RosieBell

The Spews and the Scum

 

Pisses all over the culture, and then complains of the stench.

Nicked from Impossible Songs.

Shorter Spiked

I've done pieces about Spiked's modus operandi and scribendi in the past, but for those who haven't the patience to read them, here's a handy compendium of the Spiked method.

Take a subject, any subject.

Submit to Brendan O'Neill.

You will be told to write on the subject using the following six options:-

1. [Subject] reveals a contempt for the working classes.
2. [Subject] is thinly disguised misanthropy.
3. [Subject] is merely an exercise in liberal self-congratulation.
4. [Subject] encourages a culture of victimhood.
5. [Subject] shows we’re governed by alarmist scaremongers.
6. [Subject] is an attempt to censor dissent.

After that, you're away.

(Lifted from a comments thread here.)

Unholy trinity

One way to get rhythm in a saying, sentence or paragraph, is to use words or concepts in threes.  Threes are very satisfactory, like "burn, pillage and rape" or "blood, sweat and tears."  Churchill originally said "blood, toil, tears and sweat", but the toil has been dropped by popular memory and the result sounds more satisfying.

So this is how the Observer film reviewer, Philip French, gave his paragraph a pleasant ring:- 

At the age of six, Polanski began a life of persecution, flight and the threat of incarceration – first from the Nazi invaders of Poland, then an oppressive communist regime, and finally the American criminal justice system after his newfound sense of freedom led him into transgression. The world must seem a prison, society a succession of traps, civilised values a deceptive veneer, life itself a battle against fate.

That's threes for you.  You make each word or concept seem of about equal weight. Blood=sweat=tears. So here Nazi invaders=oppressive communist regime=American criminal justice system. There's loads wrong with the American criminal justice system but it's not quite down there with Nazi persecution and communist oppression.

We now have life of persecution=flight=threat of incarceration.  The life of persecution and flight were the plight of the innocent victim, the threat of incarceration was for a criminal act - rape, in fact, with the girl being the victim. and Polanski in this case, with the misuse of his power as a Hollywood prince, being the Nazi persecutor and communist oppressor in his little domestic way.   

However, it seems a "newfound sense of freedom" led him to "transgression."  "Transgression" these days usually refers to edgy art, e.g. a sculpture of the Virgin Mary made out of used tampons and sanitary pads*. It's a wet word for crime.   Next time someone assaults Philip French and nicks his wallet, let's see if he'll call that "transgression". 

Also, if  a "new found sense of freedom" leads to such acts, shouldn't we start tightening up border controls against refugees and asylum seekers, especially the male ones?

If Polanski is making films then people can review them.  What I can't go along with is false equivalences of events that were done to him and actions he carried out, he being seen as a victim in one instance because he was a victim in two others.  Nor can I bear this kind of cod psychologising and this blurring of what wasn't a "transgression" but lust for nymphet flesh along with the piece of power and entitlement that are given to Hollywood's big shots.

* Any installation artist who nicks this idea had better give me some credit

Update:- I posted this as a comment on Philip French's article.  It has been removed.  By the look of the thread, a dozen other comments which took exception to this paragraph were removed as well.

Further update:- There's a discussion over at Crooked Timber among other Guardian Deleterati.

For those who can't remember the Great and Good's inconsistencies and double standards over the Polanski affair, read here.

I Fisk You a Merry Christmas

This is fisking for dummies, but it’s Christmas after all:-

Let's just hope God is merciful, Chris
By George Galloway

WELL, he kens noo. I hope that the deceased, unbelieving English man of letters Christopher Hitchens has discovered that God is not only great but merciful too.

[Now, when Christians say that kind of thing in pious tones, you know they are lying.   May all my enemies go to hell, Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel]

I had taken a self-denying ordinance over his demise at the weekend from osophageal cancer on the grounds that one should not speak ill of the recently dead and there would be nothing good to say about him considering the circumstances.

Two things forced me to shorten my purdah. The first was the way in which almost every one of the eulogies and profiles, in which I had declined to be represented on grounds of taste, nonetheless managed to attack me in the process of praising him.

[Oooh George – I've read loads of these, and y'know, you're not mentioned THAT much.  The American ones don't mention you at all.  But of course if your google alert says "George Galloway" – and I'm sure it does, not out of mere vanity though yours should never be underestimated, but for litigation opportunities - that's how it must seem to you.]

