If you don’t like what the label on your clothes says – the size or the brand name – cut it off.
(From a beauty book or a women’s magazine, I forget which. Sublime wisdom, whatever the source.)
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December 19th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
 The Guardian issues a rallying cry:
Hear, hear. December 19th, 2004 | 2 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hard to believe! That Tory leader Michael Howard, the second most repressive Home Secretary in living memory, should support mandatory ID cards is hardly a revelation, but that up to 40 Tory MP’s, including some on the front bench, might vote against or abstain regardless of the demands of the whips, well that is quite a pleasant surprise.
I know exactly where it is heading…  December 19th, 2004 | 14 comments - (Comments are closed)
You get used to your favourite sort of coffee, and I have now become completely used to my favourite brand: Nescafé Gold Blend. Nescafé is, so they claim, the biggest selling instant coffee in the world. Originally I started buying Nescafé Gold Blend because I had been told by my television that it would cause a very attractive young actress called Fiona Fullerton to become friendly with me, but now I buy it because I like it. However, I have a serious complaint to make about the size of Nescafé jars. There is a lot of talk out there in Internetland and Blogland about how market researchers are trawling the blogs to find out, on behalf of the business enterprises who hire them, what the masses think of the latest products of these business enterprises. Well, let the Nescafé market researchers trawl this. I have no problem with the coffee itself. It is the jars that concern me. There is much about Nescafé Gold Blend jars that I like a lot, quite aside from liking their contents. They are very fine in their own right, both aesthetically and structurally. When people first emerged from the Communist Yoke into the Light of Capitalism, they found themselves confronted with packages and pots and containers containing branded Capitalist products that were so beautiful (the packages and pots and containers I mean) that they could hardly bear to throw them away. These Nescafé jars were an excellent embodiment of this dilemma. When archaeologists dig up something like these jars made by ancient Romans or Greeks or Etruscans they celebrate for a century and build entire new museums to accommodate these items and all their worshippers. Yet we Westerners just chuck them out with the rest of the rubbish. And I do too, for reasons I will get to, but first let me explain what I like – or would like – to do with these jars. I like (and would like) to use them for shelving. Thus:  When I die, I expect all my various Internet scribblings to be forgotten utterly, very quickly, and that the last thing about me that anyone will really remember will be my kitchen, with all its CDs, and the fact that many of the shelves (for CDs and for general crap) involved Nescafé jars. → Continue reading: Nescafé jars are the wrong size! December 19th, 2004 | 44 comments - (Comments are closed)
Democracy is a remarkable thing. It gives an illusion of a state being governed ‘by the people and for the people’ whilst at the same time entrenching a ‘public service’ class (with ‘service’ being very much used in the farming sense of the word) that operates almost entirely for its own benefit. That this can go on in nation after nation in much the same manner is a testament to the dementing and infantilising effect that democratic politics has on a large proportion of the population of the planet. And so when we get an article in The Times called Purge of e-mails will deny the right to know (people outside the UK may not be able to access this link due to the idiotic policy of the Times), which alerts us that it just so happens that 11 days before freedom of information laws come into force, millions of e-mails will be deleted from government servers, it should be clear to all but the most wilfully blind that the state will always place its institutional interests before those who are comically led to believe ‘own’ the state: that mythical thing called ‘the people’.
And that is why it cannot be pointed out too often that the state is not your friend. December 18th, 2004 | 10 comments - (Comments are closed)
It is very instructional to see what happens when Islamic institutions are confronted directly with the barbaric realities of their faith. The Prince of Wales has been in discussions with leaders of the British Muslim community about the fact Islamic law demands death for any guilty of apostasy (i.e. when a person who was a Muslim converts to another faith). This is not an idle intellectual issue of interest only to the theologically inclined as in many Muslim countries around the world people are indeed executed every year for turning their back on Islam. One expects enthusiastic support for violently imposed Islam from groups like Al-Muhajiroun (which has allegedly ‘closed down’, though ‘re-branded’ would probably be more a accurate description) but what of so-called moderate Muslim leaders? Judging from this article it appears that when faced directly with the realities of what is done in the name of their religion, these ‘moderates’ insist that moves to reform such barbaric laws must be a matter for internal discussion only and urge members of the faiths who are victims of Islam to maintain a respectful silence. And by this approach I would say that these ‘moderates’ prove that they are simply not worth talking to. I wonder what approach the advocates of a softly softly approach to Islam would take if the Scientologists or Moonies had openly stated policies to kill people who joined and then rejected their faiths? Would Prince Charles be talking to them about this distasteful little ‘problem’ or would they be proscribed organisations whose leaders were arrested on sight? Islam is in serious need of the equivalent of a protestant reformation and until there is widespread ‘moderate’ support for uncompromising and overt rejection of Islam’s savage excesses, then ‘Islamophobia’ (literally ‘a fear of Islam’) is the only rational response to their religion by any who are not Muslims (or who wish to stop being a Muslim). Taking a military approach to dealing with the political manifestations of their faith will increasingly be the response they get from the rest of the world given that there is clearly no serious mainstream internal desire to see Islam change in ways to make it compatible with a broader pluralistic secular society. They have no one to blame for that but themselves, though of course they will continue to blame everyone but themselves. December 18th, 2004 | 76 comments - (Comments are closed)
There are many men of principle in both parties in America, but there is no party of principle. December 17th, 2004 | 22 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Washington Times has a blog called simply Politics Blog that fulfils the bare basics for blog-hood: Reverse chronological order and permalinks to individual articles. It is even written in a suitably bloggy informal style and takes an irreverent look at issues from an unabashedly partisan perspective. And yet Politics Blog is not really a good blog for quite technical reasons. Firstly it does not provide readers with useful sidebar links. Secondly and more crucially, it seems to studiously avoid external links in the blog articles themselves. This is a major failing as the whole point of journalistic blogging is to establish ‘accessible credibility’ and the way you do that is by linking to external sources relating to the things you write about. For example, in this article called Race Hypocrisy by John McCaslon, an organisation called Project 21 is mentioned as well as the fact that left-wing cartoonist Gary Trudeau referred to Condaleeza Rice as ‘Brown Sugar’. And yet Mr. McCaslon just seems to assume people will take his word that what he says about Project 21 and Gary Trudeau is correct because he does not add links to either Project 21 or the offending cartoon by Gary Trudeau. There! See how easy that was? If you link to the things you discuss, people actually have some basis for judging the merits of your words and in the on-line commentaries of tomorrow, to write a critical article without external links as citations will start alarm bells ringing as to the soundness of your views. It it not enough to have a blog, you need to know how to blog. December 17th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Evening Standard published a letter to the editor by me today in the print version of the newspaper (in slightly edited form). Here is the full text:
December 17th, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
“We are not gods. We cannot create wealth out of thin air. Western wealth is just a function of colonialism or, in its current form, neo-liberalism – of taking resources from countries like Ethiopia. Neo-liberals then try to justify this by pretending that they have ‘created’ the wealth they have.” December 16th, 2004 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
Lord Hoffman’s opinion in A(FC) and others (FC) (Appellants) v. Secretary of State for the Home Department (Respondent), also reported by the BBC. December 16th, 2004 | 65 comments - (Comments are closed)
We interrupt your regular blogging schedule to bring you an important government announcement:
Thank you for listening and have a nice day. December 16th, 2004 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
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