Enemies of Reason Poundshop potshots at the media moral maze.

Links 13/5/09

Yesterday's "The BNP are twats" jamboree was a delight. But it's worth remembering that the BNP are twats who don't think they're twats.

Adam Bienkov describes how Richard Barnbrook talked shit, and refused to apologise, then went on to say that there was nothing wrong with talking shit, despite being an elected representative, and that somehow talking shit didn't matter in the big scheme of things. And now Barnbrook's been suspended. And his credibility is fucked, along with that of his shabby bunch of racist bastards party. Good.

Angry Mob, meanwhile, has the Daily Mail dictionary. Which is a wonderful thing to behold.

Rhetorically Speaking: Nadine Dorries says that pro-abortion groups are like Al-Qaeda. And yet somehow she is still regarded by idiots on the right as being intelligent or somehow worthy of respect, and will get given slots on stuff like Question Time ahead of people who are genuinely worth listening to.

Chicken Yoghurt: Kelvin Hopkins for Prime Minister. He sounds all right, doesn't he?

Ben Six makes Stephen Fry look like a twit - by channeling Stephen Fry.

Penny Red: "I'm not down with the kitten microwavers, but at the end of the day, I prefer people".

George Monbiot: Climate change evacuation has begun.

House of Twits: Everyone in the world can neatly be divided into Labour, Tory and Lib Dems. The fuckwits.

Pickled Politics: Extremist comes to London, no-one minds.

More stuff later.

Links 12/5/09

There's other things in the pipeline. But for the meantime, links.

Will Sturgeon on journalists' salaries and why MPs still don't get it:

Under heavy fire, [Lord] Foulkes turned the questioning on the BBC journalist, Carrie Gracie, demanding to know how much she earns.
The answer - £92,000 – will be a shock to all, not least the people who have been laid off by the BBC in recent months as the Beeb cited a need to cut costs. But as shocking and unjustifiable as it may be, that’s not the issue here.
Even by asking the question Foulkes demonstrates how detached Westminster has become from a fundamental understanding of why the public are so annoyed - that money paid in taxes is being spent on luxuries and liberties ranging from pornographic movies to landscaped gardens.

Adam Bienkov on the new Standard:

Thankfully much of the spite has been taken out, but there's still not enough left to put in its place.
Where's the voices from outside the Kensington triangle? Where's the London that the rest of us live in?
And more fundamentally, where's the news?

Jamie Sport on the latest 'Muslim moneygrabber story':

It remains unclear why Littlejohn is unable to write words containing more than four syllables without spelling them phonetically.

Ben Six on a kid being gunned down:

I mean, how does one define “involved“? It takes one person to throw a grenade, yes? Sure, there might have been other conspirators, but one would assume that the soldiers didn’t poke around to see if they were lurking, yes? If they’d done so, they’d have realised that they were shooting at a child, yes?

Septicisle on expenses:

The one thing that is abundantly clear is that the politicians themselves can now no longer have any control over their own expenses or their salaries. That not a single one of the 47 MPs named so far by the Torygraph was willing to go on Newsnight to defend themselves was just not a display of cowardice, it was also that they know they simply can't blame a system and not apportion blame on themselves as well.

Lenin on propaganda:

Mullah Omar, the peek-a-boo playing head of the Taliban, has been claiming expenses for a subscription to an online pornography website off of the internet, 'T-Girls Aloud', NATO chiefs said yesterday.

Eric the Fish on the BNP's outlandish claims:

[Nick Griffin said:] " Pensioners in sheltered housing...and tenants of housing associations are told by council politicians, Labour supporting politicians that if they dare to vote BNP they will lose their homes. This disgraceful threat is used against literally hundreds of thousands of ordinary decent people every single election...."
So, any evidence BNP chaps?

Guess. Go on, guess.

Justin on UKIP:

It was the UKIP one that caught my eye, however. I thought I knew a fair bit about British history but I never knew that the late Winston Churchill was a member of UKIP (est. 1993).
This must be a different Winston Churchill than the one who called for a ‘United States of Europe‘ in 1946 and suggested the creation of a European Army under a unified command in 1950. Otherwise UKIP would be guilty of misleading and pointless jingoism and I’m sure that can’t be the case.