The second was the sight of his friend Tony Blair, his voice catching with emotion in the "death of Diana way", telling us what a great man he was.

This canonisation of the departed by some of the worst hypocrites operating in the English language must be halted before it slithers any further.

[Weel, I'd be very careful of the "h" word if I were you.]

Hitchens was the only-known case of a butterfly changing back into a slug.

He wrote like an angel but placed himself in the service of the devils.

He was a drink-soaked former Trotskyite popinjay, the Englishman in New York who discovered there were large bundles of right-wing dollars available for apostates like him. If they were prepared to betray their friends, their principles and sell the soul he didn't believe he had in the first place.

[And I'm sure your work for Iran's Press TV is done for a small pittance, barely enough to keep you in cigars.  Also the "popinjay" – which one is the dapper little chap and which one the untidy handsome guy out of you two?  And though it's the season for recycling, couldn't you have at least come up with some new insults?]

Easy. As Groucho Marx once put it: "These are my principles. If you don't like them, I have others."

Thus, the man who once praised Saddam Hussein in adoration and opposed the first Gulf War when the Iraqi tyrant was still occupying Kuwait, was transformed into the main literary cheerleader for the second war.

[Ah, well you would know about "adoration" of Saddam Hussein, not to mention his rapist offspring.]

And he was still blowing the weapons of mass destruction trumpet long after its tinny notes were discredited.

The man who once championed the Palestinian cause became a little echo for Benjamin Netanyahu, denouncing the 10 Turkish dead on the ship Mavi Marmara as "Hamas-sympathisers" who got what they asked for.

[Do you mean that they DIDN'T sympathise with Hamas?  I'm shocked.  And – get your little head around this – it's possible to champion the Palestinian cause and not become a pimp for what Hitchens would call "gaunt fascists with an Islamic face".]

Sure his ditties were witty, his parsing precise and, if you like your men drunk, slurred and slobbering, he could be charming no doubt.

[You really know you were outclassed on all fronts – "ditties were witty", "parsing precise" – is that your way of showing you can do that writing thing as well?]

But when you're slobbering in support of the re-election of George W Bush for his catastrophic second term, or backing Bush's handling of the clean-up operation after Hurricane Katrina (where he was the only man in the country other than Bush who thought the Federal Emergency Agency was doing a "heck of a job") and you have written the script for the most disastrous massacre since Vietnam, I'm afraid literary pretence must be put in its proper place. Down the lavatory.

Hitchens and I shared the ring in an epic "Grapple in the Apple" back in 2005 in Manhattan.

Thousands of people queued around the block for ringside seats paying top dollar for the privilege. You can watch it on YouTube or wait for the DVD, with commentary and my updates, which I will produce shortly.

[My dear, plug your work in the visual media as you will, your most popular appearance on YouTube will continue to be pretending to be a cat in a red leotard.]

Ultimately, the real reason for the ­tear-stained eulogies from the British media commentariat for the late Mr Hitchens is that, by and large, the writers and editors are weeping for themselves.

They share his guilt over the Iraq War and deep inside they know it.

But all the salty tears in the world will not out that damned spot. The next reason is class.

Hitchens was a toff, a Lord. And the English-speaking world, it seems, still likes to love a Lord.

[Admiration undeservedly won, nothing to do with talent of course.  And congratulations for about the best example of resentful envy and self-promotion incompetently disguising itself as principled opposition I've seen in a long while.]

Lifemanship

In his series Lifemanship Stephen Potter invented a reviewer called Hope-Tipping who, in order to make a splash, would take a writer to task for not doing something he was famous for,  e.g. accuse D H Lawrence of showing  a neglect of "the consciousness of sexual relationship, the male and female element in life”.   So Hope-Tipping would be severely disappointed with Irving Welsh's lack of interest in Edinburgh's low life and he would castigate Dick Francis for not drawing on his knowledge of horses and horse-racing. 

Gilad Atzmon has evidently picked up this trick of drawing attention to himself:-

Mein Kampf is an interesting read, a very important document, I could hardly find anything about the Jews – only 2 and a half pages out of 400  about the Jews.

It's one way to get noticed.  

