Lessons For Us All

27May11 – 18:08

I recommend you read all of this Martin In The Margins post: Taliban tactics in Tower Hamlets:

I’m not sure why I’ve been so affected by the story of Gary Smith, the east London RE teacher who was assaulted by four Islamic extremists because they disapproved of him teaching religion to Muslim girls. Perhaps it was the sheer ferocity of the attack, in which a Stanley knife, an iron rod and a block of cement were used, and which left Smith with a fractured skull and a permanently scarred face.

…

Then again, perhaps this event stood out because of its striking similarity with another story that I read this week—about the murder by the Taliban of an Afghan headmaster, simply because he had the effrontery to teach girls in his school. The two accounts had much in common: there was the same warped sense of religious self-righteousness, the same absolute denial of equal rights to women and girls, the same murderous violence in the name of religion. Suddenly those Daily Mail scare stories about the “London Taliban” didn’t seem so off the wall.

Finally, I suppose I was left perplexed about what would—and should—be the response of liberals to this kind of incident. I imagine if there’d been an attack of similar ferocity by four EDL or BNP thugs, against a local imam or mosque instructor, say, then we would have seen (quite rightly) liberals and anti-racists mobilising and marching through the area in solidarity. Maybe I haven’t been paying attention, but I don’t think we’ve seen anything of the kind in support of Gary Smith. Where is the outcry from the teaching unions against this assault on one of their number, simply for doing his job? Has anyone planned a march through Tower Hamlets in support of freedom of expression or the educational rights of young women?

[I have removed Martin’s links to the Daily Mail and the Guardian from the quoted text because I have a policy of not sending traffic to the Websites of either of those rags, in part because of their mutually complementary racisms.]

By admin | Posted in Afghanistan, Crime, Education, Religion, Terrorism | Comments (2)

Three Four B Movies Worth Checking Out

26May11 – 17:17

A good B movie is great fun. The format is officially dead, but the label lives; and now people use it to refer to a genre film (usually horror or science fiction/fantasy) with a small promotional spend as much as they use it to describe one with a low budget. If a non-blockbuster non-cult non-art-house non-sequel tests like a turkey, it won’t be sold so aggressively to prospective spectators and the cast will be less keen to make their contribution to its marketing, so it’ll end up on the B movie ghetto by default.

B movies are more than merely entertaining ways for multi-millionaires to hide some of their capital gains away from government revenue services. There are artistic freedoms that come with embracing B-moviehood. When it’s deliberately produced to a price, a production can decide in advance to take risks that blockbusters can’t, it can aim itself more directly at connoisseurs of its niche; plus, as a viewer, your expectations are so much lower that you are more likely to enjoy the results. This is also a segment of the business in which British filmmakers have often prospered, for a while at least.

Of course, even when we aren’t talking about straight-to-video releases, there are plenty of bad contemporary B movies—for example, the oeuvre of the infamously tax efficient Uwe “Worst Director In The World” Boll. This is one reason why, when I drop a B into my disc drive and I enjoy the ride despite myself, it’s as satisfying as eating a well made burger. In no particular order, here are three 21st-century “B”s that I have enjoyed on DVD over the past few months.

Pandorum [made in 2009 for $33m] was subsidized by German regional and national film funds and there was a substantial British contribution to its production, but its one genuine star and overall feel is American. Amongst the harsh criticism at Rotten Tomatoes, many reviewers complain that it’s derivative. Yes, the film takes your money in return for science fiction (and horror) old rope—it seems to be aimed at fans of the genre(s)—but what impressed me about it was that these frayed strands were woven into something original and, ultimately, surprising.

Reign Of Fire [made in 2002 for $60m] is a borderline B movie, almost not qualifying because it stars two bona fide Hollywood A-listers (Matthew McConaughey and Christian Bale), but it’s a film that cost less than $100 m, is set in Britain, and tries to tell an anachronistic tale of a world taken over by dragons—thereby combining science fiction, fantasy, and horror—with something like grit. Indeed, I was shocked that Sean Bean didn’t appear in it. Fortunately, keeping it real didn’t mean keeping out exhilarating action sequences.

The budget of the cheapest of these three, Skyline [made in 2010], $10.5m was so low it’s hard to believe. You can see the joins at times, but the CGI is stunning. Shame about the plot, yes; but the concept is solid, namely: “This ain’t your grandpa’s alien invasion.” If you were to look for a antecedent from the B movie golden age that summed up its mood, then you’d describe it as more a schlock-horror Invasion of the Bodysnatchers than a whizz-bang War Of the Worlds.

