Let us return to the lost age of blogging for a moment.
I thought I would share with readers this gem of the interwebby thing: The ChildCare Action Project (CAP): Movie Ministry
I have been going there for years, and it is less well-known than it deserves. (For former connoisseurs, the tinsel aesthetic is unaltered but the disruptive popups are gone.) It is full of wonders for liberal secular types like me.
If you do not know where to start, just plunge into the movie reviews here and discover the ungodly propaganda of the Hollywood elite in your favourites. You see, they are not just coddled world-insulated champagne socialists but servants of the evil one.
As a British atheist the Christians I actually meet seem to me mostly harmless, perfectly normal people. But this stuff is by turns hilarious, mind-boggling, and spine-shivering. Which is all you can ask of entertainment. And it has a salutary moral effect, too. If not quite the one intended by its dedicated creators.
P.J. O’Rourke got something similar from visiting the Praise the Lord theme-park in the 80s:
“We came to scoff. We left converted – to Satanism.”
Thankyou for posting that link. I haven’t laughed so much in ages. I’m getting my first pentagram tattoo this weekend, on my forehead.
Quoting from memory is dangerous, and when I joined this I swore to myself I’d fact-check properly, dammitt! (Sorry, CAP, for that foul offense to God.) Chinese whispers is the curse of the blogosphere.
Here is the great PJ in Holidays in Hell (1988):
Now, while we are at it, can someone explain the current shortage of right-wing humourists in Britain?
Of course, if you had read NTK, you’d have known about this unintentional source of mirth for years now…
Way back in the very early 90’s I bought a book by some wacky American preacher type called “The Rock Report” detailing all the terrible influences contained within rock and metal. It was a sheer hoot.
AC/DC’s Highway to Hell, both the song and the devil’s horns sported by Angus Young really was about to send you to eternal damnation.
Even a regular main stream guy like Bruce Springsteen wasn’t immune. Born in the USA wasn’t especially keen on the Vietnam war and opposing your government is WRONG, Glory Days glorified the demon drink, and so on.
Also the pictures it used to illustrate the bands and albums had simply been taken in a record shop. The LPs were propped up on the rack and a photo was taken of it, price tickets and all. So cheap.
Sadly I threw the book away because it was too embarrasing to have sat in the shelf. I kinda wish I hadn’t now as it was really quite entertaining.
Guy Herbert wonders:
“Now, while we are at it, can someone explain the current shortage of right-wing humourists in Britain?”
At risk of hammering the point (and earning further digs about “outrage”), might I suggest the answer to your question is – how do we know there is shortage?
No comedian from the Right would get a second’s air time in the UK. Nor would s/he be booked at any of the usual comedy venues. Even a libertarian would be run out of town if they threatened to mince any of the Left’s sacred cows.
How many newspapers or magazines would publish one? The best the Telegraph seems to have managed has been a half-hearted attempt to co-opt the woefully unfunny Armando Ianucci – no substitute for the sublime Peter Simple, or even the late Auberon Waugh.
You mentioned that you are in publishing. What chance would you give a Right-leaning author at the hands of the typical bien pensant book editor?
A humourist needs work to learn and polish his craft. The Leftist media hegemony in the UK imposes a culture in which any heterodox opinion is suffocated as soon after birth as possible.
Anthony Daniels (aka Theodore Dalrymple of the Spectator) is more Swiftian than funny-ha-ha but has had quite a few first class books published. He has far from being a consistent libertarian but his instincts are sound and he deserves to be more widely read.
Curiously, though, most of his books have been published by American publishers ……
>can someone explain the current shortage of right-wing humourists in Britain?
What about Jeremy Clarkson? And Boris Johnson? And that idiot blogger — what’s his name… Blithering Bunny? Not to mention the master satirist George Monbiot.
James Dobson’s ‘Focus on the Family’ has a similar, though not quite so silly, site called Plugged In Online (pluggedinonline.com) which does the same kind of thing for movies and music.
Careful, Guy, lest you offend the Christians around here. They’re so persecuted these days, after all.
And remember; By their reckoning, if you post one Christian website like this, you have to post at least two Muslim equivalents. Only fair in our PC (Properly Christian) world, right?
Hmm, some interesting comments. As a (culturally Christian) athiest libertarian I can see this would be a useful site to parents looking for guidance.
What’s wrong with that? Given that no one is trying to force an opinion down adult throats I see no problem with this site in a Libertarian society.
“The Leftist media hegemony in the UK imposes a culture in which any heterodox opinion is suffocated as soon after birth as possible.”
Nurse!
Seriously, if you think there’s a dearth of right-libertarian-leaning humorists in the UK, you’ve not been looking very hard. And if you think the Telegraph and Times are subservient to a Leftist media hegemony… wow.
Or are you a satirist too?
john b writes:
“Seriously, if you think there’s a dearth of right-libertarian-leaning humorists in the UK, you’ve not been looking very hard”
So name some. Half a dozen will do.
What’s wrong with that? Given that no one is trying to force an opinion down adult throats I see no problem with this site in a Libertarian society.
Sometimes I wonder about some of us atheists.
Chris. He wasn’t saying there was anything “wrong” with it. He was saying it was a FUNNY site (albeit unintentionally funny). I don’t see where he was condemning it, as you seemed to suggest.
It take it you’ve no issue with that in a Libertarian society?
Did someone just describe George Monbiot as a right-wing humorist?????????
