contained 8,847 words and 33,864 letters, but absolutely no punctuation, and capital letters were sprinkled about at random. At first he handed his book out for free, but it rapidly became popular and ran into eight editions in total. When people complained that it was hard to read, for the second edition he added an extra page - 13 lines of punctuation marks - asking readers to "peper and solt it as they plese".
....
this strikes me as an excellent and time saving way to write a book i cant See any problem with it it brings a level of interactivity after all reminds me Of those choose your own adventure books that i read as a child choose your own punctuation as it were well why not It could be a useful excercise couldnt it well probably not really no
,',.?(,)!;.?.
Timothy Dexter's book sounds magnificent:
He wrote about himself and complained about politicians, clergy and his wife. The book contained 8,847 words and 33,864 letters, but absolutely no punctuation, and capital letters were sprinkled about at random. At first he handed his book out for free, but it rapidly became popular and ran into eight editions in total. When people complained that it was hard to read, for the second edition he added an extra page - 13 lines of punctuation marks - asking readers to "peper and solt it as they plese".
....
this strikes me as an excellent and time saving way to write a book i cant See any problem with it it brings a level of interactivity after all reminds me Of those choose your own adventure books that i read as a child choose your own punctuation as it were well why not It could be a useful excercise couldnt it well probably not really no
,',.?(,)!;.?.
More on racism
Perhaps I should point out that I wasn’t trying to be preachy in the Demographic Delusion post below. My aim, as in the Ancestry post, was to write about something that’s hopefully surprising because we don’t often think about it, but which is, when we do think about it, quite obvious. I’m interested in the gap between Platonic thinking and reality. But Platonic thinking - discussing ideal categories and concepts - is just what we do, it’s natural to us, it’s often useful and we have to make a conscious intellectual effort to avoid it when it isn’t useful.
And talking of gaps, there’s a giant one between Nick Griffin (a real bigot) and someone who just starts a sentence beginning “Of course 95% of them are fine but…” because he’s thinking Platonically.
Whenever the issue of racism pops up, it is very easy to get all humourlessly high horsey about trivia which is, in the greater scheme of things, irrelevant. Witness the hysteria over Anton Du Beke and Bruce Forsyth recently – both crucified by the usual liberal pontificators.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been cursed with a sense of perspective here. In no particular order, here are three ways in which Britain has improved out of recognition since I was a kid: there’s much less dog turd on the pavements; there’s much less litter on the streets (I remember kicking through crisp packets like they were Autumn leaves); and overall we’re much, much less racist. (Football tells you the story here. After he scored his famous goal against Brazil, John Barnes was booed by England fans for being black. These days we’re so comfortable with our non-racism that we can happily boo Ashley Cole for a whole list of valid reasons (greed, arrogance, getting thrown out of nightclubs while his wife is off doing charity mountain-climbing etc) and we all know that his colour isn’t on it.)
As it happens, I am pretty sensitive to the language. I do cringe a bit when people of my parents’ generation say “coloured” when they ought to say “black” etc. But I don’t get all soapbox about it, or confuse it with real racism. And what’s so funny about peace, love and pragmatism? Broadly, the same lot who pronounced after agonised soul-searching that, yes, for the sake of our democracy and the integrity of the BBC’s charter (oh, such a cornerstone of the British constitution, the BBC charter) Nick Griffin should be allowed on the rubbish political debate programme Question Time, also crucified Brucie for defending Anton. To which you just want to say: oh get off it, lads. We’re not perfect, we never will be, but cut us some slack, we’re all just doing the best we can. Man.
And talking of gaps, there’s a giant one between Nick Griffin (a real bigot) and someone who just starts a sentence beginning “Of course 95% of them are fine but…” because he’s thinking Platonically.
Whenever the issue of racism pops up, it is very easy to get all humourlessly high horsey about trivia which is, in the greater scheme of things, irrelevant. Witness the hysteria over Anton Du Beke and Bruce Forsyth recently – both crucified by the usual liberal pontificators.
