Dunderheadedness

EU Referendum

2006-09-27T04:51:00.000-07:00

...actually, before I trot off with Mrs Carpsio for a weekend of poorly-deserved debauchery, I meant to add my twopennorth to something The Devil picked up at EU Referendum in which the esteemed Mr. North (whose views I entirely share) laid something of a glove on some of us lesser mortals of the blogosphere:

"Often the humour and analysis is about the level one would expect of the 4th form of a second-rate boys boarding school and I have heard more intelligent comment from college students in fifth and sixth forms in the lectures I have been given to schools recently."

and

"That does, as I say, leave the bloggers. You – collectively – can continue to play your little games. Or you can show up the media and the politicians and make the running. Which is it to be?"

Ouch!

There is a point here in that many, many blogs are more piss and vinegar than august journals of record. But, here is the rub, Richard. We are all real people, writing about stuff we care about to varying degrees. Not all of us have either the time, information or rigour to do the job that you do. Given that you do things like deliver lectures, this suggests you've got more opportunity than the rest of us, who snatch ten minutes during the working day to fire off a bunch of swearing and stuff.

The question is really - why do you care? If you're doing that job then great - and long may you continue... I've been a long time reader. But this is a democratic medium, and the second you start pulling the elitist card out of your pocket you sound more like one of the enemy than one of us. Not everyone wants to read a superbly argued factual dissection of the latest piece of EU legislation. Not everyone even can. Some people just want swearing. And why the fuck not? There's a broad swathe of rough and ready concensus out here, but people express it in different ways. That's people. If I can persuade one more person that the EU are a bunch of cunts, just by calling them a bunch of cunts rather than elegantly putting them to the verbal sword, then what do you care?

Your Qana piece was, I think, the most important piece of British political blogging there has yet been. The fact that it has amounted to nothing in terms of MSM penetration highlights perfectly the shortcomings of blogging's profile in the UK. What it doesn't show is that everyone should be just like you.

Enough factionalism for one day - we'll end up sounding like the cunting Labour party. I agree entirely with your sentiments, I just choose to express them in a different way. So sue me.

Checking out...

2006-09-27T04:47:00.000-07:00

Off on my hols for a couple of days, so let's hope there isn't more excitement in my absence. I'll try to give Blair a right old fisking before I go, in the sake of completeness. If not - the usual candidates will no doubt be filling that aching void...

On an entirely unrelated note, one Furriskey has come to my attention via the gift of the comments. He's got a blog - check it out... it seems he's one of us!

Ciao for now

C

Sense? Or insensibility?

2006-09-25T03:47:00.000-07:00

Via Frank P, news that:

"POLICE have agreed to consult a panel of Muslim leaders before mounting counter-terrorist raids or arrests. Members of the panel will offer their assessment of whether information police have on a suspect is too flimsy and will also consider the consequences on community relations of a raid." Also see: The Sunday Times

Sorry, what?

OK. So there exists, amongst the assembled ranks of officialdom, a belief that we need to to somehow reassure the Muslim population that we're not just picking on them because they believe that adulterers should be stoned, or that blowing oneself up on the tube is a rational response to British foreign policy. Instead of just going out, identifying criminals, catching them and punishing them, we've somehow got to examine the "causes" of their criminality and "address" them.

But let's have some fucking sense, shall we? The Police are... well... the Police. They have countless years of experience in detecting and preventing crime. Despite their increasing targeting of soft targets such as motorists, and their apparent unwillingness to do the one thing that everyone wants them to do (put manpower on the streets, moterhfuckers) they are the only law enforcement agency we've got, and we do depend almost wholly on their abilities to protect ourselves and our property.

By taking this step, they are implicitly saying: "we want to make sure we're right about this". Which on the face of it has some kernel of reason. But let's change the scenario and see how it holds water as a strategy.

Let's say that 14 Catholic priests have been arrested for pederasty in a short spell of time. In 9 of those cases, a case sufficient to take to court could not be assembled. There is a degree of outcry from Catholics, who say that the Police are unfairly targeting them. Can you see the police deigning to consult the clergy before making any future arrests to save their sensibilities?

It is part of a wider picture in which the Police are simply scared to tread on toes. Fact: There have been terrorist attacks and planned terrorist attacks in our country by Islamic extremists. Part of the "reason" that has been pedalled by certain elements of the Muslim population is "alienation". Police activity is given as one of the causes of this alienation. Hamstrung by a reflexive policial correctness, the Police cannot seem to do anything except crawl in the dust to prove that they are actually sensitive, caring, non-judgemental kinda guys as if they are the guilty party. As if we're all to blame for this.

