Those of us who are veterans of this blogging lark miss some bloggers.
Here’s one who makes a brief return (let’s hope it’s not brief). All in a good cause — Hundal slapping.
BTW be careful what mystical properties you ascribe to yourself as bad shit may follow.
I’m a bit too steamed about things at the moment to just post a response in comments here, so I’m opening a poppet valve here instead.
For one, wishing someone Merry Christmas isn’t ignorant. It’s what people who celebrate Christmas do. In the past week or so, a half-dozen people have said “Happy Hanukkah” to me, and these people are not ignorant. And people who don’t know the difference between a burqa and a hijab aren’t ignorant people, either. They’re just people who don’t know the difference between a burqa and a hijab.
Canadians can be just as ignorant as Americans, though. In the few hours since this appeared, I’ve been dismissed as a racist and a Zionist. But ignorance is all over the place. Five mouseclicks will get you from a blank Google search screen to a site that blames Zionists for the Irish bloody famine.
But no, you can’t equate the depth of Americans’ ignorance of the world (and even of the continent they’re on) with the level of ignorance on similar subjects among Canadians. The distance between these two levels of ignorance is enormous.
That much I will say in my Constable Transmontanus, Royal Canadian Thought Police voice.
Heres’ what I have to say in my Johnny Canuck voice.
In my offending post on this site, I even apologized for Celine Dion, for Christ’s sake. Plus I said Canada wasn’t better, just different. Plus in the column I linked to, when I referred to Britain and France and Americaland, I wrote: “These countries are better than us in many ways.” So lighten the fuck up.
I admit that I came to the column with a bit of attitude. I’d just read that “Toothless Canada Borrows Crescent Fangs” essay Abe Greenwald wrote in Jewcy, a webzine I think is otherwise terrific, and it occurred to me I am fed up to the teeth of hearing Yankees sneer, shout and snigger about what we’re trying to do up here. They’re no better than Canadians who think Americans have smaller brains than us.
Still, I have to confess that I’m sick and tired of the kind of Americans who give out of themselves about “Soviet Canuckistan” and I’m sick and tired of Americans who imagine that Canadians are just Americans with no guns and a good health care plan, and if I encounter one more American who comes up here and pats us on the head and says “thanks for helping us in Afghanistan” as if our soldiers are dying in the fucking dust of that country just to help Americans I’ll put his teeth down his throat for him. And I’m also sick to my stomach of Americans who use my country like some kind of white liberal gated community to which they think they are by some magic entitled to resort without so much as a by-your-leave every time their countrymen elect some goofball president they don’t like. Go home.
We’re involved in a massive experiment up here. We’ve got the highest rates of immigration in the world, and ninety percent of our Muslims are foreign-born, and a civil national conversation is difficult for us to maintain at the best of times, being bilingual and all, and it doesn’t help being strung out across the top of the most vibrant cultural dynamo in the history of nation states with a population ten times our own. Nevertheless, so far, it’s working out pretty well.
We screw up all the time. But when it comes to free speech and “race relations” and immigration, we don’t need lectures from Americans, thank you very much. On these these subjects, it just might be best if Americans busied themselves with their own affairs and left us alone and shut their big yappers.
There. I feel better now.
Sorry for the intemperate language. I realize bad words are frowned upon at this blog.
Sorry.
Go Elf yourself.
Via the Gadgemeister himself
Have I told you the one about the Christians, the Jews and the Sunni Muslim?
Everyone’s working themselves into a lather about the case of the Canadian Islamic Congress Versus Mark Steyn and Civilization As We Know It, prompted by an excerpt from Steyn’s America Alone: The End of the World As We Know It that appeared in the 102-year-old Canadian newsmagazine, Maclean’s. So thought I’d weigh in. And a little more here.
Just so everybody knows, the flag is still flying on our government buildings. I checked, this morning.
Also, Canada is not the United States, or France, or Britain. We’re a bit slow, and we have sinned, but when it comes to multiculturalism, we don’t just mean “more pavilions at folkfest.” On this front, we ride shotgun to nobody. The right to bear arms isn’t entrenched in our Constitution. Multiculturalism is, and we like it that way. We like it even better than hockey. True story.