Sometimes I wonder if I’ve been cursed with a sense of perspective here. In no particular order, here are three ways in which Britain has improved out of recognition since I was a kid: there’s much less dog turd on the pavements; there’s much less litter on the streets (I remember kicking through crisp packets like they were Autumn leaves); and overall we’re much, much less racist. (Football tells you the story here. After he scored his famous goal against Brazil, John Barnes was booed by England fans for being black. These days we’re so comfortable with our non-racism that we can happily boo Ashley Cole for a whole list of valid reasons (greed, arrogance, getting thrown out of nightclubs while his wife is off doing charity mountain-climbing etc) and we all know that his colour isn’t on it.)
As it happens, I am pretty sensitive to the language. I do cringe a bit when people of my parents’ generation say “coloured” when they ought to say “black” etc. But I don’t get all soapbox about it, or confuse it with real racism. And what’s so funny about peace, love and pragmatism? Broadly, the same lot who pronounced after agonised soul-searching that, yes, for the sake of our democracy and the integrity of the BBC’s charter (oh, such a cornerstone of the British constitution, the BBC charter) Nick Griffin should be allowed on the rubbish political debate programme Question Time, also crucified Brucie for defending Anton. To which you just want to say: oh get off it, lads. We’re not perfect, we never will be, but cut us some slack, we’re all just doing the best we can. Man.
Monday, October 26, 2009
'British Muslims' and the Demographic Delusion
Before 2001 there were a lot of brown-skinned people of Pakistani, Indian, Bangladeshi or Sri Lankan extraction living in Britain. The primary objections of Nick Griffin and his equivalents to these people were that they stole our jobs and took over our cornershops and they didn’t support the cricket team. After 9/11 these people disappeared and were replaced by a sinister organisation called ‘The British Muslims’, dedicated to undermining the national way of life through religious fanaticism and rapid breeding. On Question Time last week Nick Griffin referred to some passages in the Koran which prove this beyond all reasonable doubt.
Meanwhile, throughout the blogosphere spread theoretical assertions beginning: “Of course, 95% of them just want to get on with their lives, but… (insert some concern based on the idea that British Muslims fundamentally see things differently to the rest of us.)”
These latter theories are not the ravings of racists or bigots, just people who’ve read grand sweeping books about clashes of civilisations and news stories about rioting brown Frenchmen and, of course, lurid highlights from the Koran. It’s easy to slip into it, we all do it all the time. But the problematic words in these theories are “them” and “us”, which are meant to refer to British Muslims and “Westerners” respectively. I don’t mean ‘problematic’ in some drippy we-are-the-world sense; rather, that when it comes to practically applying these categories to actual people it turns out to be devilish difficult to work out who should go into which.
Yesterday I had Sunday lunch with Mrs Brit and a coven of her pals who enjoy cooing over our baby. One of this coven has brown skin and the surname Mohammed. She would naturally, under Nick Griffin’s definition, be a secret menace to the rest of us at the table, who have pale or pale-ish skin and surnames like Nixon, Bishop and Whelan. But given that Ms Mohammed wears jeans and drinks booze and has never in her life left the shores of Britain except on holiday and, as far I’m aware, has never set foot in a mosque during our acquaintance except for the same reasons that I’ve set foot in churches (marriages and deaths basically), then one of our non-bigoted Theorists above would, I guess, classify her as a “westernised Muslim”; one of the 95% who “just want to get on with their lives.”
At which point the full arbitrariness – and indeed, strangeness – of placing Ms Mohammed in the category “British Muslim” becomes vividly clear. To plonk her on a continuum of British Muslims, with 'westernised' moderates at the one end and Abu 'Hook' Hamza at the other, seems about as useful and meaningful as putting me in a category of British Roman Catholics – a continuum with the Great Lapsed (like me) at one end and Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor at the other – and then, while allowing that I am a greatly “westernised” or “Anglicised” Catholic, attempting to make broad assumptions about my views and behaviour by quoting from the Nicene Creed.*
We have a glaring category error on our hands here. Putting Ms Mohammed in a bundle with Abu Hamza - however vast we allow the gap on the continuum - makes as much sense as placing her Sunday lunch pals in a category with Timothy McVeigh. A more meaningful categorisation would of course put McVeigh and Hamza together in the section “Inadequate Male Nutjob”, and while no doubt Al Qaeda will turn to Inadequate Male Nutjobs with brown skin and surnames like Mohammed as the first port of call for recruitment, the crucial thing is that they be Inadequate Male Nutjobs, even if they have white skin and a name like Nicky Reilly.
