They emerged from these thoughts.
Stand down: literature has defeated the Thought Police. Belgium’s supreme court has defeated the mischief-making of the whining PC brigade. Tintin is not banned. Huzzah!
The badness of the bad faith involved in the commentariat’s discussion of this issue, the relentlessness of their categoric elisions, the unpleasantness of their crowing over the victory, should come as no surprise. This was never, at root, about banning. Yes, Bienvenue Mbutu Mondondo was applying to the court to have Tintin in the Congo declared unacceptable under the Belgian race relations law. However, he had made clear for years that he would be satisfied if, as in Britain, the book was published with a visible warning, a reminder of the context in which it was written (maybe even of the toxic ideology enshrined within). What Mondondo wanted was an official recognition that this text was a spitting in his face. That it came down to what was always clearly a nuclear option was due to the steadfast refusal of the publishers to countenance this - and thereby take responsibility for what they publish. The Belgian establishment went to cultural war, & it did so not for free speech, but for their right not to apologise for racist slander.
Let Ahimaaz rejoice with the Silver-Worm who is a living mineral / For there is silver in my mines and I bless God that it is rather there than in my coffers.
Gilad Schalit is showing signs of malnutrition. What have his captors done to him? Such shocking revelations must mean fresh scrutiny of those who have held him.
How could it not? What kind of power, after all, would deliberately starve even the youngest captives, according to chillingly cynical calorifico-political calculation, as a matter of publicly stated policy?
Advertising standards
Butter. Because natives won’t exterminate themselves.
Dunkleosteus is not extinct. It has evolved with wit & with cunning.
Enthusing over the delicious taste of strawberries when the government shits on a spoon & tells you it’s jam
Delicious jam:
Gaddafi himself has on occasion cut a rather comical figure, with his eccentric dress sense and insistence on greeting dignatories in a desert tent…
…the eccentric colonel, where some wonder if he may now make his last stand. There he would hold court in a huge Bedouin tent…
…eccentric tendencies. He dressed flamboyantly, insisted on sleeping in a Bedouin tent…
…the eccentric despot… In the center of the complex, surrounded by lush vegetation, stood Gadhafi’s Bedouin tent…
Gaddafi himself, when he wasn’t the dramatic figure of iconic evil, was a murderous eccentric who pitched his tent in the gardens of the Elysée…
Shit:
A letter from an MI6 official to Mr Koussa stated “No 10 are keen that the Prime Minister meet the Leader in the tent. I don’t know why the English are fascinated by tents. The plain fact is that the journalists would love it.”
Celebrity to Asians - well done you on the not-terrorism
More incisive politics from one of the UK’s most fêted writers.
The good thing that came out of the riots was a renewed sense of community. “How does one put this without sounding gross … it was terrific to see the Asian communities on telly and not to have to think about terrorism, and not to have to think about the thing I’m always thinking about… do they want to kill Jews?“
Kudos indeed by the way for not sounding gross, &, yes, what about our pain? Which of us White Folk has not long been strung out by our obligation to wonder whether brown people want to ostentatiously kill Jews?
(Jacobson does always speak for victims. Recall his wise intervention about the flotilla hellbent & merciless in its intent to deliver letters to Gaza. With Alice Walker yammering on about Palestinian children, what, insisted Jacobson, of the real victims, the heavily armed Israeli soldiers? Bringing mail, or in Jacobsonian idiom, ‘a cargo of intention … freighted with political sympathy and attitude’, would have been 'a provocation’, the flotilla 'half inviting a violence’. They were, to put it another way, asking for it. How refreshingly Jacobson cut through the cant, Walker’s 'language of outraged moral purity’, her delight in 'feeling good about herself’. & snap to you too, Hedy Epstein! You & Hajo Meyer. All Holocaust-survivor this, unarmed-civilian-that, solidarity-against-oppression the other. Such fucking drama queens.)
Anyway, you know Asians? Isn’t it brilliant that we’re not forced to assume they’re terrorist Jew-killers any more? That was some tiring shit right there.
Such images are never about the animal. They are always excuses to depict buildings in the background. A terrible lubriciousness for architecture, zoologically disavowed.
Except where those animals will not stay still. Defy their depicter. Walk right up to that unmentionable and sniff it. The guilt, but oh, the relief.
Of course it would be pigs.