UPDATE [27May11]: Tim Almond suggests I add Crank [made in 2006 for $12m]. Good idea. I haven’t seen it recently, but it fits the bill perfectly: cheap, daft, fun. The plot has negligible respect for physics or physiology—its sequel even less—but it is occasionally hilarious and always impossible to be bored by: dirty, potty-mouthed, violent, extreme slapstick engineered for the adolescent males who were officially forbidden from watching it in the cinema to rent on DVD.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Money, Movies | Comments (4)

Making Money By Telling Women The Correct Way To Have Sex

12Apr11 – 17:44

Further to my post about rescuing fallen women, the Heresiarch examines how evidence-abusing ideologues compete to cash in on prostitution.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Academia, Law, Politics, Religion, Sex, Sexual Politics | Comments (0)

Animals Or Savages?

02Apr11 – 23:17

Some commentators who have opinionated about the recent murders in Afghanistan, murders supposedly committed “in response to” a US pastor’s burning a copy of the Koran, have resorted to what I ironically call “good racism”. Bad racism is what unemployed people living on council housing estates display when they blame their being unemployed on immigrants. Good racism is what people in desirable jobs express when, for example, they prefer to hire better-off non-whites over worse-off whites for other desirable jobs or, in this case, when people in the West treat people in the East as though they were too primitive to be capable of moral discrimination1.

A friend on the Right, Claire Berlinski, wrote aptly about this today, just as I found myself engaged in an increasingly surreal dispute on Twitter with a representative of The Democratic Society. If the person responsible for The Democratic Society’s Twitter output is who I think it is, he isn’t a member of a tiny pseudo-Leftist sect like the Socialist Workers Party, but a man whom I engaged in what-seemed-sane conversation in a pub after a Labour Party Conference fringe meeting a couple of years ago. Our bite-sized debate today was triggered by this gobsmacking tweet from him:

7 people dead because of the actions of one western bigot - lessons for us about why multiculturalism and respect matter.

7 people dead because of the actions of one western bigot - lessons for us about why multiculturalism and respect matter.

Sometimes I think the only way to make this kind of poison unacceptable in educated middle-class circles is to keep pointing at it and pointing out how poisonous it is until you lose all your educated middle-class friends. You can visit our respective Twitter pages to browse the rest of PootBlog’s debate with demsoc. I left the discussion because I was lost for words. I had hoped he would think better of his original remark and delete it, but, instead, the subsequent attempts to explain it spiralled on, like the words of a man on a bus trying to justify an “I’m not racist, but…” outburst.

I wanted to give its author the chance to delete the tweet because, if he isn’t already embarrassed by it already, one day he will be; so I waited some hours before taking a snapshot of it here for future generations to gaze upon in head-shaking wonder as one might at a clip of The Black And White Minstrel Show.

Perhaps its author will be round later to object to being taken at his own words, like this guy did back in 2006. Follow the trackback link at the bottom of the comments below that PooterGeek post to enjoy the full glory of the subsequent thread, the finest of the examples here of people ranting at me for misrepresenting them by quoting their own words and linking back to their original context.

That last link reminds me that one of the most common accusations aimed at the authors, signatories, and supporters of the Euston Manifesto was that we had erected “straw men” to rail against; that the bizarre, illiberal, irrational, racist drivel that had been spilling from the lips of self-proclaimed Leftists since the turn of the century was a figment of our imaginations, or vanishingly rare, or restricted to the output of an extremist minority. This was absurd for at least two reasons:

  1. The manifesto’s original signatories had accumulated a vast, linked, documentary corpus of examples of exactly this kind of nonsense—from supposedly respectable, mainstream sources—a corpus so vast that critics (sometimes the same people) accused us of being obsessed with such stuff.
  2. Even as one group of our critics accused us of making this stuff up, other critics actually generated still more of it in a response to the manifesto itself.

Five years on, the drivel continues to spill out:

The UN’s chief envoy to Afghanistan, Staffan de Mistura, blamed Friday’s violence in the northern city of Mazar-e Sharif on the Florida pastor who burnt the Koran on 20 March.

“I don’t think we should be blaming any Afghan,” Mr de Mistura said. “We should be blaming the person who produced the news - the one who burned the Koran. Freedom of speech does not mean freedom from offending culture, religion, traditions.”

