Of tiny brains
November 29, 2010 13 comments
Hello again, readers! Cold, isn’t it? Many thanks to the literally several of you who have written in with suggestions, or inquiries as to whether unspeak.net would ever be revived. Perhaps? In the mean time, the following celebration of glossy-jowled bawler David Cameron’s rhetorical skills was printed in Saturday’s Guardian, but didn’t appear on the website, so I reproduce it here:
David Cameron’s two-word phrase “big society” was this week nominated “word of the year” by Oxford University Press. Much ink has been spilt over its possible content. But how exactly does it work its occult rhetorical magic?
Being big usually makes good things better (big bucks, big breakfast) and bad things worse (big trouble; and, for conservatives, “big government”). Society is good, so a big society must be even better. It follows that all countries more populous than the UK are better than it, but forget about that for now.
So what’s the big idea? In the “big society”, people ought to be enabled to help themselves. (So “society” is redefined polemically as something opposed to government.) But this ideal might be incompatible with removing the means to enable them do it, eg by slashing local-authority funding. In which case, “big society” is just cynical Unspeak for offloading responsibility on to the voluntary sector, as the Bishop of Blackburn recently suggested.
Disturbingly, the swelling of the “big society” is infectious. Cameron nightmarishly invoked “a big society matched by big citizens” (presumably fatter Britons; taller ones would more properly result in a high society), and Nick Clegg called a new Sutton youth centre a “big society super-classroom”. No doubt a big society enormoburger will be served on a bed of gruel in the workhouse.
Previous Oxford “words of the year” have included “locavore” and “hypermiling” (yes, me neither), but there are promising signs that “big society” could endure better than they, if only as a term of sarcastic opposition. Thus did a spokesman for student demonstrators in London on Wednesday announce: “It’s going to be an excellent example of the big society coming to Downing Street.” That was big and it was clever.
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The apple of my eye
June 9, 2010 8 comments
iTards the world over are moaning and stroking themselves slowly after Apple unveiled the iPhone 4, which is exactly like the last iPhone except it is now one centimetre thick and has a RETINA DISPLAY OMG WTF LOL???!!!111oneoneone.
What is a retina display? Is it a sci-fi device that interfaces directly with your retina, tickling your rods and cones so as to inject a phantasmagoric image directly into the optic nerve? Actually, no; it’s just, er, a display that has more pixels per square inch than most other displays. The only thing it has to do with your retina is that light from it passes through your eye and hits the retina — in other words, retina-wise, the RETINA DISPLAY is exactly like any other visible object.
I’m glad I got that off my chest. Now, excuse me while I go and invent some TASTEBUD FOOD?
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The fallen
June 8, 2010 9 comments
Alan Dershowitz perceives a “close question”:
It is a close question whether “civilians” who agree to participate in the breaking of a military blockade have become combatants. They are certainly something different from pure innocents, and perhaps they are also somewhat different from pure armed combatants.
It is instructive to observe the workings of this fine legal mind over the course of a mere two sentences, firstly prejudging his own close question by putting the word “civilians” in fastidious scare-quotes, and then segueing — almost imperceptibly! — from the legal language of civilians and combatants to the entirely non-legal, theological-moral essentialism of pure innocents.
I myself agree that the passengers on the boat were, in all likelihood, not pure innocents; but the discussion cannot stop there: in all honesty, I must stipulate that I myself am not a pure innocent. Does that mean it would be okay for the I“D”F to shoot me? Would Dershowitz himself claim to be a pure innocent, and if not, is it okay for the I“D”F to shoot him?
Of course, if one has to be a pure innocent to qualify as immune from Israeli attack, the imaginative Dershowitz has, at a single magnificent stroke of Unspeak, here provided a permanent and universal justification for Israeli soldiers killing anyone, anywhere, ever, except perhaps for newborn babies.
Are you pure innocents, readers?
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Let us boycott boycotts
June 3, 2010 66 comments
Iain (“M.”) Banks, many of whose books I have enjoyed immensely, writes to the Guardian calling for “a full cultural and educational boycott of Israel”:
It would be a form of collective punishment (albeit a mild one), and so in a way an act of hypocrisy for those of us who have criticised Israel for its treatment of the Palestinian people in general and those in Gaza in particular, but appeals to reason, international law, UN resolutions and simple human decency mean – it is now obvious – nothing to Israel, and for those of us not prepared to turn to violence, what else can we do?
