Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Friday links, October 3: The trashout

You can't not start with Joe Kinnear, and his spectacularly grumpy outburst at football writers:

JK Which one is Simon Bird [Daily Mirror's north-east football writer]?
SB Me.
JK You're a cunt.
SB Thank you.
JK Which one is Hickman [Niall, football writer for the Express]? You are out of order. Absolutely fucking out of order. If you do it again, I am telling you you can fuck off and go to another ground. I will not come and stand for that fucking crap. No fucking way, lies. Fuck, you're saying I turned up and they [Newcastle's players] fucked off.
SB No Joe, have you read it, it doesn't actually say that. Have you read it?

BBC's Have Your Say commenters stick a rather large hobnail boot into Sarah Palin after a pisspoor performance in the VP debate. Meanwhile, every single newspaper ever will be amazed, enthralled and startled by the fact that she didn't manage to fuck things up entirely:

She doesn't know what Hezbollah or Hamas are. She said that Taliban is 'working for us' and didn't correct herself. She was hanging on a string in most of the topics-- so she whipped out one of about 15 canned statements. The analysis of this debate is baffling to me! The critics say she 'won because she didn't lose.' Are those our standards?! They're not mine. She's out of touch and doesn't know the issues beyond cliff notes and memorization. I wouldn't trust her to do my dishes. Watch again!
Emily Alp, brooklyn, United States

Earlier this week, ANP reported on the questions that no-one is asking Sarah Palin, about fundamentalist pentecostal beliefs, 'end time' and Armageddon.

Ben Goldacre is amused by the reaction of homoeopaths to his latest book:

This is part of an enduring pattern with homeopaths: while eschewing criticism, they are keen to engage in rather unseemly campaigns of bullying and harrassment against critics, such as Professor Edzard Ernst (they exerted pressure to have him sacked, for the crime of performing systematic reviews of the literature); they refuse to say what is in the lectures or exam questions of their university BSc courses (in case someone commits the moral crime of criticising their ideas); and, in the very specific case of the SoH, they offer to sue people who dare to criticise their ideas and activities, and threaten their webhosts with legal action (do please give it a go, we would find it enormously enjoyable). Academia and medicine are founded on critical self-appraisal: this is how ideas got better with time.

Have a look at how the credit crunch has destroyed 'Foreclosure Alley' and led to homeowners leaving their possessions behind over at Qlipoth.

"We find pink slips to automobiles, we find birth certificates, those kind of things we keep and we attempt to mail...we find dozens of things but one of the things we found recently was an urn... somebody's remains, they had been cremated... we called the bank and said 'What do we do with that?' and they said 'Do not trash that'..."

Lenin comments:

This is the destruction of the American 'middle class'. Their lives, their homes, their belongings, all consumed in the relentless fury of creative destruction. People flee in a hurry, as if a tornado was rushing toward them, leaving behind computers, televisions, birth certificates, photographs, memories, all of it now material for the furnace of waste capital. This is a normal component of the capitalist 'business cycle'. And if a function of the news media is to bracket public memory in such a way that each crisis is experienced as if it were brand new, the result of an exogenous assault on an otherwise venerable profit system, a function of culture appears to be to naturalise the experience of crisis when it does come.

Medialens looks at what happens when a journalist steps out of line and lets the team down by criticising the rich:

If you've ever wondered why the press finds it so hard to find 'space' for the multitude of excellent, radical analyses, this incident gives an idea of the true reasons. The unwritten corporate media rule is that you can say what you like about the powerless - they can be treated with contempt, smeared and slandered without limit. But when the powerless attempt to challenge the powerful, a different rule applies.

Oh, and following on from last week's Krypton Factor revelation, the good news is that Going for Gold is back! Sadly without Henry Kelly twittering on at bewildered Euronumpties and asking "What am I?" to a chorus of "cunt!" from lecture-dodging students across the land, but you can't have everything. Would that you could, but you can't.

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