No, that is exactly what freedom of speech means. Freedom to say only that which fundamentalists deem inoffensive and respectful—or suffer bloody consequences—is no freedom at all. It’s the shroud that imprisoned us in the darkest of the Dark Ages.

  1. There’s more good racism and good sexism here [↩]
By PooterGeek | Posted in Afghanistan, Euston Manifesto, Philosophy, Politics, Religion | Comments (6)

Chuka Umunna on slavery

30Mar11 – 12:44

Chuka Umunna in The Voice on the question of a UK government apology for slave trade:

African slavery and colonialism are not simply remnants of the past – they helped lay the foundations for the successful modern Britain of today. The effects of slavery are still felt in our communities - many cite the matriarchal nature of our families, with a high preponderance of absent fathers, as an example. In this light, an apology is long overdue, whatever the legal argument.

Chuka Umunna’s assistant on the question of unpaid interns in Umunna’s own office:

As a former employment law solicitor, Chuka is well aware of the legal context in this area. However, for the avoidance of doubt, I can confirm that our office does not use interns in the same way that we do full staff members and interns are under no obligation to work. Our office uses the guidelines established by Internocracy.

If I may refer to the wording of our office’s advertisement on W4AMP website: “as this is a voluntary position these requirements are flexible and those with restricted availability are also welcome to apply.”

I hope this provides clarification.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Africa, History, Law, Politics, Race, Work | Comments (3)

On Rescuing Fallen Women

05Mar11 – 12:58

I spent my first two terms at university up to my naked wrists in a woman’s corpse. This was A Good Thing For Humankind. This week, one of the top BBC News stories has been the outrage at a woman demonstrating a sex toy in front of a university psychology class. This was An Act Of Depravity. Is the World ever going to grow the fuck up about sex?

Natasha Burge writes about doomed efforts to outlaw sex work:

Trafficking is a very real problem that we should clearly be working to stop, but it does not only or even predominantly pertain to sexual slavery. Unfortunately, the plight of trafficking victims is largely ignored if the story is deemed insufficiently ‘sexy’. Recently, 500 Indian workers brought to the U.S. to work in shipyards after Hurricane Katrina are suing Signal International and other entities on charges of human trafficking. The workers have alleged that they were brought to the country under a false premise, subject to deplorable living conditions and threats of violence. All these allegations add up to human trafficking, and yet no one is suggesting that shipyard work be abolished.

I’ve never been to a prostitute and don’t intend to; but, as with dissecting dead people, it’s important not to let personal aesthetic discomfort trump basic humanity. Criminalizing sex work kills women (and men) as surely as criminalizing abortion. And arguments about a woman’s ownership of her own body are even more relevant to sex work.

Right- and Left-wingers who campaign to ban sex work are reduced to making up statistics and ignoring the epidemiology because their crusading isn’t about soberly weighing the aggregate wellbeing of humankind; it’s about squeamishness and striking ideological poses.

[Thanks to Gaby C for the link.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Medicine, Politics, Sex, Sexual Politics | Comments (2)

Socially Awkward Penguin Knows Your Pain

26Feb11 – 22:29
By admin | Posted in Animals, Antarctica, Life | Comments (0)

The Alternative Vote System: So Simple That An Attempt To Write A Simple Description Of It Leads To A Complicated Debate

25Feb11 – 21:14

Tom Freeman questions one of the criticisms aimed against the Alternative Vote system (AV), which, in a referendum in May, citizens will be voting to adopt or reject in, er, preference to First Past The Post (FPTP) in UK elections. The criticism in question is that AV is too complicated and/or voters don’t/won’t understand how it works.

I am opposed to the adoption of AV. One of the main reasons I am opposed is that most of the people who will use it (including many of those who support its introduction) don’t understand the system; whereas nearly everyone on Earth understands FPTP. Call me “a conservative Right-winger who hates any form of change”, but I think that it is fundamental to the legitimacy of a democratic system that its voters know what their votes mean. Read the comments on Tom’s post to see how successful Tom has been in showing that AV is easy to understand.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Middle-Aged Man Confused By iPod, Politics | Comments (7)

Bush Was Right

12Feb11 – 11:23

This would be a good day to quote and laugh at some of the many racist articles written over the past few years that warned us not to “inflame the Arab Street”, that rhetorical mass of undifferentiated savages that “we” created by interfering in the Noble Civilizations of the region with our Imperialist Adventures, and the articles that warned us not to “impose our Western values” on the people of Middle East.