For the little it’s worth, I’ve told my agent to turn down any further book translation deals with Israeli publishers. I would urge all writers, artists and others in the creative arts, as well as those academics engaging in joint educational projects with Israeli institutions, to consider doing everything they can to convince Israel of its moral degradation and ethical isolation, preferably by simply having nothing more to do with this outlaw state.
Outlaw state is, of course, a meaningless term of disapproval, a pseudorational signal of one’s righteous outrage, no more rigorous than rogue state or failed state. If it is meant to mean simply that Israel has committed some actions that are considered to be contrary to international law, then outlaw state hardly helps in that respect to distinguish Israel from — to pick two other countries almost at random — the US or Britain. And the fact that outlaws are often heroic individualists battling a corrupt polity (Robin Hood etc) hardly helps Banks’s rhetorical purpose here.
I have written hereabouts before on why cultural boycotts are stupid, and that still applies (the idea that the refusal of pop musicians and sportsmen to play in South Africa somehow broke the apartheid régime is a fairytale). Iain Banks himself realizes too that it is a stupid (and actually vicious) idea: his plaintive “what else can we do?” doesn’t even pretend to be a justification; it is merely the Politician’s Logic of “Something must be done; this is something; therefore, we must do it.”
So Banks presses on regardless, proposing to cure the “ethical isolation” of Israel by, um, isolating it even more, without, or so it seems, even beginning to imagine how that might affect the balance of internal politics in Israel itself.
Boycott is a rather unlovely word in any case, though that can hardly be helped since it was the proper name of the target of the original boycott. Perhaps calls for such silly courses of action would attract more assent if their proposers invited everyone to join in a botham?
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‘Work values’
June 2, 2010 8 comments
Thank God for the New York Times, which in this troubling era does not neglect to cover the travails of super-wealthy parents wondering what to do with their feckless children. The question on everyone’s lips, of course, is:
How do you raise children who are productive?
The answer? Launch them:
So what is the right way to help a child struggling to find a job or a career? Ms. Godfrey said it could be difficult to get children started, or what she calls “launched.”
“A year ago, when we started to do fairly serious work on the launch process, I thought we were dealing with families who had slackers,” she said. “The more we got into it, the more we realized that these were kids who are educated but are having a tough time getting into a purposeful path that will help them maintain their lifestyle.”
She urges families to set two goals: get children living without subsidies and put them on a career track. “Those families that treat their kids’ launch like any other endeavor are having the most success,” she said.
A child’s launch sounds at once more violent and more passive than, say, “coming out”. Is a sprog who is launched more like a space shuttle, a missile, or a beauty product, readers?
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And ‘business leaders’
May 21, 2010 11 comments
(democracy_grenade reminds me that I had something to say during the election campaign about the tax on jobs, although I said it in a talk rather than on this blog. It went something like this.)
Cameron and Osborne have also had rhetorical help recently in the election campaign from a gang of people whom you might choose to call, depending on your point of view, business leaders, captains of industry, or self-interested plutocrats. Many of them have lined up behind the Conservatives to denounce the proposed one per cent rise in National Insurance contributions as a “tax on jobs”. Well, yes, in a sense, this is a tax on jobs; in the same sense that all taxes can be described as taxes on things we like. VAT is a tax on shopping. Income tax is a tax on work. Fuel duty is a tax on getting to work. And alcohol duty is a tax on relaxing in the pub, trying to forget about your work.
Nonetheless it is obviously useful to the captains of industry, or the self-interested plutocrats, to call a proposed hike in their contributions a “tax on jobs” — even though, as economists have pointed out, the effect of increases in employer “national insurance” contributions is usually that the cost is simply passed on to their employees, so that wages rise less than they otherwise would have done.
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Tax wages not profits
May 20, 2010 8 comments
So the “fairer” policies of the new ConDem régime include cutting corporation tax while reversing only that portion of Labour’s dreaded jobs tax which was to fall on employers: workers themselves will not now get the pledged threshold raise. As George Osborne blurted last night through the sneering rubber George Osborne mask permanently superglued to his face:
Our aim is to create the most competitive corporate tax regime in the G20.
I feel sure that competitive here is Unspeak for something — but what, readers?
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Research, the Janet Street-Porter way
May 17, 2010 12 comments
Janet Street-Porter has written something that is particularly vicious and outright untrue even by the usual standards of the Daily Mail:
There’s a big black cloud hanging over parts of the UK, and it’s not going away. Not volcanic ash — but depression. This relatively new ailment appeared on my radar a couple of years ago, when I discovered that more and more women were claiming they suffered from ‘stress’.