And we don’t have a First Amendment, either. We have something better. (Sorry. I meant to say “We have something different.”)
And thanks Ali, but I don’t think the Canadian Islamic Congress will agree to drop everything if you “help them get published in the Guardian.” Nine out of ten Canadian Muslims say they’re proud of their country. So long as that remains true, I don’t think a bit of “Comment Is Free” space will be sufficient to satisfy the Canadian Islamic Congress.
Some people just need to take a dang pill. Others might profit by swallowing the whole bottle.
This whole thing is going to get nasty, and the last thing we need right now is batshit crazy talk.
Picking up a theme from the preceding two posts … marking 50 years since the publication of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, Russell Brand and Matt Morgan drove from Lowell, Massachusetts to San Francisco with a film crew. Here, Brand and Morgan get to see the efficacy of capitalism at first hand:
Just after Brand gets back into the car, a no-neck-having city official pokes his head in the window and tells him–in a very unfriendly tone–’I run this corner … go back to England’. Brand remarks that no-neck is clearly doing a splendid job of running the corner.
Comment is Free continues to act as the internet dinner party, or perhaps sewer:
I have no opinions about Stochausen [sic] but I have opinions about Oliver Kamm
I caant [sic] help thinking that there is a connectioon [sic] between Kamm’[sic] Jewish heritage and his anti German opinions. I imagine if Stockhausen was Israeli we would be reading a [sic] eulogy
Maybe its [sic] time Kamm changed the record as his extremist agenda and constant calls for wars against Iran etc are grating
Sick.
Make your own mind up.
In Afghanistan there is no realistic mission, no achievable objective, no long-term strategy, only the fruitless pursuit of failure.
Almost universally, the Afghans I know see the presence in their country of foreign military and assistance workers as a necessary means to an end. Some of them even agree that if the foreigners left today, Afghanistan would collapse tomorrow.
A clue:
Anja Havedal has been living and working in Afghanistan since May 2006.
Current hate figure asks himself “coagulated whale spunk shoved through a sieve — will it go with beans on toast burnt in a squirrel trap for four days with hay harvested by pixies from a former Peruvian lavender field?”
DJ Taylor argues that writers walk where politicians fear to tread:
whatever we might think about Martin Amis’s views on Islam or high-profile literary lobbying of international summit meetings, there is one compelling reason why these voices should be heard. Broadly speaking we inhabit a society in which certain political and cultural topics have more or less disappeared from public discussion, such is the anxiety with which politicians contemplate their approach. Amis elsewhere describes his self-consciously fearless statements on religion and “demographic questions” as ventures into otherwise “undiscussable” territory. And at a time when the population of the UK is predicted to increase by as much as 17% by 2031, it is perfectly legitimate to enquire what the consequences might be for our national identity, and yet fear of playing into the hands of the lunatic right means scarcely any politician dares initiate a debate on the subject.
In half a dozen current causes célèbres, whether specific (the attacks on Monica Ali, say, for having the cheek to write a novel about the Asian communities of the East End), or general (the future of public service broadcasting, the continuing trivialisation of our cultural life) one looks for a political response and finds nothing more than a hole in the air. Only the other month I chanced upon the spectacle of the housing minister Yvette Cooper outlining the government’s long-term plans for housing development, a series of pronouncements which could have been summarised by the slogan “We are going to do this whether you like it or not” and a kind of masterclass in illiberal and anti-democratic smugness.
In cases like these the writer becomes a politician by default, colonising territory from which politicians have effectively retreated. Curiously enough, in a world where only certain things can be said (usually for fear of offending people who would prefer hardly anything to be said at all) the man or woman at the desk seems a much doughtier defender of tolerance, freedom of expression and social justice than the pin-striped reality-softeners of the Westminster chamber.
And now for some pics and a YouTube.
But first a glib one-liner…
Ein Volk, ein Reich, viele Melodeon.
Old Glory Molly melodeon players at Framlingham, 2005.
Old Glory Molly at The Locks Inn, Geldeston, Winter Solstice 2006.
Old Glory Molly at Whittlesea Straw Bear, January 2007
Jay Rayner – be very, very afraid!