But it is a better day to quote and nod at the words of George W. Bush:

Perhaps the most helpful change we can make is to change in our own thinking. In the West, there’s been a certain skepticism about the capacity or even the desire of Middle Eastern peoples for self-government. We’re told that Islam is somehow inconsistent with a democratic culture. Yet more than half of the world’s Muslims are today contributing citizens in democratic societies. It is suggested that the poor, in their daily struggles, care little for self-government. Yet the poor, especially, need the power of democracy to defend themselves against corrupt elites.

Peoples of the Middle East share a high civilization, a religion of personal responsibility, and a need for freedom as deep as our own. It is not realism to suppose that one-fifth of humanity is unsuited to liberty; it is pessimism and condescension, and we should have none of it.

We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites. Yet this bargain did not bring stability or make us safe. It merely bought time, while problems festered and ideologies of violence took hold.

As recent history has shown, we cannot turn a blind eye to oppression just because the oppression is not in our own backyard. No longer should we think tyranny is benign because it is temporarily convenient. Tyranny is never benign to its victims, and our great democracies should oppose tyranny wherever it is found.

I originally quoted and linked to this speech back in 2003. Thank you to Squander for reminding me to do so again.

By PooterGeek | Posted in History, Middle East, Politics, Race, Religion, United States | Comments (5)

A Face-Saving Exercise

20Nov10 – 14:46

The BBC reports:

A former soldier who was jailed for refusing to fight in Afghanistan has handed back a medal in protest at Britain’s involvement in the war.

“There’s a real up-swell of awareness now among military families and among the military, and among the people in this country, that this conflict is, has kind of turned into a face-saving exercise and that’s why it’s being dragged out.

“This is a majority opinion, 70% of people in this country want withdrawal, whatever their background, that’s across the board whatever their politics are, because this is an expensive, messy, gory face-saving exercise and that’s quite clear to people.”

He’s right about one thing. It didn’t start that way and that wasn’t the stated intention, but a face-saving exercise is, amongst other things, what military intervention in Afghanistan has turned into.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Afghanistan, Education, Medicine, Politics, Religion, Sex, UK, Warfare | Comments (2)

Cross In Box

03Nov10 – 13:19

Continuing the theme of suffrage, if you were unfortunate (and nerdy) enough to listen to Today In Parliament yesterday evening, you will have been treated to our law-makers displaying the sort of ignorance of the basics of the law and of European institutions that makes you embarrassed to be a British citizen as they debated the right of prisoners to vote. Carl Gardner at Head Of Legal summarizes the state-of-play for those of us without legal training.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Europe, Law, Politics | Comments (0)

The Not Vote

01Nov10 – 13:45

The always-interesting marketing guru Seth Godin wisely alerts citizens of democracies who fail to exercise their franchise because they claim to hate politicians to an important fact they have probably overlooked: many politicians want them not to vote:

Political TV advertising is designed to do only one thing: suppress the turnout of the opponent’s supporters. If the TV ads can turn you off enough not to vote (“they’re all bums”) then their strategy has succeeded.

That’s not true, but it is insightful; though my main disagreement with the rest of his blog post is that, as I have often said to political nihilists visiting PooterGeek, if you really do hate all the options available to you, then spoiling your ballot paper is a valid protest that must be recognized by the state. That is, if you don’t like the choices offered to you, then make sure that the signal you send to your fellow citizens is that you don’t like the choices offered to you; don’t allow them to assume that you are pretty much happy with the way things are. If you can’t be bothered to do that, then keep your whining to yourself; not only am I deaf to your objections, they don’t deserve to be heard.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Advertising, Politics, United States | Comments (2)

Fighting The Good Fight

01Nov10 – 13:15

Spam—email spam, link spam, splogs, social media spam—is evil. I waste too much of my time dealing with it. It was inevitable that this Wired article about a new search engine would intrigue me:

[T]here’s a new search engine in town that’s got a fresh approach to weed out the ever-proliferating junk and spam sites polluting search results.

It’s no mean feat — it’s taken 3 years, some $25 million in venture capital, and a gamble that there’s enough people who care about good search to make its model of curated results work.

And Blekko does works, thanks to a little thing called slash tags.

Basically slash tags tell Blekko to limit your search to a human curated category of websites — a custom search. So say you want to find good resources for learning about arrays in PHP? Type “arrays /php.” Need a good pumpkin pie recipe. Yup, you guessed it – append the /recipes slash tag.

