Quotulatiousness

November 10, 2011

Delingpole’s word of the day: monotesticularity

Filed under: Britain, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 09:03

He’s talking about Nigel Farage, leader of the UK Independence Party:

‘Farage has only got one ball.’ The last time I made reference to the Ukip leader’s monotesticular status, I got a rocket from an outraged reader. But the reader had missed the point entirely. Nigel Farage’s handicap is a strength, not a weakness. He’s open about it, he’s unembarrassed by it and he’s a better man for it. Yes, Farage may have lost a bollock to cancer, but by God he’s got more cojones than almost any Conservative you could name.

Our Nigel is a Conservative himself, of course. Just one who has been temporarily dispossessed by the mainstream party. When you talk to Farage he’s perfectly upfront about what he considers to be Ukip’s role: to act as the Tory party’s conscience. The moment the Conservatives start behaving like proper Conservatives again — Eurosceptical, small government, low tax, etc — that’ll be it. Most of the 7 per cent of voters who are currently Ukip’s will be straight back into the Tory fold and we’ll have a proper, Thatcherite government again doing the Lord’s work.

Seven per cent! That figure — from the latest YouGov poll — is pretty amazing, isn’t it? It puts Ukip only one point away from the ailing Lib Dems, meaning it’s on track to become Britain’s third largest political party. Yet you’d scarcely be aware of this development, the way it has been ignored by most of our mainstream media.

Peter Oborne nailed it in a recent Telegraph column: ‘If a left-wing party had reached Ukip’s size and consequence, the media would be fascinated. But, because of its old-fashioned and decidedly provincial approach, it has been practically ignored. In the 2004 European elections, the party gained a sensational 16 per cent of the vote. Had it been the Greens or the communists that had pulled off this feat, the BBC would have gone crazy. Instead it chose not to mention this event, coolly classifying Ukip as “other”.’

October 30, 2011

Using Pompeii as another stick to beat Berlusconi

Filed under: Europe, Government, History, Italy, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:48

Mary Beard debunks the widely reported story of yet another wall collapse in the archaeological remains of Pompeii:

By chance I am on the site of Pompeii for the weekend. It is now swarming with more journalists than tourists, and all (it seems) with a determination to hype another collapse, another Pompeian disaster. That is to say, they are here with a determined misunderstanding of what has just happened — or with a drive to use any damage to the site as a stick with which to beat Berlusconi.

Actually, I am usually quite happy to beat Berlusconi, but the fact is that this latest melodrama only serves to make the job much more difficult for those in the archaeological services here, who are doing their level best to keep the place up and running. (This weekend curators and other staff have been fielding tv crews, not getting on with the real job.)

So far as I can tell, what happened is this. There was an absolute downpour last night, in the course of which some stones were dislodged from a relatively fragile (and not very well built) stretch of wall near the Nola gate. A custode entered this damage rather loosely in the incident book — and (we can only speculate how and why) that report got to the press, and it soon became a new “wall collapse”. The carabinieri arrived and everything in the area (including, let me confess, where I want to go) was shut off.

Media folks are not trained archaeologists, so it’s easy to understand how a garbled report could be misunderstood — and that’s setting aside the urge to use any tool as a weapon against the current Italian prime minister. This is why media reports become less and less dependable as they try to report on more specific or more technical information: they lack the expertise and usually don’t take the time to get external experts to help them. (My favourite examples of this are when naval vessels larger than a rowboat are described as “battleships” and tracked military vehicles are invariably “tanks”.)

H/T to Tyler Cowen for the link.

October 26, 2011

When all the party leaders agree, it’s almost certainly a bad idea

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:43

Mick Hume on the consistent refusal of British politicians to allow the electorate any choice on EU involvement:

When all of Britain’s elitist, unrepresentative and interchangeable political leaders unite behind an issue in the name of ‘the national interest’, it is a sure sign that something is amiss. Exhibit A: the united front presented by Tory prime minister David Cameron, his Lib Dem deputy Nick Clegg and opposition Labour leader Ed Miliband against the demand for a referendum on Britain’s relationship with the European Union. When this unappealing triumvirate is being cheered on by many in the high-minded media, alarm bells should really be ringing.