And what about if Ms Mohammed hooks up with a man with a surname like Smith and they have a light-brown coloured baby? Will this sprog be a Muslimised Westerner or a Very Westernised Muslim? Or perhaps just another mongrel Briton, there’s an awful lot of us about.
The upshot of all this is to expose the futile and arbitrary business of attempting to impose large, simplistic categories onto what is, in reality, a chaotic mass of British humanity. It’s not dissimilar to the Family Tree Problem; not completely invalid or untrue, just a vanishingly narrow way of looking at complexity; presenting a version of reality simplified to the point of utter meaninglessness. In fact, the "British Muslim" categorisation is even more irrelevant in identifying real people than is calling yourself “Scottish” on the basis that one out of your thousand great-great-etc-grandfathers was called McDougall, since identity is such a malleable and subjective concept, whereas at least it is objectively true that he was called McDougall. If, for example, you think that being a Manchester United or Liverpool fan is a relatively trivial element in dividing up identities compared to nominal religion, then you really don’t know anything about actual Britons.
Beware grand sweeping theories about clashes of civilizations or anything else: they’re all, ultimately, wrong. Demographics is a game for computer nerds.
“Anti-human” is another overused pejorative, but I reckon that starting with a category and then attempting to force people into it is a pretty good example of anti-humanness. Mind you, we can’t help categorising, mostly benignly. I was thinking back to my university days. Of course we were right-on students so we shunned skin colour as an identifier, but we still divvied people up by musical taste, clothes etc, or by Arts (trendy), Science (geeks) or Medical students (tossers). Naturally some of those trendies, geeks and tossers were brown-skinned, but remember, this was before 2001 so none of them were British Muslims. That lot hadn’t been invented yet.
*In fact, since “Muslim” covers so many different groups and sects, you could equally substitute Murphy-O’Connor for any bugger who's been baptised, from the craziest creationist Christian to virtual agnostics like Dr Rowan Williams, and the analogy stands.
Meanwhile, throughout the blogosphere spread theoretical assertions beginning: “Of course, 95% of them just want to get on with their lives, but… (insert some concern based on the idea that British Muslims fundamentally see things differently to the rest of us.)”
These latter theories are not the ravings of racists or bigots, just people who’ve read grand sweeping books about clashes of civilisations and news stories about rioting brown Frenchmen and, of course, lurid highlights from the Koran. It’s easy to slip into it, we all do it all the time. But the problematic words in these theories are “them” and “us”, which are meant to refer to British Muslims and “Westerners” respectively. I don’t mean ‘problematic’ in some drippy we-are-the-world sense; rather, that when it comes to practically applying these categories to actual people it turns out to be devilish difficult to work out who should go into which.
Yesterday I had Sunday lunch with Mrs Brit and a coven of her pals who enjoy cooing over our baby. One of this coven has brown skin and the surname Mohammed. She would naturally, under Nick Griffin’s definition, be a secret menace to the rest of us at the table, who have pale or pale-ish skin and surnames like Nixon, Bishop and Whelan. But given that Ms Mohammed wears jeans and drinks booze and has never in her life left the shores of Britain except on holiday and, as far I’m aware, has never set foot in a mosque during our acquaintance except for the same reasons that I’ve set foot in churches (marriages and deaths basically), then one of our non-bigoted Theorists above would, I guess, classify her as a “westernised Muslim”; one of the 95% who “just want to get on with their lives.”