Blackheath Morris’ bagman Richard Sanderson, aka Baggage Reclaim, points today to a restaurant review (“Meal for two, including wine and service, £80”) by Jay Rayner in last Sunday’s Observer.
Here are a few choice extracts:
“The last time I reviewed in the Cotswolds, my bitchy comments about Stow-on-the-Wold lead [sic] to a condemnatory statement about me being read out at a meeting of the Stow Business Association. I regard this as a public service on my part.”
Sure, it does look like the kind of place which could happily accommodate a troop of Morris dancers, and that can never be positive. It’s an ancient Jewish paranoia of mine. For some reason, whenever I see Morris dancers I assume a pogrom can’t be far behind.”
Ho ho, illiterate lifestyle journalist, son of agony aunt Clare Rayner, he very funny.
For those of you with no time for such fripperies as the Observer lifestyle section:
“Jay Rayner is an award-winning journalist, writer and broadcaster. He joined the Observer newspaper straight out of Leeds University in 1988 as a columnist, after a year editing the student newspaper. He has since gone on to write for almost all the broadsheet nationals as well as a wide variety of magazines from GQ and Esquire, through Cosmopolitan (for whom he was a contributing editor) to the New Statesman and Granta;… He is a very mediocre jazz pianist.”
This is from Rayner’s PFD biography.
So Jay Rayner has never had a proper job, and writes about so many subjects that that he can safely be said to know next to nothing about any of them. GQ, Esquire and Cosmopolitan? Oh dear, another fucking lifestyle journalist with no real life of his own. He needs to get out more, but should probably avoid Stow.
Rayner is a bore who should be ignored and left to his iced Bailey’s parfait (“the Essex girl of desserts”). Anyone offended by such tosh as Rayner writes about England outside the M25 is of the mistaken belief that the Weltanschauung of the Guardian and Observer has an influence that extends beyond the coffee houses of Hampstead and Islington. This may be another stereotype, but it is fully justified in this case.
Social observation is not something that comes naturally to Guardian and Observer columnists, save for a few exceptions.
I’m currently in email discussion with Chris Wood about what he perceives to be an establishment suppression of working peoples’ culture. In the lastest exchange Chris refers to the hoary old chestnut beloved of the metropolitan chattering classes that is “You should try everything once apart from incest and Morris dancing.”
This is little different from “The Welsh shag sheep”, “Northerners bugger whippets”, and suchlike. And now we have “Morris dancers are Nazis.” But I wouldn’t call it cultural suppression, as that implies an active, conscious effort. The spineless tossers who come out with such witicisms have trouble depressing the plunger on their cafetieres, and have their Polish au pairs do it instead. “Magda, darling, do be a dear and procure some organic ciabatta from the bakery.”
One can only speculate about what the esteemed members of the Stow Business Association had to say about their bitchy visitor from London. And it’s a very rich dialect they have there in the Gloucestershire hills.
Here’s my culinary recommendation for Stow-on-the-Wold:
Greedy’s Fish & Chips
11 Park Street
GL54 1AQ
This is brought to you as a public service announcement.
The pictures above were taken by me in Greenwich, London, during the Blackheath Morris End of Season Tour in October of this year. Click here for more.
Abolish the CIA — Destroying the interrogation tapes amounts to mutiny and treason.
By Christopher Hitchens
Norm has dealt with one aspect of Gary Younge’s muddled piece in the Guardian, in which he develops a familiar theme of Western hypocrisy around criticism of the refusal of an Iranian-German footballer to play for the German under-21 team in Israel. Norm points out that the German experience is precisely why the present generation might just have pertinent comments to make about anti-Semitism.
Younge segues from his original arguments that there is “a far less murderous recent history of antisemitism in his Iranian heritage” and that (conveniently overlooking the past sixty-two years) “if any nation exemplifies the limits of integration without a vigorous culture of anti-racism it is Germany - the European nation where Jews were most assimilated and almost found themselves wiped out“, to yet another tiresome discussion of Islamophobia. He writes,
It has become a Europe-wide habit to refer to Muslims in particular and migrants in general as though they are barbarians who must either be civilised or banished, before they pollute the egalitarian societies in which they were either born or now live. Lacking all sense of humility, self-awareness and historical literacy, Europe’s political class acts as though these communities not only manifest homophobia, sexism, antisemitism, political violence and social unrest, but also as though they invented them and introduced them to an otherwise utopian continent.
