i hope you get cancer™

Service announcement

2006-03-27T11:19:00.000+01:00

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The myth of middle England just exploded

2006-03-26T17:32:00.000+01:00

Anyone who doubted that the myths of "Englishness" were anything more than a rhetorical device in the service of racism, greed, bigotry and exclusion will have been able to put their mind comprehensively to rest this weekend. I refer to the release of the Christian peace activist Norman Kember and his two Canadian colleagues, and the small demonstration in support of "freedom of speech" that took place yesterday in London.

The bitterness with which Telegraph readers - if they are a barometer of a certain strand of English opinion - greeted Kember's release was illuminating. Little sign here of the soi-disant characteristics of Britishness or Englishness that often get such people so dewy-eyed. No sense of tolerance, respect, humour, but instead the purest venom. Contempt for Kember's religious faith, scorn for his "selfishness" in "putting lives at risk", and the inevitable nonsense about how much "taxpayers' money" had been spent in rescuing the three. One could almost smell the real ale with which these people would be washing down their small-mindedness.

On, then, to the unhappy little gathering in Trafalgar Square. Notable for the excitement it had generated among the knuckle-dragging classes , what was interesting was the apparent engagement between the organiser, Peter Risdon, and Ismaeel Haneef of the Muslim Action Committee. The howls of protest at such dialogue from Risdon's racist congregation were as predictable, and revealing, as the minute turnout.

Greasy pole

2006-03-24T11:08:00.000Z

Yesterday, I was a slimy mollusc, today merely a lowly insect. But I am now linked from the awesome, all-new Chicken Yoghurt!

Who's going to be in the remake of this?

2006-03-23T10:10:00.000Z

We are all war criminals unless we stop this

2006-03-22T23:53:00.000Z

From Chris Floyd. Read it and weep.

In vino veritas, again

2006-03-22T05:23:00.000Z

The third anniversary of the US-led rape of Iraq has given renewed popularity to the sport of Hitchens-checking. For this we must thank not only the roly-poly entertainer himself, but also our friends at Hitchens Watch, who are daily uncovering vintage nuggets of his pure PNAC-inspired bollocks on Iraq which would be risibly ironic were the subject not such a hideous crime.

Inspired by HW, I have been pottering about during a sleepless night caused by a bad cold, and found this beauty from November 2002. As Tubby admits, "part of the charm of the regime-change argument ...is that it depends on premises and objectives that cannot, at least by the administration, be publicly avowed." Helpfully, Hitch puts his boozy candour at the disposal of those who might, in late '02, be guessing as to what those premises and objectives might be.

"Saddam Hussein is not going to survive. His regime is on the verge of implosion. It has long passed the point of diminishing returns. Like the Ceausescu edifice in Romania, it is a pyramid balanced on its apex (its powerbase a minority of the Sunni minority), and when it falls, all the consequences of a post-Saddam Iraq will be with us anyway."

Oh OK. So, no need to invade then? All that stuff you've hawked round over the past three years about the "threat" posed by Saddam was either irrelevant or a lie. So why are all those people dying, Chris? Do tell.

"To suggest that these consequences—Sunni-Shi'a rivalry, conflict over the boundaries of Kurdistan, possible meddling from Turkey or Iran, vertiginous fluctuations in oil prices and production, social chaos—are attributable only to intervention is to be completely blind to the impending reality. The choices are two and only two—to experience these consequences with an American or international presence or to watch them unfold as if they were none of our business. (I respect those who say that the United States should simply withdraw from the Middle East, but I don't respect them for anything but their honesty.)"

Sorry Chris, not with you. You did mention the O-word, did I get that right? And you also reckon we can prevent Sunni-Shia rivalry, social chaos, etc.? And please - Chris - spare me the knee-jerk patronising reply in those cut-glass vowels of yours, would you? Be a love.

"Once this self-evident point has been appreciated it becomes a matter of making a virtue of necessity. If an intervention helps rescue Iraq from mere anarchy and revenge, some of the potential virtues are measurable in advance. The recuperation of the Iraqi oil industry represents the end of the Saudi monopoly, and we know that there are many Wolfowitzians who yearn for this but cannot prudently say so in public. The mullahs in Iran hate America more than they hate Saddam, while Iranian public opinion—notice how seldom "the Iranian street" is mentioned by peaceniks—takes a much more pro-American view. It's hard to picture the disappearance of the Saddam regime as anything but an encouragement to civil and democratic forces in Tehran, as well as in Bahrain, Qatar, and other gulf states that are experimenting with democracy and women's rights. Turkey will be wary about any increase in Kurdish autonomy (another good cause by the way), but even the Islamists in Turkey are determined to have a closer association with the European Union, and the EU has made it clear that Turkey's own Kurds must be granted more recognition before this can occur. One might hope that no American liberal would want to demand any less."

