"Can you have negative levels of dignity? Brown’s personal popularity is so low that wearing a donkey jacket to the Cenotaph would actually boost his ratings."
"Normally, to experience this sort of shared mutual shame, you would have to stumble unannounced into a room and unexpectedly catch someone doing something acutely embarrassing, such as masturbating or miming to Kaiser Chiefs in front of a mirror. Following 10 crushed eons of infinite silence, both parties would stare at the ground for a few moments, you'd mutter a dented apology about knocking first next time, inch your way backwards through the door as though quietly observing a religious ceremony, and spend the next half hour standing in the corridor cringing your skin inside out. From then on you'd share your painful-yet-private little circle of grief in silence, the pair of you implicitly understanding that The Incident Must Never Be Referred To Again."
[Michael] Gove claims an expertise in Islamic radicalism despite the fact he does not know any Islamic radicals. He writes of conditions inside communities in Britain he has never met in towns he has never visited. He has never sat in a radical Madrassa in Pakistan or on a hillside in Afghanistan, but tells us what he has been told goes on there. He is a thin-faced recycler of the bigotry of others, a dupe for any apostate looking for new position, an engine to make racism respectable. Gove is a smooth-faced fascist.
"oh, you've put another word in front now, to carry out the legal part... health Nazi, that's alright, you'll probably get away with that one"
There's an ambiguity in the rhetoric used by people who fight bigotry that people like Bill O'Reilly -- people who couldn't care less about fighting bigotry, and indeed do their best to undermine such efforts -- love to exploit. It involves the word "hate."
Email provides no benefits, only 'impotence, disease [and] frustration' according to one embittered ex newspaper editor driven to distraction by the disturbingly fast moving world of anything that uses electricity.
It’s easy to look at the world at some arbitrary point in the past (’Peter’ chooses 1965 as the date when, for him, everything started going badly wrong), pick differences between then and now and see patterns. We could draw graphs linking global temperature and Tesco’s market share, women in parliament and divorce, number of countries in the EU and UK birth rates. Their correlation, however, would not be enough to imply a link, or enough to base policy on. The fact that you’re less likely to be abused if your parents are married is not a good reason to promote marriage if it’s only another way of saying you’re less likely to be abused if you’re well-off. It would be nice to believe, as ‘Peter’ seems to, that marriage is the panacea for all social ills, but it’s almost certainly more complicated than that.
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