The official line from the Lib-Con government and the Labour opposition this week, as party leaders sought to marshal their MPs to vote against the parliamentary motion calling for an EU referendum, was that to have a national debate about the UK’s membership of the EU just now would not be in the national interest; it would be ‘a distraction’ from coping with Europe’s desperate economic and financial problems. As Cameron put in on the day of the vote, ‘it’s the wrong time to have this debate’ because ‘we’re in the middle of dealing with a crisis in the Eurozone’. A referendum now would be ‘rash’.

Turn that front-bench consensus on its head. It is precisely because of the parlous state of the Euro economy, and the paucity of solutions being offered by our rulers, that now is exactly the right time to have a major public debate on the future of the UK and Europe. The real ‘distraction’ that the Euro-elites fear today is democracy.

October 25, 2011

Gangs not to blame for London’s August riots

Filed under: Britain, Government, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:15

Brendan O’Neill debunks the widespread story that the August riots were either gang-led or pre-planned by gangsters:

In the aftermath of the riots, police, politicians and penmen all arrived at the same conclusion: gangs have taken over parts of England. Organised cliques of mask-wearing, territory-protecting youth, who divide themselves into ‘elders’, ‘soldiers’ and ‘youngers’, are turning bits of London and other English cities into something akin to south-central LA. These gangs orchestrated the violence, we’re told, as a way of staking their claim over local patches of land and warning off the ‘Feds’ (police). It is now apparently time, says David Cameron, for a war against ‘gang culture’.

There’s only one problem with these claims: they are complete and utter bunkum. No doubt gangs exist in some parts of urban England, and no doubt some of them are criminal. But there is no ‘gang culture’ and gangs were not responsible for the recent rioting in London and elsewhere. ‘Gang culture’ is almost entirely the imaginary creation of a political elite which prefers to fantasise that urban implosion is a product of gang conspiracies, rather than face up to the harsh reality that the riots were triggered by the twin crises of community solidarity and state authority.

[. . .]

Perusing the press, it was hard to tell if you were reading genuine reports about English cities or drafts for a movie about the life and times of 50 Cent. ‘Inside the deadly world of gangs’, screamed newspaper headlines, inviting readers to peer at these violent groups where new recruits as young as nine are referred to as ‘Tinies’ or ‘Babies’, while teenage members are known as ‘Soldiers’ and the overlords have the title ‘General’. Apparently there are 171 such gangs in London alone. Journalists write about being ‘embedded’ with the police, as if they’re in Iraq rather than England, and observing an ‘inner-city underworld’. This underworld exploded into the overworld two weeks ago, we’re told, when these military-style gangs ‘orchestrated’ looting through social media or by ‘laying on minibuses to ferry yobs into and around towns’.

[. . .]

Often, the hotheaded claims about Britain being overrun with hundreds of gangs simply do not stand up to scrutiny. So the Metropolitan Police claims there are 171 gangs in London, while the Home Office says there are 356 gang members in London. As one study pointed out, this would mean ‘around two people per gang’

October 20, 2011

Brendan O’Neill: Occupy movement is the death rattle of the old Left

Filed under: Economics, Media, Politics — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:46

For a self-described man of the left, Brendan O’Neill is not afraid to critique leftist movements:

In the increasingly whiffy camp outside St Paul’s Cathedral, amid placards declaring ‘The End is Nigh’, apparently a new kind of politics is being born. Young women talk about ‘politics starting again’. The media cheerleaders of the Occupy movement claim it represents ‘a substantive change not just to the nature of modern politics, but to the way in which it is done, demanded and delivered’. From New York to Madrid to Tokyo, the inhabitants of the so-called tent cities proudly declare themselves ‘citizens of a new world’.