Warm Endorsement

As everyone in the blogosphere knows, Gilad Atzmon has written a book, The Wandering Who, published by Zero Books and with a blurb of warm endorsement  from Professor Mearsheimer - "fascinating and provocative .  . Should be widely read by Jews and non-Jews alike.'  This has caused a storm.  Professor Mearsheimer defends himself here, and in his comments thread he is in turn warmly endorsed by every Nazi nutter and Holocaust denier in town. 

I haven't read Atzmon's book, and as I wouldn't buy it or ask the library to get it, I suppose I never shall.  But I did check out Atzmon's warm endorsement of his own book (here) which has  put "the entire Zionist network is in a total panic" (according to him).  Atzmon has also photoshopped pictures of the heads of his critics onto naked bodies.  Somehow I don't think he and the Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago are in the same intellectual milieu. 

Atzmon's account of the controversy:-

". . .the Islamophobic agent-provocateur “Harry’s place” [Atzmon doesn't know what an "agent provocateur is, evidently] – who never miss a chance to muddy the water – joined in, intimidating and harassing  a London academic  just because she tweeted that she likes Atzmon’s book

Just before London Tea Time, America woke up. Within the hour, her Zionist stooges were ready to join the campaign. EX- IDF concentration camp guard Jeffrey Goldberg had a clear plan to chew Professor John J. Mearsheimer circulating the same banal and unsubstantiated accusations.

At that stage, it appeared to be a campaign that was run by hundreds of Zionist enthusiasts – but if one scratches the surface, it was actually an orchestrated move of barely more than five Jewish bloggers, [Richard Seymour? Andy Newman?] who have managed to mobilise another twenty or so book burners or shall we call them ‘wandering  sockpuppets’ that habitually attack in different areas of the net and the press, co-coordinating to harass, bully and intimidate, with the same dull, repetitive, accusations, ‘arguments’ and smears.

By Sunday night the Guardian published an appalling piece by one Andy Newman of Swindon, who, according to one of his “Socialist Unity” editors, attacked Atzmon simply to appease the relentlessly Islamophobic “Harry’s Place” public.

[Now since when did Socialist Unity "appease" Harry's Place?  They have just put up a very rude piece about them  - or is this merely a cunning Zionist smokescreen?]
.  . .

In a final desperate attempt to jeopardize the publication of the book and to silence its author. Richard Seymour AKA ‘Lenin Thumb’,  authored a new anti Atzmon manifesto. 

I read Richard ‘Lenin’ Seymour’s text with interest and found out that for some reason, both ‘avant-garde revolutionary’  Seymour’s text, and Guardian’s ‘socialist’  Andy Newman’s drivel are suspiciously far too similar to the unforgettable ‘Aaronovitch Reading Atzmon’ performance at the Oxford Literature Festival.  [This reading is of the choice bits of antisemitism in Atzmon's work.  Why Seymour, Newman and Aaronovitch should quote the same choice pieces of antisemitism is moronically obvious.]

.......................

One may wonder how come Seymour, an alleged revolutionary radical Marxist, Andy Newman, a mediocre socialist  and Neocon pro war Aaronovitch are caught together naked holding ideological  hands. [Yes, how would a far left anti-Zionist like Seymour pick up with the liberal Aaronovitch?]

How is it that the three try  to prevent myself and others from criticising Jewish political lobbying. For some reason they also don’t want us to look closely into the events that led to the financial turmoil. [Jews' fault of course] How is it possible that a hard core Zionist and ultra radical leftists are not only employing the same ideological argument but also performing the exact same tactics?  Clearly, there is an obvious ideological and political continuum between Aaronovitch, Newman and Seymour. The Wandering Who? scrutinizes this very continuum.

Zionism clearly maintains and sustains  its ‘radical left opposition’ and the logos behind such a tactic is simple- ‘revolutionary’ left is totally irrelevant to both the conflict and its resolution. Hence, Zionists cannot dream of an easier opposition to handle. When the Zionists detect a dangerous rising intellect [Atzmon of course - he tells it like it is] who aims at the truth, they obviously utilize and mobilize the Jewish left together with the few willing Sabbath Goyim executioners to gatekeep the emerging danger. Seymour, Newman and a just few others are always happy to slay the emerging intellect.  [Atzmon again - in case you didn't get the first time who this "intellect" is].