Well at least he was right about the oil.

The world's gone mad

2006-03-17T15:57:00.000Z

Man walks into The Ivy and orders a shit sandwich.

What was that about freedom of speech?

2006-03-14T17:50:00.000Z

So the famous "tolerance" on which Middle England prides itself has limits. Say what you like about muslims, foreigners, religion, but leave Winston Churchill alone. The statue of the wartime leader wearing a straitjacket, erected by a mental health charity to highlight the stigma surrounding depression, with which he suffered, has been quietly removed following a chorus of complaints from his family, the good people of Norwich and the Daily Express.

In stamping on the charity's freedom of expression, critics of the statue have performed a valuable service. Not only have they given the lie to all that "freedom of speech" bollocks trotted out by racists last month, they have also articulated perfectly the point the charity was trying to make in the first place. Namely that the stigma surrounding mental illness remains as strong in 2006 as ever. We now know that certain people regard a public reminder that a revered figure such as Churchill suffered with depression as an insult; would the outrage have been the same had the issue been cancer?

The President's been simian a little odd all week

2006-03-10T21:02:00.000Z

Thanks to Andrew Bartlett for the latest evidence.

What IS the truth about the Monkey family?

2006-03-09T09:19:00.000Z

From today's Daily Mail: "Their affliction is grotesque, disturbing, and like something out of a Victorian freak show. They crawl on hands and feet like animals, but with the swift agility of circus gymnasts. Their speech is a primitive babble...a Turkish scientist quoted by the programme goes so far as to claim that the family are some kind of genetic throwback, a "missing link" to our pre-human ancestors."

"Uner Tan, of Cukurova University Medical School, believes the family represent a case of what he calls "backwards evolution". He says the children's quadrupedal gait, primitive language and impaired hand skills are all throwbacks to our ape-like ancestors."

"Astonishingly, he declares: "This syndrome can be considered a live model for human evolution.""

I wish I was deaf

2006-03-07T23:31:00.000Z

Then I wouldn't have to hear shit like this. I'm not sure what I hate most: her dull, lifeless, poor-man's-india.arie-lift music; the way this stuff gets marketed to death by a music industry that is terrified it won't exist in 10 years; or the 30-something cunts who buy it, think it's "soul" just because the middle-class, English Literature graduate's dad is black, and listen to it in their cosy flat with their partner, when they meet their cunty friends for Sunday brunch in All Bar One, and at the fucking gym. More cunts.

Oh, by the way, this is the motherfucking 200th post.

I hope Melanie Phillips gets cancer

2006-03-07T22:40:00.000Z

Spot the difference...

Sugababes vs. Arctic Monkeys

2006-02-27T10:21:00.000Z

I can't work out whether this is cool, or just knowingly funny.

Dig deep for the lecturers

2006-02-26T01:07:00.000Z

As a humble academic, I face the unpalatable prospect of taking industrial action as part of a national pay dispute between the higher education teaching unions and our employers, beginning with a one-day strike on 7 March. As the professionals responsible for educating future generations of graduates and postgraduates, we are paid between £24,352 and £37,513; our pay rose, in real terms, by 6.6 per cent between 1994 and 2003, compared with the following real terms increases for comparable groups:

Public sector average: +12%

Personnel, training and industrial relations managers +23%

Managers/senior officials in government (HEO to senior principal/grade 6) +31%

ICT professionals +22%

Medical practitioners +27%

Secondary education teaching professionals +12%

Chartered and certified accountants +12%

[Source: New Earnings Survey (series)]

"The shortfall of teaching funding has badly hit the salaries of academic staff, which have shown practically no increase in real terms over two decades." Tony Blair, speaking to Universities UK, 14 January 2004.

Lecturer pay was cited by university vice-chancellors as one of the key reasons behind their support for top-up fees, and committed to allocate at least a third of the extra income to lecturers' salaries.

More info, and details of how you can support our claim for fair pay, here.