Is all this occupying really the start of something new? No. And not only because on the rare occasion when the protesters issue a coherent demand they end up echoing ideas we’ve heard a thousand times before. (Their call for tougher independent regulation of the financial industry was pilfered from the Financial Times.) More fundamentally, their globally contagious protest represents the death agony of something old rather than the birth pang of something new. What we’re witnessing is the demise of the progressive left, but — and here is the Occupy movement’s twist — that demise is dolled up as something good, something positive, where instead of addressing the vacuum at the heart of modern left-wing thinking, the occupiers make a virtue out of it.

Around the world, the occupiers are adapting to the decayed state of radical left-wing thinking, moulding themselves around the organisational and political disarray of the left. All the negative things about the left today — the lack of big ideas, the dearth of daring leaders, the withering of organisational structures — are repackaged as positives. Leaderlessness is transformed into a virtue, the enabler of a fairer, more consensual form of politics. The absence of overarching ideology is sexed up as ‘liberation from dogma’. Even the thoughtlessness of the Occupy movement, both in terms of its lack of deep thinking and the way it has spread across the globe in a fairly thoughtless, meme-like fashion, is turned into a good thing: this is ‘unthought’, declares one observer, where creeds emerge ‘without much articulation of why they’re necessary, [almost] as reflexes’.

October 17, 2011

Nostalgia for the monoculture that never was

Filed under: Media, USA — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Steven Hyden points out that waxing nostalgic for a mythical time when “we” had a monoculture is farcical:

Like Touré, I get nostalgic for the monoculture. It certainly seems like an alluring idea. The monoculture reinforces the belief that what we as critics spend so much time thinking about really is a central part of the way our society lives and breathes. Otherwise it might be hard to believe in the primacy of pop music when millions of people are out of work and our government is crippled by deep systemic dysfunction. But the best thing (or the worst thing, if you’re writing a think piece) about the monoculture is that it exists safely in the past, where it can live on in our imaginations as a mythical place where, as Touré recently wrote in Salon, “an album becomes so ubiquitous it seems to blast through the windows, to chase you down until it’s impossible to ignore it” — an all-powerful communal unity that comments on the shortcomings of the present.

[. . .]

I’ll remember going back to my junior high school that afternoon and talking about the video with all of my classmates. We knew instantly that “Smells Like Teen Spirit” signaled the dawn of a new era in pop music; it expressed our joys and fears, and pointed the way to a new future. We pledged to commit all the details of this moment (sorry, Moment) to memory, so that when our children asked us what it was like When The World Changed Forever, we would be able to pass down the tale.

Oh, wait a second: It didn’t happen that way at all.

Yes, I saw “Smells Like Teen Spirit” video over lunch, but nobody seemed to know who Nirvana was when I got back to school. It wasn’t like my friends could just punch up the video on their iPhones after I told them about it; the clip was in heavy rotation on MTV, but you still had to watch the channel for an hour or two (and at certain times of the day) to see it. Once my classmates did see it, a number of them purchased “Nevermind,” as I did. But many of them didn’t. Some preferred Pearl Jam. Some liked N.W.A.’s “Niggaz4life.” Some didn’t care about music at all; they’d rather play Tecmo Bowl. Then there were the millions and millions of Americans who bought Garth Brooks’ “Ropin’ the Wind,” the best-selling album of 1991. If anything, that was the album that we as a culture were united behind — it sold 14 million copies, though I never heard it once blasting through people’s windows.

October 9, 2011

Rick Mercer on the War of 1812 Bicentennial

Filed under: Cancon, History, Humour — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:58

October 7, 2011

“The entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a ‘[citation needed]’ footnote”

Filed under: Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

Robert David Graham does some independent reporting of the “Occupy Wall Street” protests and finds the mainstream media is being remarkably superficial:

It’s the quality of the coverage, not the amount that’s the problem. It’s been on the nightly news every night for the past week, but there has been little “serious” reporting.