Heh. Got my UKIP leaflet through yesterday - and straight into recycling it went. The BNP have got the union jack, UKIP have Churchill... what next? Veritas hijacking Bobby Moore?

Links for Sunday

Mm, isn't it? I'm busy with other things at the moment. I say 'busy' but I'm doing this, aren't I? Anyway, I have time to put some links down of stuff I've enjoyed over the past couple of days, and which hopefully you might enjoy as well.

First up is David Mitchell with clearly one of the most brilliantly argued things ever, on speeding fines and how drivers think they shouldn't be told off for breaking the law. I've tried to write about this subject myself a couple of times but nothing has quite done justice to the simmering irritation I get when people who break the law decide that (a) they're such brilliant drivers they'd never hurt anyone; (b) it's just a 'stealth tax' on otherwise law-abiding motorists; (c) no-one ever actually died from speeding, it's all just a conspiracy against us to raise money and (d) Waaah! Waaah! Waaah! I got caught out! Waaah! Waaah! Not fair! Not fair! Waaah! Waaah! Luckily Mitchell has delivered the goods rather marvellously, and while he hasn't got a car and doesn't drive, I have and I do, and I've even been caught by a speed camera myself once, and guess what? It was my own fucking stupid fault and I was dumb to do it. And if I get caught later today, I'll be pissed off, but it will be my own fault. And I shouldn't speed if I don't want to get a ticket.

Mitchell:

It's seldom an accident, that's for sure – even if it may cause one. Almost everyone knows when they're speeding and almost everyone speeds. Maybe this massed recalcitrance means we should change the law, allow people to drive as fast as they like and accept a few thousand more road deaths?

Any speeders who aren't OK with that need to shut up and pay their fines, even if they were speeding in a way they thought safe – and I accept that driving illegally fast is not always unsafe. Laws, particularly those enforced by cameras, need clearly drawn lines. You can't replace speed limits with nebulous rules against dangerousness as they'd have to be enforced by real police officers, who are, in fact, busy trying to catch real criminals.

Johann Hari ponders why we as a society think it's for the best if we indoctrinate all children to some Big Sky Man:

Why does this anachronism persist in this blessedly irreligious country? For all their whining that they are "persecuted", the religious minority in Britain are in fact accorded remarkable privileges. They are given a bench-full of unelected positions in the legislature, protection from criticism in the law, and vast amounts of public money to indoctrinate children into their belief systems in every school in the land.

Speaking of persecuted minorities, pity poor Richard Littlejohn. No, seriously. Tricky Dicky has taken time out from sunning himself by the pool in Florida to get angry over the Guardian for saying he makes up shit about health and safety - even though he quite patently does make up shit about health and safety. Come off it, Littlebrain: that's kind of what you do. Anyway, quite brilliantly, in attempting to defend himself with 'facts' he peddles even more bullshit, as documented rather enjoyably by No Sleep Til Brooklands:

There are times when I'm actually embarrassed for Littlejohn. Here he is, trying to prove his worth as a purveyor of hard-nosed journalistic facts, and yet he crams so much fail into a brief sentence segment you wonder if he's doing it deliberately to generate more criticism he can self-righteously moan about. Sorry to labour the point, but in that brief section of one sentence, which is supposed to prove how good he is with facts he manages to get the following things wrong:
1) it hasn't 'been closed to the public', it was never open to them,
2) it will at some point be open to them, and
3) it has nothing to do with health and safety legislation.

Oh, Richard, Richard, you poor, poor man. You can't just say "Aha! Here's real journalism and facts!" and then just copy some bollocks out of the Daily Mail without bothering to check whether it's accurate or not. I almost feel sorry for him too. It's almost as if he genuinely believes that the Mail is telling the truth about things. That I do find tragic. For the price of a direct-dial call from Florida he could have checked out the details of the stories, but no: he thought just repeating the rubbish from the Mail was good enough. It wasn't. He now looks five times as stupid as he already did.