At which point the full arbitrariness – and indeed, strangeness – of placing Ms Mohammed in the category “British Muslim” becomes vividly clear. To plonk her on a continuum of British Muslims, with 'westernised' moderates at the one end and Abu 'Hook' Hamza at the other, seems about as useful and meaningful as putting me in a category of British Roman Catholics – a continuum with the Great Lapsed (like me) at one end and Cormac Cardinal Murphy-O'Connor at the other – and then, while allowing that I am a greatly “westernised” or “Anglicised” Catholic, attempting to make broad assumptions about my views and behaviour by quoting from the Nicene Creed.*
We have a glaring category error on our hands here. Putting Ms Mohammed in a bundle with Abu Hamza - however vast we allow the gap on the continuum - makes as much sense as placing her Sunday lunch pals in a category with Timothy McVeigh. A more meaningful categorisation would of course put McVeigh and Hamza together in the section “Inadequate Male Nutjob”, and while no doubt Al Qaeda will turn to Inadequate Male Nutjobs with brown skin and surnames like Mohammed as the first port of call for recruitment, the crucial thing is that they be Inadequate Male Nutjobs, even if they have white skin and a name like Nicky Reilly.
And what about if Ms Mohammed hooks up with a man with a surname like Smith and they have a light-brown coloured baby? Will this sprog be a Muslimised Westerner or a Very Westernised Muslim? Or perhaps just another mongrel Briton, there’s an awful lot of us about.
The upshot of all this is to expose the futile and arbitrary business of attempting to impose large, simplistic categories onto what is, in reality, a chaotic mass of British humanity. It’s not dissimilar to the Family Tree Problem; not completely invalid or untrue, just a vanishingly narrow way of looking at complexity; presenting a version of reality simplified to the point of utter meaninglessness. In fact, the "British Muslim" categorisation is even more irrelevant in identifying real people than is calling yourself “Scottish” on the basis that one out of your thousand great-great-etc-grandfathers was called McDougall, since identity is such a malleable and subjective concept, whereas at least it is objectively true that he was called McDougall. If, for example, you think that being a Manchester United or Liverpool fan is a relatively trivial element in dividing up identities compared to nominal religion, then you really don’t know anything about actual Britons.
Beware grand sweeping theories about clashes of civilizations or anything else: they’re all, ultimately, wrong. Demographics is a game for computer nerds.
“Anti-human” is another overused pejorative, but I reckon that starting with a category and then attempting to force people into it is a pretty good example of anti-humanness. Mind you, we can’t help categorising, mostly benignly. I was thinking back to my university days. Of course we were right-on students so we shunned skin colour as an identifier, but we still divvied people up by musical taste, clothes etc, or by Arts (trendy), Science (geeks) or Medical students (tossers). Naturally some of those trendies, geeks and tossers were brown-skinned, but remember, this was before 2001 so none of them were British Muslims. That lot hadn’t been invented yet.
*In fact, since “Muslim” covers so many different groups and sects, you could equally substitute Murphy-O’Connor for any bugger who's been baptised, from the craziest creationist Christian to virtual agnostics like Dr Rowan Williams, and the analogy stands.
Friday, October 23, 2009
Biffin’ Griffin
So, Nick Griffin on Question Time then. Bit disappointing? Mostly a touch comical, wasn’t it? Aside from one particularly nasty little bit of Kilroy-Silkish Islamophobia (which we’re used to on blogs but still carried a frisson of shock on TV) he came across as a bumbling buffoon. Much less smooth than I expected. That might have been due to the sheer variety of attacks he faced, and because the panellists had the good sense to bring along his Neo-Nazi Obfuscation Bingo list and thus undermine his ability to use it.
Still, I think they should have kicked him a bit more in the fundamentals. I’d have loved to have seen a really ruthless debater on there, like Nick Cohen or, even better, me. I’d have pointed out that the number of ‘indigenous’ people in Britain, is, according to Griffin's definition, precisely zero, by which count a BNP candidate represents the interests of even fewer people than does Esther Rantzen, who at least represents the interests of herself.
Also nobody mentioned the critical fact, pointed out here a few times (and by Gaw) that BNP support is not gaining in popularity in the real sense. Fewer voted for them at the most recent Euro election than at the previous one – their seats materialising only through Proportional Representation because of a crash in support for the major parties in the midst of the expenses scandal. Admittedly this fact takes a great deal of the fun out of the fight for both fascists and anti-fascists, but it puts the thing in perspective.