By “serious” reporting, I mean such things as contacting the park’s owners asking for an official statement. The protesters are occupying Zuccotti Park, owned by the same company (Brookfield Office Properties NYSE:BPO) that owns the adjacent skyscraper. An obvious step would be to contact them asking for a statemen, but I could find no journalists that had yet done so. Well, if “journalists” aren’t going to do this, I can do this myself. I sent an email to their VP of Communications. I got a response, which I posted to my blog. When I posted it, I also Googled the sentences from the official statement, and found no results. I was indeed the first one “reporting” on this. Since then, others have mentioned the official statement, probably by picking it up from the #OccupyWallStreet Twitter hashtag that links to my blog.

[. . .]

In many ways, the press treats this protest the way they treated the Tea Party, completely distorting the story. Journalists ignored the mainstream of the Tea Party and instead focused on the fringe. Instead of showing the hundreds of signs calling for smaller government, reporters instead focused on the one sign showing Obama as Hitler. In the end, this reporting became self-fulfilling. The Republican fringe disaffected with the establishment were convinced by this reporting, believing that they, too, should join the Tea Party, thus derailing it.

[. . .]

In that way, it’s like the Internet. When the Internet appeared on the scene 20 years ago, it wasn’t like anything that predated it. Yes, you could define it in terms of the old, as a digital library, as an electronic form of mail, or as a communications network, but none of these descriptions captures the essence of what the Internet really is.

In particular, there is the problem with the “filter bubble”. While the Internet can expand a person’s universe, it gives people the power to shrink it. People create a “filter bubble” around themselves, using tools of the Internet to pass only those things they agree with. For example, Google watches what people search for, profiling them, and sorts the results for that individual. They see their own small universe reflected back, rather than the big universe.

[. . .]

I get the impression that the entire Occupy Wall Street movement needs a “[citation needed]” footnote. Wikipedia uses this technique to allow anybody to challenge an unsupported assertion. Anybody can insert this footnote, expressing to the reader that (as yet) the assertion isn’t supported. Anybody else can find supporting evidence, and replace the [citation needed] to a footnote pointing to a reliable source. If no citation can be found, the assertion is eventually deleted.

October 3, 2011

ReasonTV: Ken Burns on his new documentary, Prohibition

Filed under: Law, Liberty, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 13:20

Occupy Wall Street activists fail to persuade

Filed under: Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 13:12

Brendan O’Neill says that the “teenage moralism” of the protesters makes him “ashamed to be Left-wing”:

Occupy Wall Street, the gathering of angry actors, graphic designers and various other hipsters in the financial districts of New York City, might just be the most degenerate Left-wing movement of recent times. Its weird demands, plastered across tongue-in-cheek placards and on super-cool, self-pressed t- shirts, capture the descent of the modern Left into the cesspool of victimology, conspiracy-mongering and disdain for mass society and its allegedly dumb inhabitants. Far from representing anything that I, a Leftie, would recognise as progressive and humane, this gaggle of rich kids spouts little more than snobbery and fear, seemingly incapable of deciding whom they loathe the most: greedy fat bankers or the dumb fat public.

Occupy Wall Street claims to be a mass workers’ movement, but it’s nothing of the sort. It is in fact a tiny, self-selected group of self-righteous, mostly middle-class activists who have failed to win over large sections of the American public to their “cause” — which isn’t surprising when you consider that on the rare occasion that these trendy banker-bashers talk about the American public, they do so with a metaphorical peg on their snouts. An article on the Occupy Wall Street website claims “the working class in this country has been brainwashed by MSM, Fox News and the Right-wing propaganda machine”. It says everyday Americans, being stupid, do not understand what socialism is, because “they have been emotionally brainwashed against it”. And so it falls to the cool, fashionable, oh-so-enlightened activists of Occupy Wall Street to help “de-programme people against the brainwashing they’ve experienced”. That is, the oiks must be re-educated by the hipsters. The little people must have their minds cleaned out by their moral and fashion superiors. Occupy Wall Street mashes together the outlook of Kim Jong-Il with the politics of Susan Sarandon, giving rise to a weirdly hippyish yet authoritarian gathering of slackers-cum-elitists.