Please Gary, if you want to criticise, get it right. Not only is this the creation of a straw man through vague generalisations, it does scant justice to the anti-totalitarian left, which does not conflate Islam the religion with Islamism the political ideology. Instead it makes the specific point that Islamism has imported into its world view precisely those aspects of European irrationalist thought - nihilism, death cults, anti-Semitsm, etc. - that caused carnage in the 20th Century. Our European experience shows that these ideas are not only repugnant but also unbelievably dangerous and that they have to be confronted.
This misrepresentation is compounded by a strange false analogy with the sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church.
Even as these scandals have run parallel with the war on terror, no one is claiming that Catholicism represents a threat to our civilisation.
Eh? Well there is a reason for that. It isn’t. The clergy in the Catholic Church are actually supposed to be celibate. Therefore there was no way in which anyone could claim “the abuse was essentially religious” as it took place against the express commands of the religion. Despite the appointment of sex offenders to the priesthood, there also doesn’t appear to be any Catholic militias decapitating Protestants, wishing to bring back the Inquisition, stoning to death adulterers, hanging gay men, or suicide bombing Anglican jumble sales and coffee mornings. Perverts ruining the lives of choir boys to satisfy their repressed sexuality isn’t quite the same thing. The reason why Jihadi movements can be seen as a threat to our civilisation is that they have declared themselves to be just that and have set about a campaign of random murder in an attempt to bring it down.
To pretend that the dead of New York, London, Madrid, Bali and the far more numerous Muslim victims in Muslim countries are not witness to the existence of a murderous political movement is to abandon all sense. To claim that Europeans are unable to act in solidarity with the victims of those movements is equally ridiculous.
I am an atheist and do not like religion of any type, but I can certainly spot the difference between Islam and Islamism, in the same way that I can distinguish between European Enlightenment values and European Fascism. I would hope that Gary Younge could be similarly discriminating.
Even Seamus Milne couldn’t bring this level of disgrace to the Graun.
Disgraced media mogul gets 6.5–8 year sentence. How the mighty they do fall!
I gather that Black is keen to dump his British citizenship and become Canadian, so that he can serve his sentence in a minimum security prison in his native country. How would his compatriots feel about this, I wonder?
… and yet we pay. Overnight in the DSTPFW mailbox, we received an unsolicited email with 10MB of attachments–which is antisocial by any measure–specifically four eBooks, with the promise of ‘another round soon’. It is the electronic equivalent of the no marks who throw garbage bags full of bottles and food waste into the middle of a busy road. That’s 10MB of bandwith that would be better used for reading poetry or watching youtubes of talking cats.
As well as America’s “War On Terrorism”–Michel Chossudovsky and The War On Freedom: How and Why America was Attacked, September 11th, 2001–Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed, we have:
Crossing The Rubicon: The Decline Of The American Empire At The End Of The Age Of Oil–Michael C Ruppert
Eh? When Julius Caesar crossed the Rubicon in 49BCE, Rome was, at least in name, still a republic. Far from declining, following Caesar’s assassination in 44BCE, the Empire grew ever larger and more powerful under the Julio-Claudian and Flavian dynasties, and the Pax Romana lasted for three hundred years. Seriously, if you are looking for a slick metaphor, that one’s not very useful.
The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11–David Ray Griffin
Not sure whether the Pearl Harbor comparison is based on the conspiracy theory that Roosevelt kept the Pacific Fleet in port in order to give his government a casus belli, or whether the author thinks the USA should have ridden out the attack and continued an isolationist policy in the face of Japanese fascism–and I have no intention of finding out.
Yasmin Alibhai-Brown should read the “supportive” letter from Dina Turner in today’s Independent, praising her recent “wrath of Moses” article about Labour Friends of Israel [See Norman Geras].
Thank you to Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. She is a brave woman. It is disturbing to think that our politicians are working for the benefit of a foreign country, and explains a lot about our Middle East policy.