And perspective, of course, is everything. Outside the cauldron of Question Time, where batting down Griffin seems so terribly important, you only have to mooch about any city for a bit to see the full scale of this fantasist’s delusions. This is a mongrel country of extraordinarily successful multicultural integration, the reversal of which is not conceivable. The comic highlight of the programme came at the end when Griffin showed he still had some hate left for a few more minorities and had a go at the ‘ickiness’ of gay men kissing. Dear me, remember the civil partnership 'debate'? Talk about dead as a dodo; Griffin’s protests felt about as relevant in 2009 as a tirade against the repeal of the Corn Laws.
There really is no obligation to take this clown and his nasty little party seriously at a national level. At the local level – ie. certain towns in the north of England – it’s a different matter, because if you happen to be a British Asian in an area where the BNP has had electoral success, you’ll have to go about your business feeling that your neighbours want to get rid of you. The BNP, therefore, is primarily a problem to be solved by local representatives of the major parties. And then of course they will need the national representatives to help them out by not screwing things up all the time.
Still, I think they should have kicked him a bit more in the fundamentals. I’d have loved to have seen a really ruthless debater on there, like Nick Cohen or, even better, me. I’d have pointed out that the number of ‘indigenous’ people in Britain, is, according to Griffin's definition, precisely zero, by which count a BNP candidate represents the interests of even fewer people than does Esther Rantzen, who at least represents the interests of herself.
Also nobody mentioned the critical fact, pointed out here a few times (and by Gaw) that BNP support is not gaining in popularity in the real sense. Fewer voted for them at the most recent Euro election than at the previous one – their seats materialising only through Proportional Representation because of a crash in support for the major parties in the midst of the expenses scandal. Admittedly this fact takes a great deal of the fun out of the fight for both fascists and anti-fascists, but it puts the thing in perspective.
And perspective, of course, is everything. Outside the cauldron of Question Time, where batting down Griffin seems so terribly important, you only have to mooch about any city for a bit to see the full scale of this fantasist’s delusions. This is a mongrel country of extraordinarily successful multicultural integration, the reversal of which is not conceivable. The comic highlight of the programme came at the end when Griffin showed he still had some hate left for a few more minorities and had a go at the ‘ickiness’ of gay men kissing. Dear me, remember the civil partnership 'debate'? Talk about dead as a dodo; Griffin’s protests felt about as relevant in 2009 as a tirade against the repeal of the Corn Laws.
There really is no obligation to take this clown and his nasty little party seriously at a national level. At the local level – ie. certain towns in the north of England – it’s a different matter, because if you happen to be a British Asian in an area where the BNP has had electoral success, you’ll have to go about your business feeling that your neighbours want to get rid of you. The BNP, therefore, is primarily a problem to be solved by local representatives of the major parties. And then of course they will need the national representatives to help them out by not screwing things up all the time.
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Cupcake, swineshead updates
Excellent, someone has this morning landed here by googling "Black Forest Gateau Cupcake." I hope you enjoy the recipe!
Meanwhile, I have absolutely no comment whatsoever to make about this.
Meanwhile, I have absolutely no comment whatsoever to make about this.
Dr Seuss and Roald Dahl never did me any harm
In Martin Amis’s excellent autobiography Experience (by far his best book) he describes how he is Saul Bellow’s ‘perfect reader’ (and Chris Hitchens, he suggests, is Kingsley’s perfect reader). I think I might be Wes Anderson’s ‘perfect viewer’. The Darjeeling Limited, The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore – I could watch any of them any number of times with a fixed expression of rapt wonderment and glee, of the kind that you might see on the face of a five year-old if Bob the Builder came riding into the living room on Thomas the Tank Engine, bearing a tray of Milky Bars and plastic tat. The Life Aquatic is possibly my favourite, but if there are flaws in any of Wes Anderson’s films then I am impervious to them.
A stop-motion animation of Fantastic Mr Fox is next from him. It’s bound to be good, though the other day Nige gave us a surprisingly hostile rant against Roald Dahl. I seem to remember our own Peter B, I think, launching a similar tirade against the nonsense verse of Dr Seuss once (correct me if I’m wrong, Peter).