The Mail covers things in an interesting way, and it's always worth thinking about their choice of words. Jamie over at the Quail has a look at how they could have described a paedophile, and how they chose to. Why do you think they might have done that, then? Hmm.

Jack of Kent ponders what should happen next, now that Simon Singh has effectively been defeated in the courts by the British Chiropractic What A Load of Old Steaming Bollocks Association (at least I think that's their title; I'm not entirely sure. Oh well, it's not as if they're particularly litigious, is it.) Ben Goldacre is also itching to say something, but hasn't been allowed to yet. I do hope someone gives him the opportunity to say it in print.

Angry Mob looks at the Pavlovian response of readers to a well-known family newspaper to a crock of shit story about how women are rubbish and not as good as men.

Paulie says Gordon Brown deserves everything he gets. And I'm inclined to agree.

Ben Six lists six prime ministers who would be better than Gordon Brown. To which I may add a seventh: a wooden dog on wheels.

And Sarah at Paperhouse explains why people decide to do deals with people like Max Clifford.

And that's all for now.

Links for Wednesday

I actually wrote 'Tuesday' to begin with. That's bank holidays for you. Isn't it? Mm.

Anyway, look, can I begin with an appeal to those of you who may have stumbled across the beer phenomenon known as man-in-a-box. I've seen that fat stein-wielding man in his box winking at me as I've headed towards the carpet many times in my callow years; I think he deserves to be back, for he has been supplanted by a rather banal view of the Bavarian countryside. Time was when you could stagger sober into a pub anytime, anywhere, and know you could be in the realms of floorboard-thumping insanity within moments, thanks to that fat fella in his box. I can't even remember what the lager tasted like; I just remember ordering four man-in-boxes at the bar and getting pleasantly merry. Please, for the sake of everyone's nostalgia everywhere, I think in these credit-crunched times it would be a massive boost to the nation's spirits to see the little Alpine fella back where he belongs, in his box. Sign here!

Elsewhere, Zarathustra at Liberal Conspiracy argues that nurses are getting a raw deal. It seems they're a bit of an easy target, given that they're public servants and therefore part of the much-hated public sector; of course, as I suspected, there's some microchip implanted in the brains of people who write for stuffy newspapers like the Times which actually forces them to talk about 'matron' when they think of nurses, like Hattie Jacques turning up is going to solve every fucking thing ever. Read this article instead and then go and have a look at the blogs it links to. It's more than the "Bring back Matron!" fuckwits will ever have done in the way of research.

Mark Easton over at the BBC writes an interesting piece about how he feels people are treated like toddlers by the Government and by society in general.

On a train the other day, the announcer told us: "Do take care when leaving the train". There is part of me that immediately wants to exit the train in a "care-free" manner. Hopping, perhaps. Sprinkling marbles on the ground as I go.

It's pretty interesting to me that he's saying quite a lot of things that Littlejohn might come out with, yet I don't have the urge to push him in front of a tram. I don't know why that might be; probably because Easton resists the temptation to blame all this nonsense on political correctness, or elfnsafetygawnmad or other such phonetically-spelled things, or some other pointless, improbable and demonstrably wrong Aunt Sally; and probably because he's not a sneery bastard with a cruel streak for minorities who grandstands to bigots and scum twice-weekly while pretending that he's actually the victim in all this. Yes, I think that might be it.

Mornington at Feminazery looks at the pearl-clutching shock and outrage at the revelation that the first European may well have been a bit browner than people might like to imagine. Fairly obvious to anyone who sits down and thinks about it for more than five minutes, but far too much to handle for the readers of the Mail, who have launched into an astonishing attack not only on evolution but also on the whole idea that Europeans may be descended from brown folk as some kind of PCgawnmad plot to indoctrinate us all.

Five Chinese Crackers looks again at Paul Dacre's completely mendacious twaddle wanked out to the Culture, Media and Sport Committee and why his own newspaper has directly contradicted it within days of him having smugly sat there droning away. And, would you believe it, it concerns a MigrationWatch press release that wasn't checked at all by journalists before being chucked into the paper. Goodness!

