To those still attacking Martin Amis.

1. Amis has been a bit of a “daft cock” (to steal a phrase from a fellow PopinJay). This does not necessarily make him a racist.

2. Attacking Amis now is nothing more than a vanity project. “How should the liberal-left approach such issues?” asks one particularly vapid commentator who presumes to know the answer. If you disagree, you may be a racist.

3. Attacking Amis is attacking Amis. It does not undermine strong more considered left wing critiques of Islamism, which are neither racist, indicative of wider racist sentiments in the left, or Western imperialist constructs. When people say they are calling Amis a racist, they hope that the slur of racist will smear others they disagree with a little bit wider than Amis.

Apparently fighting nazis is ‘totalitarian’. Political discourse has degenerated to the extent that race hate is now just another ‘text’–as valid as any other. For the facilitators of this discourse, reality is reduced to a series of abstractions–discrete, unconnected occurrences–where ‘nigger/paki/yid/poofter’ is not followed by a fist, boot, or bottle. In their privileged bubble no-one is ever that nasty and the politics of genocide are reducible to a parlour game. They congratulate themselves on their virtue, secure in their certainty that there is no connection between the words of their transgressive entertainer for the evening and the axe-murder of a teenager in Liverpool. If the pile of corpses swells enough to reach the doorstep of their bubble, the best we may expect is that they ring their hands and wail ‘well we never thought they actually meant it’–again.

One week after achieving the Guinness World record for the world’s most expensive dessert – a $25,000 “Frrozen Haute Chocolate” containing 5 grams of edible 23-karat gold – the New York restaurant Serendipity 3 was shut down by the health department. It turns out that in addition to truffle shavings and other Haute Chocolate ingredients, the restaurant’s kitchen contained “a live mouse, mouse droppings in multiple areas of the restaurant, fruit flies, house flies, and more than 100 live cockroaches,” according to the inspectors.

Barbara Ehrenreich points out that it is a delusion of the rich that they can escape the consequences of a rotting public sphere.

Oh, and you lobbied against higher taxes and regulations on business? Then think twice before you sink your teeth into that chocolate and gold dessert. The vermin are always with you.

Personally, I have a sneaking sympathy for the view she quotes of Brian O’Connor in the Detroit News

He recommends guillotining the Haute Chocolate eaters, “Then we could treat the needy to a helping of my favorite dessert: ladyfingers.”

The aversion to infallibility would have brought Popper up to arms today against market fundamentalism. Neo liberals and libertarians ‘believe’ that a free market and absolute freedom will always lead to a better result for mankind. Reality proved them wrong. In the book The Lesson of This Century Popper claims: “A free market without intervention does not and cannot exist”. Unconditional belief in freedom and a free market often lead to indifference towards people who can’t perform in society due to sickness or old age. It even leads to corrosion of the free market due to monopolies. A strong government is required to guard the free market from monopolies and price agreements. A strong government is required to defend the constitutional state and to guarantee the safety and freedom of its civilians. A strong government is required to help the sick, seniors and disabled, and to give children the educational opportunities to develop their own talents.

Certain aspects of Karl Popper’s ideals and philosophy are abstractly appealing (some, sometimes, with qualifications).

Why the same philosophy and ideas should appeal to ‘libertarians’ is a mystery. Look here and see more.

Headline in Guardian:

Ahmadinejad offers to be an observer at US presidential election