September 26, 2011

Gorram purplebelly censors

Filed under: Bureaucracy, Education, Liberty, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 12:24

A Mal Reynolds poster falls victim to academic censorship:

Dateline: Wisconsin. At the University of Wisconsin-Stout, theater professor James Miller put up a poster on his door with an image of Nathan Fillon in the character of Captain Malcolm Reynolds with one of Mal’s better lines: “You don’t know me, son, so let me explain this to you once: If I ever kill you, you’ll be awake. You’ll be facing me. And you’ll be armed.”

In a better world, nothing would happen — except perhaps Firefly fans would geek out and people who roll their eyes at geek culture references would roll their eyes.

But this is modern America. In modern America, the Browncoats are people who like to use vigorous figurative language to speak their mind, and they are often outnumbered and outgunned by the Alliance, made up of silly, professionally frightened moral and intellectual weaklings who see expressions of dissent (particularly dissent rendered in vivid figurative terms) as upsetting and potentially all terroristy.

So naturally the campus police at University of Wisconsin-Stout went all Mrs.-Grundy-With-A-Gun-And-A-Badge on Professor Miller. They threatened Prof. Miller with criminal charges for disorderly conduct, taking a page from the cops at Sam Houston state. They also took the poster down. The redoubtable FIRE has the story and has sent the necessary letter asking the University to grow the fuck up and pull its shit together. (That might be kind of a paraphrase by me.)

September 25, 2011

The new TV show will have to be highly imaginative to match the real Pan Am

Filed under: Americas, History, Media, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:11

Scott Van Wynsberghe looks at the fascinating history of the real-world Pan American:

To say the least, it was a peculiar charter flight. At some point in the first half of the 1960s, Pan American World Airways put one of its planes at the disposal of Indonesian president Sukarno. However, Pan Am was also working with the CIA, and the plane was wired for surveillance. As well, Pan Am vice-president Samuel Pryor — who was the airline’s liaison with the CIA — staffed the flight with “stewardesses” who were actually German hookers. Pryor would later reveal all this to co-authors Marilyn Bender and Selig Altschul for their 1982 book on Pan Am CEO Juan Trippe, The Chosen Instrument. Referring to Sukarno, a known womanizer, Pryor commented, “I was afraid to expose our Pan Am girls to him. Our girls were nice girls.”

The new ABC television series Pan Am, which premiered on Sept. 25, will have to go a ways to beat that image of intrigue and sexism. Still, the creators of the series deserve credit just for reviving interest in a company notorious for combining flying and spying.

[. . .]

Amid the profits in Latin America, however, were the roots of shadowy affairs to come. As early as 1930, Pan Am quietly acquired SCADTA, a Colombian-based German aviation firm, but the existing management was allowed to remain. That caused trouble later in the 1930s, as war threatened in Europe and Washington fretted over the proximity of so many German fliers to the Panama Canal. In early 1939, the U.S. military — well aware of the true ownership of SCADTA — simply ordered Trippe to purge the Germans from the company. When American replacement crews arrived, they discovered that someone had been modifying SCADTA planes to permit the mounting of bombs and machine guns.

Over a year after the SCADTA affair, in mid-1940, U.S. authorities were so worried over a possible spread of the Second World War to the Western Hemisphere that they decided to create a chain of installations across the Caribbean and the coast of Brazil. The problem was that all this would require complex military treaties, for which there was no time. Airfields and radio stations could, however, be built by a private company pretending that all the activity was just routine business. If war did reach the hemisphere, panicky local governments could then permit the U.S. military to take over the sites. Pan Am was chosen for the job, and a secret deal was finalized in November. According to historian Stanley Hilton, German military intelligence attempted to monitor the ensuing construction.

September 22, 2011

Telegraph: The great euro swindle

Filed under: Britain, Economics, Europe, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:34

This is an interesting summary of the path to the Euro, and how some predicted the current situation at the very start of the project:

The field is theirs. They were not merely right about the single currency, the greatest economic issue of our age — they were right for the right reasons. They foresaw with lucid, prophetic accuracy exactly how and why the euro would bring with it financial devastation and social collapse.