Sunny at Pickled Politics talks about the list of people who've not been allowed into the UK for thought-crimes. I can't help wondering why the list's come out and what point there is to it, other than to suggest that Muslims are disproportionately bad people or that there is a seriously large propensity towards wingnuttery in Islam. I don't know. Maybe the Government is trying a dog-whistle to its beloved racist friends on the far-right by demonstrating just how many Islamists they're prepared to deny freedom of speech to. I just don't get it, but there you are.

If, incidentally, you don't think that the Government likes to pander to the far-right, then you've never heard of Phil Woolas. Justin points out exactly just how far he's been prepared to go to court the far-right or display New Labour's 'tough on immigration' credentials. Still think that Labour's a liberal party?

Angry Mob points out that the Mail, having tried to convince you for days that swine flu was going to murder your babies and smash their brains on your car windscreen, is now suggesting that it might not be such a bad thing if you actually went out and got it. What? Really? Oh yes.

A Very Public Sociologist takes on the mighty intellect of Nadine Dorries, who has decided that Twitter is A Bad Thing. Presumably because it's not a one-way conversation and means that you actually have to interact with others and listen to their points of view, which is so clearly an alien concept to her.

Finally, Johann Hari is brave enough to stick his head above the parapet and claim that Thatcherism wasn't the most wonderful brilliant invention ever. He's probably alone in the entirety of Fleet Street, given that as we speak glowing tributes are being prepared to the Iron Lady from everyone ever, and that, as with Reagan, every bad aspect will be glossed over when she dies.

But please, let's get that man back in his box.

Links for Sunday

The first place to go, if you haven't been there already, is this episode of Charlie Brooker's Newswipe - before it disappears off the iPlayer and into oblivion. Choice cuts include "working as a journalist right now must be like gargling with cold cow's piss" and watching a fight between Guido and McBride is like a fight between "two immense monsters made of shit".

The second thing I watched that made me think was this documentary posted over at Henry North London, by the investigator who led the inquiry into Madeleine McCann's disappearance. Now I've watched with delight as the Express, Mail and chums have been nailed to the wall for libelling Kate & Gerry over the past few months, but I can't help wondering whether at the heart of it all there might be some genuine questions to answer. It's worth watching, as well, to see the miserable way in which Robert Murat is smeared by the Mirror journalist who had nothing but some crap suppositions to back it up.

Five Chinese Crackers takes a forensic look at the evidence given by the screamsheets to the Culture, Media and Sport committee:

[The MMR 'urban legend'] is not the only bizarre denial trotted out by Dacre as he gets increasingly agitated and uncomfortable when it becomes clear that he isn't going to be given as easy a time as he expects.
In my posts here, I include tags for stories with headlines that are shown to be completely false by the story underneath. They're so common that I often forget to tag them now, since I sort of assume the headline will be contradicted at least in part in the text without even thinking.
Dacre is asked about this practice at around 42 mins 45 secs into the video. His reply is, 'I'd like to think this doesn't happen in the Mail - I'm not going to hold my hand on my heart and say it doesn't. It does happen in some areas of the media.'

but:

Of course, Dacre then goes on to excuse this practice because papers need to attract readers, and as long as the body of the article is accurate, the headline doesn't have to be. Nice. Who else but a newspaper editor would think newspaper editors should be allowed to lie in massive letters in a headline as long as something approaching the truth is buried in the much smaller text underneath?

It's worth watching the video as well. It's almost as if Dacre really did expect to be treated like royalty and gets a bit grumpy at having to answer questions that aren't of the "Well, you're the best editor in the world of the best newspaper ever - how do you do it, oh wise one?" variety.

Sticking with the Mail, then, and this week Melanie "Batshit" Phillips managed an absolute classic of its type: claiming that intelligent design isn't the same as creationism, using the wonderful 'because I said so' technique. I mean, who can fault that? No Sleep Til Brooklands notes:

The claim that ID's "proponents are mainly scientists" holds little water; you'll notice that Phillips completely fails to mention them. So far, Intelligent Design hawkers have conspicuously failed to get any papers in proper peer-reviewed science journals. There are scientists among them, such as Michael Behe, but his theories have been discredited by all major scientific organisations and institutions. There's a difference between something 'coming out of science' and something which is believed by a few scientists. It's a conclusion without a plausible mechanism, without evidence.