Indeed they were effective for years. From an intellectual perspective our movement is pretty much a desert. Every deep thinker we have ever had [Atzmon for instance]  has been targeted and destroyed by the Jewish Left and their Sabbath Goyim.  But for some reason, they somehow failed with me. My views on Palestine and Israel are now circulated on most dissident journals [bringing them into discredit] and my book The Wandering Who is endorsed by the most important people scholars and activists in our discourse. [please - list of names besides Professor Mearsheimer's?]

So far, all efforts to stop the book have fallen apart. There is no sign of anyone pulling the book out but there are clear signs that the Hasbara orchestrated campaign has backfired. No one surrendered to the Zionist campaign and its stooges. As they said in Tahrir Square, ‘we have lost our fear.’ [ Oh who do you think you are!]   The Wandering Who is now a best seller for more than a week (as far as Amazon ranking can tell). On the Jewish best seller list, it is even more popular than the Babylonian Talmud and the Torah. I guess that this is indeed a great concern for Zionists and  their stooges, but there is nothing they can do about it.

The sheer dreadfulness of this writing passes description. How could a distinguished academic like Professor Mearsheimer read such self-important, bragging crap and pat its author on the back?  OK, this is not Atzmon's book - but if this is how the guy writes - its juvenile abuse, its total idiocy on how left and liberal writers in the UK operate, its paranoia, so that if people criticise him they must be in some kind of "Zionist" conspiracy, its general craziness - now, how could Professor Mearsheimer read anything from a writer like that and endorse it? What was he on?

A Sure Fire Bet

There's no surer way of looking foolish than making predictions, so I don't usually risk it. However, here's one I got right.

I wrote a piece about Spiked on 11 October 2010:-

The masses, working class and sturdy proles are useful bricks which Spiked always keep at hand to hurl at the dismissive liberals.  I haven’t yet come across a piece about the liberal fear of and contempt for the EDL only shows how cut off they are from the English masses, but it must be out there somewhere.

Spiked, 6 April 2011

for many liberal campaigners, this 90-second interview with one ‘thick EDL bastard’ represents the views and the intelligence of the EDL in general. Far from going on a march and speaking to EDL supporters about their views to understand them better, this one short internet clip is seen as enough to confirm all their smug prejudices: EDL members are badly dressed, incoherent, pissed-up yobs whose anger is more bestial than human.

This video does reflect the reactionary nature of the EDL outlook. Seemingly unable to make sense of the undoubted isolation and demonisation of the white working-class community and its traditions, EDL members blame outsiders – mostly Muslims – for making Britain feel more foreign. Yet instead of seeking to tease out what fuels this reactionary outlook amongst some sections of the disenfranchised white working classes, liberal anti-EDL campaigners have had a field day with it. It is nothing less than confirmation of their political and cosmopolitan superiority over the uneducated, provincial lower orders.

I missed putting a bet on that one. 

H/t Mod for the pic.  I find this demonstration of a “reactionary outlook amongst some sections of the disenfranchised white working classes” repellent.  But then I’m a superior, cosmopolitan cow.

More Vatican PR

It’s a really good idea if you’re making a state visit that you say something nice about the country that is your host.  When you go to China, you praise their ancient civilisation and their invention of all sorts of things like paper and porcelain; when you go to France you eulogise their contribution to philosophy, the arts and cuisine; when you go to Britain, you congratulate them on their fight against Nazis.  That goes down a treat, especially when they’re commemorating the Battle of Britain seventy years ago end to end on the BBC.  You do this especially if one of you team has recently called the place “third world”  (a reasonable if ill-judged statement about some of the facilities eg the railways, nasty if applied to the population).

Then, with your hearers duly loved up, you can smuggle in a warning that atheism leads to Nazism.

Even in our own lifetime, we can recall how Britain and her leaders stood against a Nazi tyranny that wished to eradicate God from society and denied our common humanity to many, especially the Jews, who were thought unfit to live. I also recall the regime’s attitude to Christian pastors and religious who spoke the truth in love, opposed the Nazis and paid for that opposition with their lives [as did a lot of godless Commies]. As we reflect on the sobering lessons of the atheist extremism of the twentieth century, let us never forget how the exclusion of God, religion and virtue from public life leads ultimately to a truncated vision of man and of society and thus to a “reductive vision of the person and his destiny”.  [What’s more reductive than regarding this world as only a preparation for the (non-existent) next?  I‘ll give him public virtue, but excluding God and religion leads to Nazism?  Bugger that.]