Worse, the move begs all the crucial, practical questions. Will this scrutiny cause crucial delays in action? Will the Official Secrets Act be adhered to? If the panel comes back and says that they feel the case is unsubstantial, will the Police not act - even if they disagree? We are constantly told that there is a deadly gap between older Muslim moderates and younger, 'radicalised' sections - will this help? If these "community leaders" are known to be working with the Police, how will they be able to influence people who feel that the entire apparatus of the State is against them? How will a panel of laymen determine whether a case is sufficient to stand up in court? This is what the CPS is for. Having a separate, parallel CPS exclusively for Muslims makes no rational sense. It only serves to people who believe, on both sides, that there is one rule for Muslims, and one rule for the rest, that they are right.

As I've noted before, low-tech terrorism is incredibly difficult to prove. You've got a rucksack and some fertiliser? You could be a keen gardener or a suicide bomber. If the Police, who you evidently mistrust, come to you suggesting the latter, will you be entirely objective? Really?

It is time to stop treating this problem as though it is somehow unique. In the simplest terms: Terrorism is criminal. The Police exist to catch criminals. Just do it.

No. No. And Thrice No.

2006-09-22T11:51:00.000-07:00

A bit late to the party today, but non-the-fucking-less an opportunity to good to miss...

The Times reports that:

"Hazel Blears, the party chairman, told The Times yesterday that Labour, as the party of government, should get more public money to support political work."

I'll throw some money into the pot if we're buying rope for you and your entire pestilential, gibbering calvalcade of simpering, sidestepping, immoral, stealing, theiving twats. Aside from that, you can put my diseased, unwashed cock in your mouth and await my watery seed (and it will be a long wait - but it will arrive before my money). You have no claim on my money. None. Not a single penny of mine is yours by any measure of right or justice. If you're bankrupt, you can get to the nearest street corner and whore yourself. You can sell advertising space on your cheeks. You can sell some of the acorns you've no doubt got stored up at the bottom of the garden.

What you cannot do - in this universe or the next - is take my money that I have earnt, through my skills and talent and time, that I worked to bring home to better my family and my life, and spend how I see fit. Through automation and coercion, you take more than your fair slice as it is. What democracy is this when my money is taken from me to be spent on "political work" that I don't agree with? That a mere 22% of the population as a whole voted for at the last opportunity? Who are you Blears, to demand my money? What is your authority to take what is mine by right? In any other sphere of life, this would be called theft. My Allah take your hands. Tell me to which authority I can appeal? Who will redress my pleas? A fucking ombudsman? Ermine akimbo? I think fucking not..

This will head to the barricades sooner than you think.

Read it.

2006-09-22T05:35:00.000-07:00

Gerard Baker nails it:

"It may well be that history will judge that Europe’s decline came at the very moment of its apparent triumph. The traumas of the first half of the 20th century have combined with the economic successes of the second half to induce a collective loss of will. Great civilisations die not in the end because of external force majeure but because internally the will to thrive is sapped.

The symptoms of this moral collapse may be far away from the affluent and still largely peaceful cities and towns of the old continent — in the mountains of Afghanistan, the diplomatic reception halls of Tehran and the angry Pope-effigy-burning streets of the Middle East. But there should be no doubt that it is closer to home where the disease has taken hold."

Nothing need be added. Go on - read it.

More of the above...

2006-09-22T05:13:00.000-07:00

"Superintendent Martin Deacon, of North Yorkshire Police, said that the organisers of the high-speed challenge should have done a full risk assessment before filming began."

Via The Times, more on Richard Hammond's accident. I'm curious as to at whether failing to do a risk assessment is now considered to be a criminal offence. If so, it gives eloquent testimony to the mad pursual of process and measurement that characterises the modern public mind. If not: why are the Police involved at all?

Lawson's End.

2006-09-22T04:22:00.000-07:00

Dreary tosspot Mark Lawson asks the question on everyone's lips, over in the Graun. "is it worth risking the creation of widows and orphans for a piece of disposable entertainment designed for blokes to watch with a few tinnies?"

The recent incidents involving Steve Irwin and Richard Hammond have crept into his soul in the night. He has awoken - a thin sheet of moralising sweat clinging to his corpulent but sensitive body. He must share his thoughts with us.