Seriously, is there anyone out there - anyone at all, of any political persuasion - who thinks that Melanie is anything other than an embarrassment to journalism, either a shambolic idiot or a downright liar? Anyone...?

Sticking with the Mail for the moment, this is one of the best things I've read all week:

Concerns for the well being of Daily Mail editor Paul 'Mr Burns' Dacre were mounting today after the ferrite fisted news dictator suffered an exhausting three hour ejaculation that left him 'withered like a prune', according to one onlooker.
...
Describing the scene as Dacre began his epic jizzathon, the source added: 'It happened late last night, after the subs had been in to see him with new pieces on Maddy, swine flu and Baby P. There was an almighty rumbling sound like thunder and suddenly he was being propelled around his office by this giant stream of...well, you know

We're still on the Mail with a story about Barack Obama supposedly having been exposed to swine flu and someone who died 24 hours later, which, as it turns out, well you can guess can't you? Angry Mob:

To settle this lie once and for all I tried to find the origin of the '24 hour later' claim. The Daily Express ran the story on Tuesday, but they only mention that Felipe Solis 'died less than two weeks later from symptoms similar to swine flu'. Obviously the Daily Express follows the Mail's lead and announced the story as 'Obama in swine flu scare' even though they do not provide any evidence that Felipe Solis died or displayed any symptoms of swine flu - but this is no surprise considering the Express' reputation for lies.
As far as I can see the 24-hour claim is solely a fabrication of the tabloid newspapers, and seems to originate in the Daily Mail.

Heavens above. Who would have thought? Maybe that was the day the nice Mr Dacre was busily giving his evidence to the committee and being given such a rough ride - I mean, such complete bollocks and fabrication wouldn't have happened under his watch, now, would it? Would it...?

Mutantblog has a look at the world's worst ever headline. No, it's not in the Mail, oddly enough.

Stumbling and Mumbling looks at whether those poor hard-up folk like Michael Caine who claim they'll bugger off if they get taxed more (Fuck off then! Byeeee!) are patriotic or not.

Lenin reports on a May Day victory of sorts - sacked car workers are going to get some compensation from Ford - ah Ford, such lovely employers - after being booted out and told they'd get none.

Septicisle chronicles another week towards the end of Gordon Brown. And no-one's mourning.

And here's a rather good article, comparing Ronald Reagan's stance on torture to that of Rumsfeld and Rice. Guess who comes out as the milksop liberal?

Finally, Sarah looks at one TV presenter's ambition to 'get them out for the lads' and how it doesn't really do her many favours.

Your fun links for the day

I've been meaning to write about something else, but I've not got around to it. So in the meantime here are some nice links to other places where you can read interesting stuff.

Blogging The Mail on our favourite paper's rather embarrassing attempts to portray Labour as the spectral 1970s bogeyman.
Bloggerheads with a forensic analysis of whether one eyewitness was telling the whole truth about G20.
On a similar theme, Nick Davies on the days of misinformation about the protest and whether journalists can really trust the police to tell the truth when they're in the spotlight.
Rhetorically Speaking on the 'abyss of stupidity' over sex education.
Ben Six with the Harry Phibbs de-arser. Very useful, but we need more de-arsers when it comes to our favourite daily paper.
Lenin on the threat of the BNP.
David Neiwert on blind eyes being turned in the US when it comes to violence perpetrated by former service personnel.
Craig Murray on giving his evidence of British complicity in torture.
Claude Carpentieri at Liberal Conspiracy on panic over swine flu.
Michael O'Leary (warning: links to Mail) has shown all his usual charm and desire to shrink away from publicity as he cements his position as most loathsome toad in the world. And his airline's fucking shit as well.
Who's worth following on Twitter? Here's a rough guide. Though to be honest I've not heard of all of them.
Here's a marvellous story - surely it can't be true? - of a chihuahua that got blown away by a strong gust of wind. But there's a happy ending.
And if you've not been there yet, here's my new favourite website - the secret life of Richard Madeley. I love it.