Now, some people could take exception to this on the grounds that when it comes to the chief characteristics of Nazism, that is, genocide and gross anti-semitism, Roman Catholics have had a good swing at the bat.  Those conquistadors were very devout, weren’t they?  .  As for anti-semitism. . . And others spring to mind.  The Nazis burned books, the Church indexes them.  The Nazis murdered dissenters to their creed, as did the Church ("heresy" they call it). However, I wouldn’t assume that the four million Catholics in the British population were heading towards Nazism. 

For an excellent short piece on Nazism, Christianity and religion in general read this over at Obscene Desserts.  It’s one he prepared earlier for another German bishop. Evidently this atheism-leads-to-Nazism is a meme that German clerics are taught these days.

it is necessary when considering Bishop Mixa's comments linking 'aggressive atheism' to Nazism to differentiate two things: the Party's view toward religion and the views of religious people toward the Party.

While there is plenty of evidence in the former case of a hostility to Christianity among some party leaders, their alternative was hardly atheism but a mix of Nordic mysticism and esoteric paganism.

However, in the latter case, it is equally clear that the Nazis' road to power was paved by the best wishes of a significant number of observantly religious people who--regardless of what Himmler or Goebbels or Rosenberg might have had planned--saw no contradiction between their belief in a Christian God and their support for the regime.

Atheism, of course, is no more a guarantee of morality than is theism. But what the current 'aggressive atheism'--in the words of a press release put out by the diocese of Augsburg--has to do with the history of Nazism is a mystery to me.

It’s amazing the Pope gets away with this.  I don’t know what proportion of the British population is atheist - my guess is that most are lapsed Christians or lazy agnostics - but there are probably more atheists than Methodists (a quarter million) and Hindus (half a million) combined.  If the Pope had said that Methodism or Hiinduism could lead you to Nazism, he would be taken as vilely insulting a minority.  In fact he could be prosecuted under our ridiculous religious hatred laws.

There have been distinguished British atheists.  Dead ones - George Eliot and George Orwell, two of our most considerable literary figures and great moralists.  Living ones - Richard Dawkins (okay, he‘s not much loved) and David Attenborough, a national treasure.  They are /were all of them rational and humane - that is, as far from Nazism as any human being can be.

People do the logic:-

Atheism leads to Nazism,

David Attenborough is an atheist

Therefore David Attenborough is a Nazi.

Think of the lovely old gentleman delighting in any form of life, whether it’s dophlins swimming or bats excreting.  Does he look like a Nazi?  (Mind you, there was a big nature loving streak in the Nazis. . .)

How does it feel?

Among the many things that really piss me off is the “What did you feel about that?” question, the “that” being when you were gang-raped and mutilated,  your house and livelihood was destroyed by a flood or your child buried in rubble by an earthquake, asked by a journalist at some scene of disaster.  THE SAME AS YOU WOULD FEEL IN THE SAME CIRCUMSTANCES EVEN THOUGH YOU‘RE AN INSENSITIVE ARSEHOLE, would be the proper answer, but the victims and sufferers of outrages, catastrophes and bereavements usually answer with dignity and politeness.

I thought putting this stupid question dignified with too courteous an answer was a new phenomenon, but leafing through Doris Lessing’s The Story of a Non-Marrying Man (published 1972, a collection of short stories, some of which were first published in the 1960s) I found this in a Not a Very Nice Story.  The theme of this piece is love and adultery, the stuff of fiction for which Lessing demonstrates irritation and boredom.  But here’s her diatribe:-

Ah emotion, emotion, let us bathe in thee!

For instance, the television, that mirror of us all:

A man has crashed his car, and his wife and three children have burned to death.

“And what did you feel when this happened?” asks the bland, but humanly concerned, young interviewer.  “Tell us, what did you feel?”

Or, two astronauts have just survived thirty-six hours when every second might have meant their deaths.

“What did you feel?  Please tell us, what did you feel?”