Well I loved both Dahl and Seuss, and it never did me any harm. Certainly I didn’t seem to turn into a psychotic spouter of nonsense, but grew into a perfectly rounded and responsible member of society. And if you don’t believe that’s true,
I’ll fill your nostrils up with glue,
I’ll stuff your pants with itchy ants,
And give you weird breast-implants.
I’ll run you over with a tractor,
Then make you sit through The X Factor
(Including the bits with the Irish twins),
And then I’ll put you in three bins.
In three bins, you say,
But how?
I do not understand you now.
You could put me in a box.
You could put me with a fox.
You could put me in a house.
You could put me with a mouse.
In a tree
Or on a flea
Or with a Zizzle-Zozzle-Zee.
But still I fear I cannot see
How in three bins you could put me!
Before your puzzlement increases:
I’ll chop you into little pieces,
Your guts will burst like pus-filled pimples,
And in three bins I’ll put you.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Question Time balls-up
Ooh aren’t we all jolly well looking forward to the big bunfight on tomorrow’s Question Time? Won’t we all get into a good lather?
Nick Cohen links to a set of euphemisms that the BNP commonly uses to disguise its racist policies ("identity" rather than "racial purity" etc), so you could add to your enjoyment of the programme by playing Neo-Nazi Obfuscation Bingo if you wanted.
The more I think about this, the less justification there seems to be for the BBC’s decision to allow Nick Griffin (and now his supporters) onto the programme. If this was a European Parliament special, there might be some semblance of duty to give the BNP airtime, given their MEP seats. But they have no MPs and, for as long as we operate a first-past-the-post electoral system, they almost certainly never will. So there’s no strong democratic imperative to invite them to speak. I mean, it’s not like anyone gives a toss about the European Parliament, is it?
The other line is: give them the oxygen of publicity and they’ll choke; their arguments will be exposed as the nonsense they are. I suspect this is over-optimistic. First, anyone with the sufficient mental capacity to spot an ‘exposed’ argument on an episode of Question Time already knows the BNP are scumbags, so few minds are likely to be changed however the debate goes. Second, Nick Griffin is a slimy, slippery political toad who is not going to blow his big chance by doing Nazi salutes and announcing in the first five minutes that ‘Wogs begin at Calais’. Instead, he’ll go through his Obfuscation Routine, talking calmly about ‘protecting British jobs’, attacking Labour for easy claps and pushing populist buttons on Iraq, MPs expenses and what have you. In fact, the inevitable section of the Question Time audience made up of hysterical right-on students and Mock the Week fans will probably make him appear reasonable by comparison.
Always do what your enemies least want you to do. Griffin most wants to be accepted as the kind of politician who gets invited onto Question Time. His Obfuscation Routine, don’t forget, has taken the BNP from a being a bunch of no-mark skinhead jokes to a small but reasonably professional political force, at least in PR elections. The BBC has just given him another little victory. It won’t amount to much in the greater scheme of things, but still, BNP victories of any scale stick in the throat.
Of course, I may be completely mistaken, he may be roundly trounced by his fellow QT guests and on Friday the BNP may be forced to disband because of this devastating ‘exposure’. In which case you can come back here on Friday morning and we’ll all say how glad we are that I was wrong.
Nick Cohen links to a set of euphemisms that the BNP commonly uses to disguise its racist policies ("identity" rather than "racial purity" etc), so you could add to your enjoyment of the programme by playing Neo-Nazi Obfuscation Bingo if you wanted.
The more I think about this, the less justification there seems to be for the BBC’s decision to allow Nick Griffin (and now his supporters) onto the programme. If this was a European Parliament special, there might be some semblance of duty to give the BNP airtime, given their MEP seats. But they have no MPs and, for as long as we operate a first-past-the-post electoral system, they almost certainly never will. So there’s no strong democratic imperative to invite them to speak. I mean, it’s not like anyone gives a toss about the European Parliament, is it?