Depression is a “relatively new ailment”, perhaps, in the sense that a term used in medical contexts for 150 years (to ignore arguendo the long history of “melancholia” before that) can hardly compete in the longevity stakes with, I don’t know, demonic possession. But wait, Street-Porter does affect to strike a reasonable note:
I am not denying that clinical depression is a real mental illness, or that it can be debilitating for sufferers.
Oh! Okay!
But let’s take a moment to consider whether depression is common among the poor or the working class?
Oh sure, let’s take that moment!
A: [P]eople living in ‘economic hardship’ on a long-term basis, were much more likely to be suffering from clinical depression than those not living in economic hardship.
B: About one in six Americans say they have at some point been diagnosed with depression, and the rate is nearly twice as high for lower-income people [...]
C: Children from poor families are more likely than their peers to be depressed as teenagers, with effects that can ultimately make it harder to climb out from poverty [...]
D: [C]hronic depressive episodes [...] are associated with poorer physical health, lower quality of life, socioeconomic disadvantage and minority status [...]
E: [D]epressive and anxiety disorders [in South-East Asia] are disabling and can prevent sufferers from carrying out their tasks at home and in employment and thus have adverse economic implications for the individual, their families and society. Irrespective of the average per capita income of a society, persons who are at the bottom end of the social hierarchy are at a greater risk of suffering from these disorders than those who are at the upper end.
That’s just what I found in 10 minutes’ googling; but I think that must count as a moment, in Street-Porter’s parlance. So, let us see what her own moment of research turned up:
If you’re a black South African woman growing up in a township, or a mum in a slum favela in Rio, or a supermarket shelf-stacker in Croydon, or one of the band of low-paid female workers who go to work at 3am to clean the offices of the wealthiest and most powerful people in Britain in the City of London, you probably aren’t afflicted by depression.
Oh, right! She asked us to take a moment to consider whether depression is common among the poor or the working class, and I, like a fool, thought that meant something like “consult the mass of available evidence staring you in the internet’s face, like any minimally competent and self-respecting hack would and should do”, whereas what Street-Porter actually wanted me to do — and went on to demonstrate so superbly herself — was just make shit up, drawing a factually false conclusion from purely imaginary anecdotes. This journalism business is easier than I thought!
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Proper politics
May 12, 2010 9 comments
Glassy-eyed doughboy David Cameron, making repeated little chopping motions with his hand like a malfunctioning karate robot, last night gave his virgin speech as subprime minister.
I aim to form a proper and full coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats.
He has long been very hot on the word proper, no doubt because its original Anglo-Norman sense was “belonging exclusively to one person, private, personal” (c.1130, from OED).
Real change is not what government can do on its own. Real change is when everyone pulls together, comes together [...]
Everyone pulls together, comes together… Well, I am sure there have already been many satisfying rounds of the biscuit game between moist-lipped glottal-stopper David Cameron and his advisors at No 10, but in that case it seems rather unfair that a man should have been handcuffed in his own home for displaying a poster with the word “Wanker” emblazoned over a photograph of our new master?
I believe together we can provide that strong and stable government that our country needs, based on those values, rebuilding family, rebuilding community — and above all — rebuilding responsibility in our country.
So government can’t do much on its own, but one of the things it can do is rebuilding family? How exactly is this to be arranged? Will single mothers be compelled to marry men chosen for them by Conservative central office? Will childless British couples be forcibly gifted with infant asylum-seekers? What is the sort of self-admiring and materially comfortable “libertarian” who complacently supports the Conservatives supposed to make of this fantastic and pernicious nonsense?
Happy new ConLib régime, readers!
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A great day for plutocracy
May 7, 2010 21 comments
As The Race To Run Knifecrime Island (© The Awl) stutters to a Photoshop finish, a phalanx of experts (plus Simon Schama) lines up this morning to say that the most important criterion for any Parliamentary deal is that it be one which will reassure the markets. Which reminds me of Unspeak™, page 209:
How protean, indeed, these markets were. On the one hand, they dispensed God’s justice, free from any interference by merely human justice; yet on the other hand, when the rhetorical occasion demanded, the markets were vulnerable little flowers, in desperate need of “reassurance”.
Economic events of the last few years, it appears, have not proven sufficient to dislodge the assumption that the opinion of the markets is both reasonable and sovereign.
UNSPEAK PREDICTION: if a Lib-Lab deal materializes, it will be presented not as a “coalition”, but as a partnership; maybe even a progressive partnership.
Election open thread, readers!
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