Or, a woman’s two children have spent all night exposed on a mountain-top but were rescued alive.

“What did you feel?” cries the interviewer.  “What did you feel while you were waiting?”

An old woman has been rescued from a burning building by a passer-by, but for some minutes had every reason to think that her end had come.

“What did you feel?  You thought your number was up, you said that, didn’t you?  What did you feel when you thought that.”

What do you think I felt, you silly nit, what would you have felt in my place?  What does everybody watching this programme know perfectly well that I felt?  So why ask me when you know already?

Why, madam? - of course it is because feeling is our substitute for tortured slaves and dying gladiators.  We have to feel sad, anxious, worried, joyful, agonized, delighted.  I feel.  You feel.  They felt.  I felt.  We were feeling . . . If we don’t feel, then  how can we believe that anything is happening to us at all?

And since none of us feels as much as we have been trained to believe that we ought to feel in order to prove ourselves profound and sincere people, then luckily here is the television where we can see other people feeling for us.  So tell me, madam, what did you feel while you stood there, believing that you were going to be burned to death?  Meanwhile the viewers will be chanting our creed: We feel, therefore we are.

Hitchens Still Lives

Every Monday I check Slate, and with relief see that Christopher Hitchens has turned out another 1,000 words. After the news of his cancer it's reassuring to see that he's still alive and still writing even though his Slate pieces don't show him at his best.  They are too short, his writing is simplified and he doesn't relax into the literary allusions and the general amplitude and richness that distinguish his style. 

But here he is, on excellent form with a piece of travel writing describing his journey “from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady“.  He’s a good travel writer closely observing the unfamiliar scenery and customs, and sending back vivid descriptions. 

I discovered that my cancer had spread to my lymph nodes, and that one of these deformed beauties—located on my right clavicle, or collarbone—was big enough to be seen and felt. It’s not at all good when your cancer is “palpable” from the outside. Especially when, as at this stage, they didn’t even know where the primary source was. Carcinoma works cunningly from the inside out. Detection and treatment often work more slowly and gropingly, from the outside in. Many needles were sunk into my clavicle area—“Tissue is the issue” being a hot slogan in the local Tumorville tongue—and I was told the biopsy results might take a week.

Working back from the cancer-ridden squamous cells that these first results disclosed, it took rather longer than that to discover the disagreeable truth. The word “metastasized” was the one in the report that first caught my eye, and ear. The alien had colonized a bit of my lung as well as quite a bit of my lymph node. And its original base of operations was located—had been located for quite some time—in my esophagus. My father had died, and very swiftly, too, of cancer of the esophagus. He was 79. I am 61. In whatever kind of a “race” life may be, I have very abruptly become a finalist.

Read the lot.  His senses are as alert as ever and his humour is full on and stoic.  There’s an interview here as well.

Hitchens: There are people who are praying for me to suffer and die.  They have lavish websites relishing my. . .  Then there are people much more numerous and nicer who are praying that either I get better or that I redeem my self, that I make my peace with the almighty, that my soul gets saved even if my wretched carcass does not..  Some pray for both.  ..

Interviewer: Do you tell people not to do it for you?

Hitchens: No, I say if it makes you feel better then you have my blessing.

It's not as bad as hearing that a friend or family member is seriously ill, but I really do want to howl because we are almost certainly going to be losing that individual voice in a short time. It’s painful to see pictures of him made bald by chemotherapy,  If I thought prayer, fasting and abstaining from drink would help him, I'd certainly be willing to make my contribution.  However, I’m sure he wouldn’t want me to do that. . .

Some of his religious enemies are openly rejoicing at his suffering and likely death, seeing it as his deserts, some hypocritical shits are sanctimoniously offering to pray because it makes them look good (see Shuggy‘s take on this), while some pleasant souls with genuine kindness are praying for his health and spiritual welfare.   Hichens receives this with grace, which most atheists would of course.  We would assume that someone was wishing us well, in the same spirit that we thank friends who say they will cross their fingers for us when we go for a job interview and don't snap "Never mind your superstitious nonsense".

However, this is too much for the logorrhoeac freak at HitchBitch who is taking great umbrage at what he thinks is hypocrisy.   Reading that hang out of giggling nihilists brings on as much nausea as chemotherapy ever did, without the curative powers.