What happens is that an editor or set of editors decide what sites return good results in that particular category, and blekko only searches those sites when you include a slashtag in your query.

Why is such a thing necessary?

Well, according to CEO and co-founder Rick Skrenta, it’s because the web is filling up with spam and low-rent webpages from content farms like Demand Media, saying the web now has 100 billion urls, most created by bots.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Blogs, Searches, The Web | Comments (0)

Bhangra Nights

31Oct10 – 16:28

Right now, I am banging my head like Flat Eric to this. The intro rambles on a bit then it all kicks off in a diversity-tastic way:

Bhangra Nights - Husan 2010 (Tom Pritchard Remix) by Tom Pritchard

By PooterGeek | Posted in Music | Comments (0)

Who’s Mad?

31Oct10 – 16:21

Martin In The Margins makes an important criticism of an otherwise mostly admirable and well-intentioned enterprise:

As for that plea for a focus on ‘tolerance’, it would have helped if the rally organisers hadn’t included a performer who has expressed the most outrageously intolerant opinions. Appearing onstage in the National Mall was Yusuf Islam, the singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, who is on record as supporting the fatwah against Salman Rushdie and wishing the author dead.

There’s also this from Andrew Anthony, over at Nick Cohen’s Standpoint blog:

“[Yusuf Islam] told me in 1997, eight years after saying on TV that Rushdie should be lynched, that he was in favour of stoning women to death for adultery. He also reconfirmed his position on Rushdie. He set up the Islamia school in Brent, which is currently undergoing council-backed expansion. Its mission statement three years ago explicitly stated that its aim was to bring about the submission of the individual, the community and the world at large to Islam. For this aim it now receives state funding. Its an incubator of the most bonkers religious extremism and segregation, and is particularly strong on the public erasure of women. Why do people go to such lengths to ignore these aspects of Yusuf Islam’s character and philosophy?”

By PooterGeek | Posted in Music, Politics, Psychology, Religion, Terrorism, United States | Comments (0)

“It’s not his fault, miss; he’s Anger Management.”

08Oct10 – 22:36

People will focus on what Katharine Birbalsingh said about the failure of this country’s educational establishment to serve poor black boys, but the bigger disaster, in simple numbers, is its failure to serve working-class whites.

Pseudoscience, whether it’s Marxism or eugenics or anti-vaccine hysteria or educationalist psychobabble, is often characterized by rich people making money by limiting (or even ending) the lives of poor ones. It’s depressing that I find myself linking to a speech to a Conservative Party conference to hear someone else remind contemporary politicians of this.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Academia, Class, Education, Pseudoscience, Race | Comments (8)

If You To Want See A Briton Fight, Threaten To Bring Down The Price Of Her House

18Aug10 – 23:22

Rory Sutherland’s wiki man column in The Spectator is one of the few things remaining inside that magazine that might yet tempt me to buy another print copy. In his latest he sticks a finger through one of the biggest holes in the Tories’ buckshot “Big Society” balloon of bullshit:

In one sense, it seems, the Cameronian idea of the ‘Big Society’ is already flourishing in Britain — with groups of people voluntarily grouping together in order to stop things happening or to keep things the same (including that annoying group in my village who petitioned to prevent an admirable fish and chip van visiting once a week). The member organisation for this tendency seems to be the National Trust, a vast, slightly fascist entity with over a million members that imposes a banal, uniform and static idea of good taste on everything it owns.

So here lies the central challenge of the ‘Big Society’. In Britain our spectacular capacity for collective action in opposing things (Nazism, new housing, nightclubs) is matched only by our inability to harness any will or consensus when it comes to doing something new. Worse, our resistance to change is often self-defeating, since the only people not defeated by the bureaucratic hurdles are huge organisations like Tesco — while those traditional smaller cafés and shops that traditionalists claim to love cannot summon the energy to clear them.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Life, Mad As A House, Philosophy, Politics | Comments (5)

Bieber-eautiful

18Aug10 – 22:37

16-year-old Justin Bieber is the pop new sensation with pre-teens. [High Court Judge] I have yet to have the pleasure of hearing one of his musical performances [/High Court Judge], but I have heard this:

J. BIEBZ - U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis

which is one of his recordings slowed down 800% and pitch-shifted back to the normal audio spectrum. More here, including a YouTube video of the original track and mention of accusations that the freshly-minted slo-mo Bieber Internet meme is a hoax and the recording is actually a piece by ambient experimental outfit Photon Wave Orchestra. It isn’t, but perhaps their modus operandi has been rumbled.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Celebrities, Memes, Music, Technology | Comments (0)

The Great Typo Hunt

11Aug10 – 23:42

Incensed by a “no tresspassing” sign, Jeff Deck launched a cross-country trip to right grammatical wrongs.

