Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Links and that

You have to admire Paul Dacre. In the sense that Victor and Battle comics used to print pages and pages about the Luftwaffe and Goering. You know, you have to be interested. I love the idea that Dacre is incensed that "rapacious, greedy, unscrupulous" libel lawyers are "ambulance-chasing rich clients" encouraging them to sue papers.

It's an especially Daily Mail attitude, as you'd expect from Dacre of course. Instead of blaming his own newspaper for printing lies, he blames people for being annoyed by lies told about them. Instead of seeing that printing lies is wrong, he thinks that it's wrong that there's a system by which (some rich) people are able to get a form of redress against those lies. Instead of thinking that it's wrong to lie, he thinks it's wrong that people are able to complain about it. Instead of wondering that people can only sue if they have a case in law, and that perhaps to stop people having a case in law you could use the handy get-out clause of not printing lies about them, Dacre thinks the world would be better if people were just allowed to print lies without having to worry about any consequences whatsoever. And that, my friends, sums up everything about the Great British Press.

Elsewhere on the Street of Shame, the Telegraph and the Guardian are getting grumpy at each other over this week's Budget Tele Twitterfail. Aww bless. I'm sure it seemed a good idea at the time. I mean, who knew that people would do that? It's not as if it's the case that if you point a camera at a group of people in the street, they start waving, gurning and generally behaving like sillybillies, is it? Oh hang on. And, as one of those sillybillies, I can assure you it was ruddy great. Epically childish but epically fun, as such things tend to be.

David Semple at Though Cowards Flinch takes a look at the implications of Kindle and how the likes of Murdoch might try and protect their precious media product by attempting to charge for it - and how that's almost certainly doomed to failure. It would be nice to think there might be some way of salvaging a newspaper industry who decided the best idea would be to give everything away for nothing, then scratched their heads and wondered why no-one bought papers any more, but I don't think it's going to be particularly easy. But we'll see.

One new blog you have to go and have a look at, if you haven't seen it already, is The Last Strawman. Those of us hoary old types who remember thinking in the black-and-white distant past that Jack Straw was something of a radical, a leftist, a - dare I say it? Dare, dare - socialist, have been dismayed to see his transformation into the British Donald Rumsfeld. There's even a bit where you can make your own Strawman in a Blue Peter stylee!

Eric the Fish examines the fallout from the "FOOTBALL BOMB TERROR THEY'RE GOING TO BLOW US ALL UP oh hang on we have no evidence at all" arrests. 12 men have been found guilty of being Pakistanis and will now be kicked out of the country. It makes you proud to be British doesn't it?

I don't know how accurate this is or whether it's an internet scare story, but if it's true it's a bit on the scary side. Supposedly there's a proposal to make organic farming illegal in the United States. Illegal? Illegal. I'm a bit sceptical, anyone know anything more about this?

Good news from the Orwell Prize for Blogging - Iain Dale lost. And someone else won. So that's delightful.

Rhetorically Speaking on how you can't always get your message across, no matter how hard you try. For once, I'm with the Express on this one.

Justin at Chicken Yoghurt reports on how Alastair Campbell chose the Budget to announce some important charidee work (but he doesn't like to talk about it, mate).

BenSix on the Sideshow Bob theory of political corruption. If only Jacqui Smith would walk into a few rakes...

The BNP has finally shown its true colours - the colours in question being "I'm not racist, but...". By classifying anyone not white as "racial foreigners" and refusing to call them British, Nick Griffin has made it pretty clear what he thinks. Good. I'm glad he has. No more rubbish from Daily Mail commenters and snorting Tories in the Telegraph about how politicians must listen to the BNP - no they mustn't. They're racists and they're proud of it. Let's stop pretending they're anything else.

Which is a perfect reason to read Nosemonkey's marvellous St George article, as we celebrate all that's great and English about our Turkish/Roman/Palestinian hero by drinking a cup of Great English Asian tea, eating a chicken tikka massala and watching American TV.

Finally, Parent Student says today is the day we should be nice to Daily Mail readers to make them happy about St George. Why not, I say. After all, it's not their fault they've been scared shitless all morning by what they've read. We should pity them, not hate them.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 

Related posts:

1. Your fun links for the day
2. Links 12/5/09
3. Links 19/5/09
4. Some links 6/3/9
5. Links 21/1/10