I read a couple of reviews… why is it meant to be funny? I’m not a Christian per se, but given their beliefs, the reviews seem to be perfectly reasonable analyses of the movies. You-all seem a little hysterical, if you don’t mind me saying so.
You’re not really going to suggest that Monbiot is serious, are you? It’s all a put-on. No-one’s that mad.
The aforementioned Clarkson & Johnson. Craig Brown. Toby Young. Rod Liddle.
None of them are hard-right, but all of them are best classed as right-libertarian rather than PC leftie (notwithstanding Liddle’s anti-Countryside Alliance stance: you don’t need to be a reactionary agrarian conservative to be right-leaning).
john b writes:
“The aforementioned Clarkson & Johnson. Craig Brown. Toby Young. Rod Liddle.”
Jeremy Clarkson is a motoring journalist, Boris Johnson is an MP (and former journalist) while Rod Liddle is (or rather was) a BBC news editor.
Now, capable of writing humourously they may be, but I’d say you were stretching a point to describe them as humourists.
And this pitiful few part-timers is all that can be arrayed against the massed ranks of BBC, Grauniad and Indie jesters?
Case proven, I’d say.
Thank-you Guy for the link. I’ve been using the Internet Movie Database quite a lot recently but this is a valuable addition. I just looked up several films I have seen recently and have gained a whole new perspective on what I thought I had seen.
It is most peculiar that the PG-13-rated 2Fast2Furious recieved a much lower score than the R-rated The 13th Warrior. Even the supposedly kid-friendly Addams Family Values was lower than that very violent film (according to their site), and Alien vs. Predator recieved the highest rating of the four – and again, one of those movies is supposed to be suitable for older children!
Oh, and by-the-way, I am one of those Christian folk, and this is quite funny to me! I wonder how some people can take themselves seriously.
You’re not really going to suggest that Monbiot is serious, are you? It’s all a put-on.
And his father is Treasurer of the Conservative Party, too. but I do think he’s that mad. So are a large number of otherwise beautiful and articulate people.
To avoid any doubt, Monbiot is very clearly insane:
Pete_London writes:
“To avoid any doubt, Monbiot is very clearly insane:”
I wish we still had some good, honest, muck-raking journalists in this country. There are several sword bearers of the eco-Left whose histories would, I feel sure, reward scrutiny. Moonbat for one. Professor “Tim” Laing, for another.
What a shame even the few remaining non-idiotarian voices seem more interested in the Chelsea Flower Show.
Pete_London – and this guy is a regular columnist in The Guardian? Good god!
We do have a couple of wacky weirdos writing for Aussie papers. One particular moonbat springs to mind…Robert Bosler! Anyone familiar with the Australian blogosphere will know him well. He sometimes writes for Sydney’s major broadsheet’s online semi-blog, semi-editorial, Webdiary. He’s a lefty fruitcake, with the most godawful, soppy prose.
Some classic Bosler lines:
We have to remove our prejudices and our pressing need to do whatever is pressing on us to do. We have to strip away our daily concerns, take it all off, and sit there, free. Peaceful. We feel the quiet descend on us. We become aware of our breathing. Breathing in. Breathing out.
There. Down we go. Into the depths. We are on our way in.
The first thing we see is that it’s big. For twenty million people it’s bound to be…but isn’t it strange, we don’t see twenty million people. We don’t see any people at all. We see a kind of an organism, where the oceans of peoples’ hearts and the universe of their minds sort of melds together, moving gently, warm, just seeming to move over itself. All sharpness and hardness went long ago. We are inside the warm soft pulsing body that is our nation’s heart and mind. It seems to just want to experience itself. That’s all it seems to want to do, to feel itself, explore itself, enjoying itself, slowly and timelessly. It seems to delight in its very own existence, as though that delight is reason enough for its being.
It’s sensational! Are you smiling a little? That’s it, right there. That is the heart and mind, the soul, of our nation.
It is precious, isn’t it. Precious and delightful, almost breathtaking.
*SNIP*
I suddenly have the urge to vomit uncontrollably.
Hello. This is my first post on Samizdata. First post anywhere, in fact. Be gentle.
Did anyone else notice that the CAP rating system gives ‘Who Gets the House?’ 100 percent, while The Jesus Video gets 80 percent? It lost points for depicting ‘murder by crucifixion’.
GCooper, at the risk of looking like a complete geek, could I offer up Terry Pratchett as a right-leaning humourist? He’s not so crass as to be outright political, but he’s definitely right-leaning. Extremely popular, too.
I’ve known about CAP for years. Its most charming aspect is its touching belief in the power of quantification. If we assign numbers to these movies, the site’s authors believe, then you’ll know just where in Hades all these films stand in relationship to one another, as well as to God.
Unfortunately, as far as I can tell, the numbers generally have little connection to what I like to think of as reality. A movie with ten gruesome murders and a chorus of “fuck”s gets a worse score than a movie with twenty gruesome murders and no naughty words (because, at some point, you will have saturated the murder meter).
Also, under drugs/alcohol, you’ll see that “drinking”, “booze”, “bar”, and “drunkenness” are all separate offenses.
And then there’s the fact that murders have a separate category from “wanton violence”, so that they may dock Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy 36 points for “destruction of the Earth”, but under murders it says “none noted”.
Another interesting feature is the Impudence/Hate metric. (Called Impunity/Hate for some movies.) This is an amorphous category that covers such things as bad words, tattoos, and child running off in dark stormy night to fetch dog.
And then there’s the intellectual stimulation of figuring out just what “the three/four letter word vocabulary” is, and which is the “most foul of the foul words”.