He enlisted a friend, Benjamin D. Herson, and together they got to work erasing errant quotation marks, rectifying misspellings and cutting unnecessary possessive apostrophes.

The Great Typo Hunt is the story of their crusade.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Language, Literature, Travel, United States | Comments (2)

Support World-Class UK Research Universities

10Aug10 – 16:03

Which of this month’s begging letters from my almae matres more rapidly and effectively earned its place in my bin?

Was it the one from Oxford University that began:

Dear Mr Counsell

Today the defining struggle in the world is between relentless growth and the potential for collaboration.

which, if it means anything at all, is cobblers?

Or was it the one from Imperial College that began:

Dear [DO NOT USE - Temp Salutation],

Insert your content here

?

It’s a question worthy of our finest minds.

UPDATE: Today (11Aug10), I received an email from Imperial that began:

Dear Mr Counsell,

If you spotted our email of Monday 9 August, we’re sure it didn’t escape your attention that it lacked the lucidity that we hope you would normally expect of us. We would like to apologise for the mistake and thank those of you who have responded asking us to “<insert content here>”.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Academia, Education, Language, Middle-Aged Man Confused By iPod, Money | Comments (5)

“…the most inalienable and sacred of all human rights”

02Aug10 – 10:02

I am against bans on the wearing of the burqa or niqab in public1 therefore I am going to recommend that you read the best article I have read in favour of such bans:

The argument that the garment is not a religious obligation under Islam is well-founded but irrelevant; millions of Muslims the world around believe that it is, and the state is not qualified to be in the business of Koranic exegesis. The choice to cover one’s face is for many women a genuine expression of the most private kind of religious sentiment. To prevent them from doing so is discriminatory, persecutory, and incompatible with the Enlightenment traditions of the West. It is, moreover, cruel to demand of a woman that she reveal parts of her body that her sense of modesty compels her to cover; to such a woman, the demand is as tyrannical, humiliating, and arbitrary as the passage of a law dictating that women bare their breasts.

All true. And yet the burqa must be banned.

I quote Jefferson in the title of this post because he was one of the Founding Fathers and the author of the article is American; I don’t agree with him either.

  1. But I have no strong objections to consistent bans on all religious symbols on the premises of state-funded institutions [↩]
By PooterGeek | Posted in Law, Philosophy, Politics, Religion | Comments (9)

What Hamas Gets Up To When No One (Here) Is Looking

02Aug10 – 09:30

Over at Ricochet, Judith Levy illustrates her commentary on the state of the “ceasefire” with a picture of the effects of another rocket attack from Gaza on a rehabilitation centre for special needs kids in Israel two days ago. For “prison camp” guards, the Israelis are surprisingly easygoing.

…the attack on Sderot took place twenty-four hours after an Iranian Grad missile, also fired from Gaza, landed in Ashkelon, a city even deeper inside sovereign Israel. It should be noted that in addition to containing 125,000 Israeli civilians, Ashkelon contains the power plants that provide 70% of Gaza’s electricity. Attacks like this might therefore seem counterproductive, but ratcheting up the misery level at home in Gaza via an attack on Israeli civilians is a win-win for Hamas. Images of Gazans without electricity or other basic needs play extremely well abroad; they feed a carefully constructed narrative that enables those so inclined to justify their distaste for Israelis and Jews. And the response of the IDF to the attack on Israelis – whatever that response may be – enables the shifting of blame for all Gazan misery to Israel while providing a justification to continue attacking Israelis inside Israel.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Middle East, Politics, Terrorism | Comments (0)

Self-Replacing Elites

02Aug10 – 08:23

The BBC’s Paris correspondent Hugh Schofield is broadly happy with his children’s French education, but he does have one complaint:

French schools have absolutely no extra-curricular activities.

There are no debating societies, no orchestras, no film clubs, no sports teams, no painting classes, no school newspapers, and no drama, at least none worthy of the name.

This, it seems to me, has enormous implications for society as a whole.