The other line is: give them the oxygen of publicity and they’ll choke; their arguments will be exposed as the nonsense they are. I suspect this is over-optimistic. First, anyone with the sufficient mental capacity to spot an ‘exposed’ argument on an episode of Question Time already knows the BNP are scumbags, so few minds are likely to be changed however the debate goes. Second, Nick Griffin is a slimy, slippery political toad who is not going to blow his big chance by doing Nazi salutes and announcing in the first five minutes that ‘Wogs begin at Calais’. Instead, he’ll go through his Obfuscation Routine, talking calmly about ‘protecting British jobs’, attacking Labour for easy claps and pushing populist buttons on Iraq, MPs expenses and what have you. In fact, the inevitable section of the Question Time audience made up of hysterical right-on students and Mock the Week fans will probably make him appear reasonable by comparison.
Always do what your enemies least want you to do. Griffin most wants to be accepted as the kind of politician who gets invited onto Question Time. His Obfuscation Routine, don’t forget, has taken the BNP from a being a bunch of no-mark skinhead jokes to a small but reasonably professional political force, at least in PR elections. The BBC has just given him another little victory. It won’t amount to much in the greater scheme of things, but still, BNP victories of any scale stick in the throat.
Of course, I may be completely mistaken, he may be roundly trounced by his fellow QT guests and on Friday the BNP may be forced to disband because of this devastating ‘exposure’. In which case you can come back here on Friday morning and we’ll all say how glad we are that I was wrong.
Bloody Meerkats
Anyone else getting a bit fed up with them? Ferrets with ideas above their station, basically. I’m tempted to stick them on the Bad List on the grounds of excessive ubiquity.
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
There is too much internet 2: Swineshead revisited
Swineshead’s misdirected attack on the post below illustrates a problem with blogging: although a blog mostly operates as a local pub with regular readers and commenters, literally anyone can drop in to insult you if they happen to find the door.
I’m not intending just to bash Swineshead particularly here – his admission of standing ‘corrected’ is a vanishingly rare thing in blogland and shows he’s basically a decent cove. But he was googling for the Panorama programme with an over-sensitive racism-detector and jumped to conclusions when he found my post (and probably the title of the blog and the name Brit).
That’s the trouble with the internet – nobody’s got an attention span anymore. Twitter worsens the problem tenfold. A whole bunch of Swineshead’s Twits have come to this blog by following a link which says: I'm still reeling from last night's Panorama - then I see this: http://bit.ly/32EUlC . What a turd.
That, of course, was before he realised that, while I might be a turd for many reasons, racism isn’t one of them.
Swineshead’s argument might be that I should have spelled out, as if for a child, that racism is a Bad Thing in the post, and then the gist of the thing would have been clearer to the ‘casual reader’ (ie. the googler who stumbles upon you).
But of course you can’t write every post as if for the casual stumbler or Twit. My regular readers know I know racism is a Bad Thing, it’s taken as read. Life would get very tedious if I had to run through an obvious list of Bad Things every post. Unfortunately this does leave one open to over-sensitive stumblers with no attention span who feel they can call you “a turd” with impunity, but what can you do?
More evidence, then, that there is just too much internet.
I’m not intending just to bash Swineshead particularly here – his admission of standing ‘corrected’ is a vanishingly rare thing in blogland and shows he’s basically a decent cove. But he was googling for the Panorama programme with an over-sensitive racism-detector and jumped to conclusions when he found my post (and probably the title of the blog and the name Brit).
That’s the trouble with the internet – nobody’s got an attention span anymore. Twitter worsens the problem tenfold. A whole bunch of Swineshead’s Twits have come to this blog by following a link which says: I'm still reeling from last night's Panorama - then I see this: http://bit.ly/32EUlC . What a turd.
That, of course, was before he realised that, while I might be a turd for many reasons, racism isn’t one of them.
Swineshead’s argument might be that I should have spelled out, as if for a child, that racism is a Bad Thing in the post, and then the gist of the thing would have been clearer to the ‘casual reader’ (ie. the googler who stumbles upon you).
But of course you can’t write every post as if for the casual stumbler or Twit. My regular readers know I know racism is a Bad Thing, it’s taken as read. Life would get very tedious if I had to run through an obvious list of Bad Things every post. Unfortunately this does leave one open to over-sensitive stumblers with no attention span who feel they can call you “a turd” with impunity, but what can you do?
More evidence, then, that there is just too much internet.
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