Dina Turner is not alone in her views. It is a view that I find so common in left wing circles that I have reached the stage were a mild urge to avoid discussing Middle Eastern politics, with those I find otherwise intelligent and interesting, has arisen to avoid the sense of disappointment and distaste it invariably leaves.
I know it’s customary to be charitable toward the recently deceased, but my reaction to the passing of Karlheinz Stockhausen is that another pompous, humourless arse has bitten the dust. I won’t miss him one little bit.
Richard Sanderson has posted on his blog an interesting obituary of Stockhausen, in which he refers to the English composer Cornelius Cardew’s book “Stockhausen Serves Imperialism”. Cardew was a pupil of Stockhausen, and produced a volume of similarly unlistenable noise. Stockhausen was certainly bourgeois, but given that Cardew served totalitarianism, the critique of his mentor carries little weight.
I’ve had the misfortune to hear quite a bit of Stockhausen’s oeuvre over the years. Take Stimmung, for example. This overlong and extremely tedious piece for voices was experimental music for the cultural hell that was 1970s middle-class suburbia. It was the kind of music played by pseudo-intellectuals in box houses with wall-to-wall nylon carpets and all the latest kitchen gadgetry.
An absolutely fucking awful racket.
Miaow!
Ali Eteraz is close. Andrew Coyne is closer.
Sohail Raza is closer yet, and Alan Borovoy is right on the mark, but it’s still all too much like a sitcom.
Following on from the recipe advice here — Hakmao has taken a look at a Heston Blumenthal inspired menu. There isn’t any Beluga whale’s spunk foamed up and encrusted upon a sliver of bull’s intestine but there is some Langoustine, onion and vermouth stock cubes, wrapped in edible gold leaf and dissolved in frankincense water, served with a spoon carved from myrhh. Yummy. Most christmassie indeed.
Real culinary delicacies from Gordy (proper man food — fish pie included, doeth follows).
“Let me assure you that no authorities of my church, or of any other church for that matter, will ever exert influence on presidential decisions. Their authority is theirs, within the province of church affairs, and it ends where the affairs of the nation begin.”
Had Mitt Romney simply left it at that, he’d have passed the biggest sniff-test on his religion by giving the public a sworn commitment to which it could hold him. This is what JFK did, greasing the wheels for his own galloping folly of an administration.
Yet I can’t see how Romney’s speech, taken as a whole, doesn’t come off as anything other than a verbal and philosophical disaster. Take this fatuous remark:
“We separate church and state affairs in this country, and for good reason. No religion should dictate to the state nor should the state interfere with the free practice of religion. But in recent years, the notion of the separation of church and state has been taken by some well beyond its original meaning. They seek to remove from the public domain any acknowledgment of God. Religion is seen as merely a private affair with no place in public life. It is as if they are intent on establishing a new religion in America - the religion of secularism. They are wrong.
There is no such thing as the “religion of secularism.” It ranks not as even a cute form of semantic jujitsu. An atheist who goes to the Supreme Court asking that his son be excused from delivering a pledge of allegiance with the words “Under God” in it is an atheist who chooses not to be anesthetized by warm consensus and to hold the First Amendment to its own clear language. There is nothing “religious” in this. Laws exist either to be broken or upheld. Although it is refreshing to see the faithful using the term pejoratively, sneeringly for a change — if only they followed this line of thought to its logical conclusion.
“The founders proscribed the establishment of a state religion, but they did not countenance the elimination of religion from the public square. We are a nation ‘Under God’ and in God, we do indeed trust.
“Under God” was a phrase used by Lincoln in the Gettysburg Address. It was then added, at the bullying insistence of the Catholic Knights of Columbus, to the pledge of allegiance in 1954 as way of underscoring our providential mission in the cold war. In neither case is this meaningless preposition a gift from the founders.
But what should really set one’s teeth on edge is this bit from Romney’s speech:
And you can be certain of this: Any believer in religious freedom, any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me.
A fine follow-up sentence would be: “So do those Americans without belief.” Alas, too bad for Mitt. I wasn’t voting for him anyway, but now I count him a political enemy.
Update: Hitchens on same here (hat at jaunty angle tip - Mustafa in comments).