Youngsters who are not exposed to these activities at school are unlikely to spot their own potential. Perhaps as a result in adult life, the associated professions - politics, theatre, journalism - now seem filled by self-replacing elites, which is both undemocratic and uninteresting.

How lucky we are to live in England.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Class, Drama, Education, Media, Politics | Comments (1)

Assimilation

26Jul10 – 17:23

Further to my most recent extended comment on That Bigoted Woman, I note The Mirror reports that Gillian Duffy, who wondered during the UK General Election where all those Eastern Europeans are flocking from, has come out in support of David Miliband for the position leader of the Labour Party. David Miliband is the offspring of Belgian-born Pole Adolphe Miliband and Polish-born Marion Kozak.

[via Nicky Campbell]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Europe, History, Immigration, Politics | Comments (0)

Moral Philosophers Of Our Time

24Jul10 – 16:07

Charles Alexander:

The former partner of killer gunman Raoul Moat was yesterday blamed for the death of an innocent man and the maiming of a police officer.

The deranged bodybuilder’s uncle Charles Alexander claims Samantha Stobbart also has the blood of her ex-lover on her hands.

The 72-year-old former soldier launched a astonishing tirade of abuse at 22-year-old Ms Stobbart in an open letter, blaming her for causing “untold suffering and anguish”.

He claims it was her lies that turned Moat into a monster - and goaded him into launching his deadly shooting spree.

In his letter - addressed to “the victims, their families and others” - Charles rages at blonde Samantha, who dumped Moat while he was in prison.

He says: “This lady has the blood of two deaths and a maimed PC on her hands, all caused by the lies and goading on the mobile (phone) prior to the incident.”

Russell Razaque:

The flimsy justification for the [second Iraq] war was apparent from day one and, as a result, young Muslims already vulnerable to radicalization found themselves easily swayed by an argument by extremist recruiters that painted it as part of a global crusade the West was waging against all of us – “the Muslim ummah”.

Not a word of Baroness Manningham-Buller’s testimony to the Chilcot enquiry is, therefore, news to me.

…

After 7/7, Tony Blair did not occasion to visit a single victim of the atrocity in hospital, as would have been customary for a political leader at such times of national tragedy. Instead he preferred to stay away. As a psychiatrist, I don’t have to think too hard about why this is. He may obfuscate and divert, deploying the considerable intellect and forensic debating skill, with which he is blessed, endlessly in the cause of his rationalization, but the guilt he is working so hard to suppress will never be far below the surface when the direct consequences of his actions face him in this way.

If the first duty of any government is to protect its citizens then I cannot imagine a greater crime a government could perpetrate on its own people.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Celebrities, Crime, Iraq, Natural Disasters, Philosophy, Terrorism | Comments (0)

Imelda Got A Boom Boom

24Jul10 – 14:57

I’ve no strong objections to the sub-genre, but I’m certainly not a rockabilly fan; this afternoon, though, Imelda May, having been flown in specially with her band by private jet to play, impressed me on Dermot O’Leary’s BBC Radio 2 show1. Check out this video of her performing Johnny Got A Boom Boom on Later… with Jools Holland to see why her record company is throwing money at her—in short: great vox, good songs, fine band, hot looks:

Although her “story” is the sort of cute thing that PRs lap up—“Irish rockabilly singer with residency in Birmingham burlesque club”—it’s a good indicator of her long-term potential that the live version of that song is better than the one recorded in the studio, which you can also find on YouTube.

  1. Readers who follow my Twitter feed will know why I made a special point of bigging up Radio 2. [↩]
By PooterGeek | Posted in Music | Comments (2)

“Darth Vader Robs Bank”

23Jul10 – 20:45

That’s how everyone is reporting this. But it’s clearly Chad Vader in the photos. I can only conclude that all the people with sufficient discrimination to know this are at Comic-Con 2010—where, incidentally, the latest trailer for the Tron Legacy, featuring a digitally thirtysomethingified Jeff Bridges has been shown.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Comics, Crime, Movies | Comments (0)

Tough Characters

23Jul10 – 20:29

In Web time, this is an ancient (1991) essay, so I don’t feel guilty that I can’t remember who drew my attention to it today: “Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard”.

Someone once said that learning Chinese is “a five-year lesson in humility”. I used to think this meant that at the end of five years you will have mastered Chinese and learned humility along the way. However, now having studied Chinese for over six years, I have concluded that actually the phrase means that after five years your Chinese will still be abysmal, but at least you will have thoroughly learned humility.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Asia, Language, Life | Comments (1)

“Does anyone know the way, there’s got to be a way To Block Buster!”