Meanwhile, the pro-Europeans find themselves in the same situation as appeasers in 1940, or communists after the fall of the Berlin Wall. They are utterly busted. [. . .]

The central historical error of the modern Financial Times concerns the euro. The FT flung itself headlong into the pro-euro camp, embracing the cause with an almost religious passion. Doubts were dismissed. Here is the paper’s Lex column on January 8, 2001, on the subject of Greek entry to the eurozone: “With Greece now trading in euros,” reflected Lex, “few will mourn the death of the drachma. Membership of the eurozone offers the prospect of long-term economic stability.” The FT offered a similarly warm welcome to Ireland.

The paper waged a vendetta against those who warned that the euro would not work. Its chief political columnist, Philip Stephens, consistently mocked the Eurosceptics. “Immaturity is the kind explanation,” sneered Stephens as Tory leader William Hague came out against the single currency.

[. . .]

Now let’s turn to the BBC. In our Centre for Policy Studies pamphlet, Guilty Men, we expose in detail how the BBC betrayed its charter commitment and became a partisan player in a great national debate — all the more insidious because of its pretence at neutrality.

For example, in the nine weeks leading to July 21, 2000, when the argument over the euro was at its height, the Today programme featured 121 speakers on the topic. Some 87 were pro-euro compared with 34 who were anti. BBC broadcasters tended to present the pro-euro position itself as centre ground, thus defining even moderately Eurosceptic voices as extreme.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

September 19, 2011

Why are kids using the word “gay” to mean “lame”?

Filed under: Britain, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 09:23

Brendan O’Neill isn’t going to get letters of love and support for his current column in the Telegraph:

One thing that causes great consternation amongst schoolteachers, commentators and gay-rights activists is that young people use the word gay to mean “rubbish”. Last week it was reported that thousands of schoolchildren, some as young as four, have been reported to their local authorities for using racist or homophobic language, including using “gay” as a stand-in for “naff”. One boy was reprimanded for saying in class: “This work’s gay.” This follows other gay-as-rubbish controversies, including a tsunami of newspaper outrage when, in 2006, BBC Radio 1 presenter Chris Moyles described a mobile phone ringtone as “gay”, and even more outrage when the BBC inquiry into his remark ruled that the word gay is “often now used to mean ‘lame’ or ‘rubbish’. This is widespread current usage… among young people.”

But is it really such a mystery as to why the word gay has come to mean rubbish? It seems obvious to me. It is because gay culture is quite knowingly and resolutely lame. I don’t mean culture that happens to be produced by homosexuals, which includes some of the greatest art in history. No, I mean the stuff that passes for mainstream “gay culture”, foisted upon us by gay TV producers, filmmakers and magazine publishers, which is almost always shallow and camp and kitsch. That is, crap. If young people associate “gay” with “rubbish”, then they’re more perceptive than we give them credit for — they have twigged that, sadly, what is these days packaged up us as “gay culture” is almost always patronising pap.

September 18, 2011

Chinese censors crack down on . . . talent shows?

Filed under: China, Liberty, Media — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 12:49

They’ve become too popular, and the text voting for winners sets too much of a democratic example, so China’s State Administration of Radio, Film and Television (SARFT) is ordering talent shows off the air:

The latest run of the hugely popular Super Girl contest finished on Friday. A spokesman for Hunan Satellite Television said it would not show any TV talent shows with mass participation next year because it had been accused of breaking time limits.

“Hunan Satellite Television obeys the state watchdog’s decision and will not hold similar talent shows next year,” said Li Hao.

“Instead, the channel will air programmes that promote moral ethics and public safety, and provide practical information for housework.”

[. . .]

SARFT decreed that talent shows could not be shown in prime time — between 7.30pm and 10.30pm — or screened for more than two hours a day. It also banned text voting — with some suggesting officials were concerned that the democratic method of choosing the winner was a bad influence.

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