Folk heroes

2006-02-25T20:04:00.000Z

It's hard not to root for the gang who stole £50 million this week. While there's the little matter of the depot manager and his family who were traumatised in the robbery, there is a general, quiet sense of the British almost hoping they get away with it. Arrests after our heroes, eager to start earning interest on the loot, walked into the local bank with a big bag marked SWAG, adhere strictly to the comic-book discourse of bungling crooks. The trauma of the manager, his wife and 8-year-old son, weighed against the lives devastated by the Enron thieves, puts the Kent job firmly in the category of "good luck to 'em".

Which raises the question of why we tend to brand certain figures as either heroes or, literally in this case, villains, with no attempt to shade in more detail in between. Consider too the way that our soldiers fighting in Iraq are similarly divvied up: heroes (usually when they're dead) or villains (despite the protestations of the Defence Secretary). When they're not earning posthumous medals, or beating the shit out of unarmed civilians, British soldiers in combat are, to all intents and purposes, invisible in the public sphere.

While the flag-in-the-front-yard jingoism of the US sits ill with us Brits, it is odd that - whatever one's views on the war - the young men and women who are shipped out to kill for oil remain faceless cyphers to us, rather than real people not much older than my own kids.

BBC panders to fashionable attitudes on race

2006-02-19T21:48:00.000Z

As someone who works at a university, and has had to deal with complaints of racism against members of my department at a previous job, I was interested to hear a programme about diversity awareness courses when I was driving back from a walk with the dog today. Radio Four, just after The World This Weekend? Bound to be a thoughtful, illuminating examination of the subject. I rapidly discovered, on the contrary, that the programme was inspired by the sort of fashionable, racist political-correctness-gone-mad lies one would normally expect to see smeared across the pages of Her Majesty's Press.

The polemic's central theme was that such courses are divisive, and seems to suggest that the UK is about to see an increase of training along the lines of the Blue Eyes/Brown Eyes programme. Good - about time too. I know from personal experience how little sensible advice there is for managers trying to deal with racist incidents at work, while the sound of racist scumbags complaining, in their newspaper columns, pamphlets and blogs, about being "gagged" grows more deafening by the week.

The faithful don't deserve our hatred, just our pity

2006-02-17T23:30:00.000Z

The world's most famous bloggeur, Fuckbuddy, recently spotted his dream headline. I have to admit, this looked like a dream headline of mine: Five crucifies Dominik Diamond. Turns out that ugly, beardy twat Dominik (eugh) Diamond ("best known to television viewers as a frequent pundit on Sky One showbusiness documentaries") likes nothing more than going to the Phillipines, not for this, but to join his fellow xtians in re-enacting the crucifixion of Jesus H Christ. What a cunt.

A great night for music

2006-02-16T12:43:00.000Z

Who could have failed to cheer KT Tunstall to the echo last night as the feisty wee lassie from Bonnie Scotland walked away with the Brit Award for Best Woman? The Caledonian rock chick gave a mesmerising performance of some song or other, and her place in the pantheon of rock greats, alongside Lulu and her out of Texas, is surely guaranteed.

The call's coming from inside your knickers

2006-02-16T00:24:00.000Z

Now I'm as likely to form an obsessive relationship with some mouthwatering ubervixen off the telly as the next bloke, but every so often someone comes along and raises the bar for the rest of us. Be afraid, Nina Hossein, be very afraid...

Britain's descent into madness

2006-02-15T22:31:00.000Z

Smoking yesterday, glorifying terrorism today. Is there no part of the British way of life™ that Tony and the self-appointed Islington elite will leave untouched? While you still can, savour the images above, and gaze wistfully upon these.

I wish I was dead

2006-02-14T21:08:00.000Z

More Californian lunacy spreads like bird flu: as smoking becomes an at-home or outdoor activity in England, I'm thinking of hastening the end of my sentence on this lump of rock by upping my habit to 200 a day.

Look into an airy ring and what does one find?

2006-02-11T21:22:00.000Z

Well, scientists have been doing just that, and discovered what some of us suspected all along - that spacetime is not as foamy as we thought. You know the way that space is, like, totally composed of ever-changing arrangements of bubbles, called spacetime foam? Yes you do - the uncertainty principle blatantly allows virtual particles to spontaneously pop into and out of existence, remember?

Yeah, so anyway, these scientists have observed an airy ring around the quasar-like object PKS1413 + 135, and reckon that the ring limits the amount of light scattering that could be caused by spacetime foam. The quasar is 1.2 gigaparsecs – or about 4 billion light years – away from the Milky Way, allowing the physicists to accumulate the effects of the fluctuations over a distance, necessary for amplifying the tiny effects of the foam.