The more it changes…

A few bits and bobs that I've noticed since I've come back to sunny old Blighty from The Foreign.

George Monbiot is surprised by the anti-police backlash in the right-wing press after the G20 protests over here:

If the police at the G20 protests were pumped-up, testerical, itching for a fight, it was partly because their commanding officers have spent years blurring the distinction between peaceful campaigners and terrorists. Until recently, this strategy worked well: by turning quiet protests into angry confrontations, the police could show the public that unless they received ever greater powers and resources, the country would be overrun by violent mobs. Now it has backfired.

But as Monbiot says, normal service will soon be resumed. How soon? Er, this soon, as Rhetorically Speaking points out, with police grumbling behind the scenes being gleefully and unquestioningly accepted by the churnalists at The Times:

McKeever's protest would be a lot more compelling (i.e. a little bit instead of not at all) if he could point to exactly when and where commentary and criticism based on misinformation had taken place. Some kind of evidence-based process for supporting charges, if you will. And the bandwagon isn't anti-police so much as anti-"getting smacked in the face by balaclava'd police who refuse to identify themselves."

Nothing like keeping the boys in blue on-side, is there? I mean, the last employee of the newspaper industry who turned his back and assumed he'd be all right got smacked down to the ground and died shortly afterwards. And it's nice to see the BBC talking about "alleged assaults" to make sure everything's completely nice and safe. When you've got a video of someone being smacked down to the ground by a copper, there could be a completely innocent explanation, couldn't there?

Speaking of the BBC, it's disappointing but entirely predictable that Jeremy Bowen should be on the receiving end of a similar kind of blindsiding, by his own employers, after daring to try and be anything other than nonsensically 'impartial' towards the Israel/Gaza issue. Presumably if Bowen had been covering the Holocaust for the BBC he would have had to have included a disclaimer from the Nazis: "Some people say the Holocaust is a bad thing, but on the other hand senior German Government sources say that Jews are sub-human vermin who should be destroyed. So, we can't make any judgement as to who's right and wrong on this one." Robert Fisk is enjoyable apopleptic over at the Indy:

The BBC's preposterous committee claims that Bowen's article "breached the rules [sic] on impartiality" because "readers might come away from the article thinking that the interpretation offered was the only sensible view of the war". Well, yes of course. Because I suppose the BBC believes that Israel's claim to own land which in fact belongs to other people is another "sensible" view of the war.

And here's Septicisle on how Monday at The Sun is MoD propaganda day:

... if we are to believe this isn't just an MoD stunt, desperate for some good news from Afghanistan, it isn't as rare as is being made out. Only last July a highly similar story was reported, without apparent MoD involvement, the soldier in that example being David Poderis, also shot through the helmet without being harmed. Secondly, another previous case, reported back in 2003 in Iraq, involving a soldier supposedly shot four times in the helmet and surviving, subsequently turned out to be a prank or hoax, depending on which you prefer, the Sun proudly reporting the soldiers' ingenuity. The author? One John Kay. Is history repeating itself? You decide...

Also, No Sleep Til Brooklands applauds an incredibly insightful piece of journalism by the Mail, which has used alchemy and pure skill to link income tax to income, with astonishing results:

Mail readers, and the paper itself, love to talk about 'stealth taxes'. Originally this used to refer to idden charges in the tax system that most people didn't know about, whereby they'd be hit by unexpected levies, but now it seems it's become synonymous with tax itself. It's hard to think of a way income tax could be any less stealthy. Announced annually in the Budget, written about in the press, rates published for all to see, and the figure literally printed on your monthly payslip under the none-too-stealthy name of 'Income tax', it seems to me that Alastair Darling is not perhaps the most cunning of pickpockets in this regard.

Getting ready for the 'WAR ON THE MIDDLE CLASS' guff from the right-wing screamsheets when the Budget comes out? Oh yes!