01May10 – 11:59

This Slate piece about Blockbuster, the movie rental chain, is fascinating; well, it’s fascinating to someone like me who thinks formats and markets and channels and digital data and movies are interesting in themselves. Stir them all together and…

In 2005, Greg Meyer wrote a letter to the management of Blockbuster. He wanted to warn the movie rental company of a looming revolution: DVD vending machines that were showing up at supermarkets and fast-food joints all over the country. At the time, Meyer was the CEO of DVDXpress, which operated DVD kiosks in New York and the United Kingdom. He was offering Blockbuster a chance to get in on what looked to be the next great transformation of the home-video rental business.

If Blockbuster installed a DVD machine outside each of its stores, Meyer argued, it could offer movie rentals even when the store was closed. This would likely increase the revenue at each retail location and let the company reduce its operating hours; with the kiosks, Blockbuster could justify closing each store during the three slowest hours of the business day, saving $140 million a year in operating costs. Meyer gave the Blockbuster board his contact information and proposed a meeting to discuss his kiosks. He never heard back.

Five years later, Blockbuster looks foolish for ignoring the kiosk revolution. Redbox now operates machines at 22,000 locations, and it’s poised to expand to 30,000 by the end of the year. In 2009, Redbox’s parent company, Coinstar, doubled its revenue in the DVD business; Redbox now accounts for about 20 percent of the DVD rental market. Meanwhile, Blockbuster looks nearly sunk. In 2005, when Meyer sent his letter to the board, shares of the company—which had already been roughed up by competition from Netflix—stood at $9. Today, two Blockbuster shares wouldn’t buy you a $1 rental at your local Redbox. With $1 billion in debt, Blockbuster is flirting with bankruptcy.

Yet here’s the crazy thing: Greg Meyer is still trying to save Blockbuster. In 2007, Meyer sold his DVD company to Coinstar. After DVDXpress merged with Redbox, Meyer left the company and used part of his windfall to invest in Blockbuster; he now owns about 650,000 shares of the firm. Despite Blockbuster’s current troubles, Meyer believes the video chain can thrive once again.

By PooterGeek | Posted in Money, Movies, The Net, Video | Comments (2)

Lost Appeal

29Apr10 – 23:34

The BBC reports:

A relationship counsellor who refused to offer sex therapy to gay couples has lost his unfair dismissal appeal.

Gary MacFarlane, 47, from Bristol, was sacked by marriage guidance service Relate after he said he could not do anything to promote gay sex.

He alleged Relate had refused to accommodate his Christian beliefs.

The service’s chief executive Claire Tyler said: “The appeal judgement validates Relate’s commitment to equality of access to our services.”

Mr MacFarlane, a former church elder, was appealing on the grounds of religious discrimination at the Employment Appeal Tribunal in Bristol.

The two main quotations below are, to my amazement, from the text of of the relevant judgement by the England and Wales Court of Appeal. The arguments in these extracts seem to me to go beyond those I understand are normally supposed to be included in such documents. I also wonder how much foundation for some of the claims made can be found in English legal history—none is offered at those points the text, and I bet there are plenty of opposing precedents. Still, I agree with the following [apart from the feeble “slippery slope” bit about theocracy], so why should I care?:

[T]he conferment of any legal protection or preference upon a particular substantive moral position on the ground only that it is espoused by the adherents of a particular faith, however long its tradition, however rich its culture, is deeply unprincipled. It imposes compulsory law, not to advance the general good on objective grounds, but to give effect to the force of subjective opinion. This must be so, since in the eye of everyone save the believer religious faith is necessarily subjective, being incommunicable by any kind of proof or evidence. It may of course be true; but the ascertainment of such a truth lies beyond the means by which laws are made in a reasonable society. Therefore it lies only in the heart of the believer, who is alone bound by it. No one else is or can be so bound, unless by his own free choice he accepts its claims.

The promulgation of law for the protection of a position held purely on religious grounds cannot therefore be justified. It is irrational, as preferring the subjective over the objective. But it is also divisive, capricious and arbitrary. We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.

Would you say there’s some creeping Americanization of English law going on there? Like there was in this [PDF 73KB]? I would. Hurrah for the colonies!

[Thanks, Andrew.]

By PooterGeek | Posted in Law, Religion, Sex | Comments (0)