Y. Jack Ng, member of the team that observed the ring, was like, “The detection of spacetime foam will give us a glimpse of the ultimate structure of spacetime,” and all, “The observational results may also point physicists to the correct theory of quantum gravity.”

Mental!

Why Christopher Hitchens always was a cunt

2006-02-10T00:53:00.000Z

Are you an erstwhile admirer who can't work out what happened to Hitch? Nothing happened, my friend. This guy's worked it out -

"The contradictions and tortured logic of his opinions only seem incoherent when viewed through the lens of political thought. Don't bother. The point is not to be right, or fair, or even consistent. It's all about branding: the book jacket poses surrounded by empty glasses and full ashtrays, the unruly look, the pugnacious attitude. It's about being different, unique, memorable - and "the blending of quite discrepant images." Pay attention, pundits manqué."

Thanks to the succulent Sonic (for Hitchens Watch is he) for serving up the link. Now I can just settle down and enjoy dismissing Hitch as a big fat cunt.

Scott Burgess, cunt

2006-02-09T19:53:00.000Z

He calls his blog The Daily Ablution, suggesting that reading it results in some sort of cleansing or purification. Unfortunately, like washing with any kind of shit, DA has precisely the opposite effect. However that hasn't stopped Burgess from becoming a poster boy for racists since his part in the sacking of junior Guardian staffer Dilpazier Aslam last year, on account of Aslam's membership of Hizb ut-Tahrir(So much for "freedom of speech"). Burgess counts the usual suspects among his fans, thus ensuring his daily emissions reach a large readership. Which makes it all the more surprising that he hasn't been found out yet.

The Bag Lady of Fleet Street cites one of his latest cries for help as "magnificent", so let's take her at her word and give it a close reading.

The topic is the demolition of claims to membership of the muslim "mainstream community" by Faiz Siddiqui, convenor of the Muslim Action Committee, a barrister and principal of Hijaz College, an Islamic university in Warwickshire, during an interview on yesterday's Today programme on BBC Radio 4.

Burgess starts by claiming that Siddiqui presents himself "as the fabled "moderate Muslim"", before gleefully quoting Siddiqui dismissing the very notion nine years ago. Just two problems there, Scotty. First, "moderate muslim" was never uttered by Siddiqui in his interview. He was, in refusing to condone those who had called for beheading etc. at last week's protest, distancing mainstream muslim opinion from such "extreme views". In the 1997 interview, by contrast, he was responding to a question about western political interpretation of the recently-elected President Katemi, as a moderate - again, the interviewer's words, not Siddiqui's.

Two interviews, two entirely different subjects, a word introduced by Siddiqui on neither occasion. If this were an undergraduate essay, Burgess might already be looking at a fail, having used such sophistry to concoct the basis for his argument. At no point does Siddiqui make any claim to moderation, but merely refers to mainstream Islam and distances it from figures like Abu Hamza - exactly the sort of thing that the racists are always demanding. Siddiqui is, on the contrary, presented as a muslim activist in opposition to a Metropolitan Police superintendent, which makes Burgess' "exposé" distinctly, like, yawnsville. No matter, let's move on.

He then quotes Siddiqui - highly selectively - as describing the US as "the Pharoah of today" and the EU as a "devil". However the Pharoah reference follows on from his response to a question about Iran-US relations, which he described as "tension between truth and falsehood. For every Pharaoh there will be a Moses. And for the Pharaoh of today, which is the United States, there will have to be a Moses."

And the devil reference? "a better devil, because Europe has a culture, has a tradition and a history. Therefore, the American officials feel vulnerable and are frightened of any interaction between Iran and European Union.... I think Germany can be the best ally for Iran." Sounds like the devil you know, more a figure of speech, but either way, for an Islamic activist to describe the EU, in reference to Iranian foreign policy, is hardly the sort of swivel-eyed lunacy which Burgess is claiming.

Burgess then concludes by juxtaposing Siddiqui's approval of Ayatollah Khomeini with a particularly fire-and-brimstone quote from the old man himself. Again, doesn't really amount to much, since it's like putting Saint Tony next to a sermon from Ian Paisley.

Tampon Teabag informs me that they prefer not to nominate bloggers for their popular Cunt of the Month awards. Pity, as Burgess oozes cuntishness from every pore, and his lies are evidently getting halfway around the world before they're exposed.

Cartoon protests and freedom of speech

2006-02-08T00:13:00.000Z

After much thought I've decided I'm definitely on the side of Itchy and Scratchy.