"The astonishing fact is that, on recent statistics, television presenting is a more dangerous profession than formula one motor racing"

Well, I'm fucking astonished, Mark. Strike a light. Knock me down with a feather. How many umpteen thousand TV presenters are there? Compared to - what? - a couple of dozen F1 drivers? So go ahead, bespectacled statistician, enlighten us about the relative dangers. Please - I's begging you, Mastuh. Nice use of the qualifier "recent" there too. There's no amount of chicanery you people won't stoop to to impose your cunting governance on us all, is there?

Like everyone in this creeping menagerie of risk-averse, sensibly shod clipboard carriers, he operates from a sensibility that Joe Soap - me and you - are dumb sheep. Show us that it is fun to do something dangerous, and we'll be out of the door, gagging for speed, inclines, explosions and danger. We'll be recklessly chasing mind-blurring speed on the way to work tomorrow, veering to splatter infants over our windscreens in the name of fun.

"a television show that advertises the thrill of driving at four times the national speed limit might have a significant influence on the everyday actions of its viewers."

He wails, rhetorically clasping and unclasping his porky little hands as he frets about the danger to the nation's armchair bound simpletons.

"So sick is our culture that there would be a sizable internet audience for the footage of Irwin's and Hammond's catastrophes."

Ah - it is 'sick'. Argument ended. Go home. Actually, it's called human curiousity. The same impulse that drives us to put our finger in the flame from time to time to see if really does burn. To find out what happens if you try to drink 14 pints in a couple of hours. We want to know, to see, to learn, to do, to be. Funnily, if it was a performance artist doing something similar, you'd probably find it very "challenging" wouldn't you? But then I suppose you're too clever to mimic what you see on telly aren't you?

Where does this desperate policy of Lawson's end? Look around you. Speed cameras that can't tell how close you're driving to the car in front or whether you're the only car on the road. Church roofs crumbling because scaffolding companies can't afford the insurance. Centuries-old organs decaying because licenses cannot be granted to move the lead pipes. Doormats being taken and shredded because of the "tripping risk". Faceless Health and Safety "executives" with the power to cancel your street party, close your business, take your property. A pale, emasculated culture, where 'risk' is something you can avoid by filling in an Excel spreadsheet.

I was told to move my son in his car seat from in front of the fire exit in a pub recently because he "posed a tripping risk" in the event of a fire. As if we're just going to sit there as the claxons chime and people lie in an increasing pile in front of the door, burning to death. As if someone couldn't pick him up and move him by bending at the waist for - ooo - two seconds? As if anyone, anywhere, ever has died because of something like this.

I'm off to YouTube to try and find the footage now, Mark. Put that on your fucking clipboard.

Abject cuntery

2006-09-21T07:08:00.000-07:00

Another day, another tediously unremitting whinge from yet another pair of idolatrous Left wing 'pundits'.

Today's subject? Go on... guess! Yup - that's right: "Money can't buy you happiness." Pull that out of a cracker on christmas day and you'd nod sagely, ruminate for a second and throw it on the yule log. If you're a Guardian columnist, this is a moment of bliding, road-to-Damascus style insight. The clouds part, and the finger of God points to you... "You there! Yes - the socialist wanker in the jumper... did you know that money can't buy you happiness? Now - spread my word: for it is just, meet, and your bounden duty".

So it begins, with the usual "ooh... ah" list of things we can do now that we couldn't do before. We can buy our own homes, take foreign holidays, have 24hr access to staggeringly lame comment from some no-mark socialist arseholes. But - BUT! - "material prosperity has not brought increased satisfaction with life. We have become a more unequal and divided society."

Really? Are you honestly dissatisfied because of "inequality"? Do you wake up every morning in a fug of seething resentment because someone else has a nicer car than you? Is your every step heavy with the burden of knowing that someone, somewhere owns a house with both upstairs and downstairs bogs? Can you never bring yourself to climax because you can feel in your soul that other people are eating in posh restaurants?

Er no, actually, cuntwads. I'd say that says more about you, and your sense of entitlement rather than the society in which you live. Of course, it continues thus....

"...we are time-poor, working long hours either to make ends meet or to buy the ever-changing trappings of success..."

Just wrong, morons. Here are the facts: "Since 1998 the average working week has fallen by over an hour. According to the ONS, full-time workers (now averaging 37.34 hours) are putting in around an hour and a half less each week, although part-time workers (who average 15.7 hours) are working half an hour longer." In the last year along, average wages have risen by 3.7% whilst inflation ran at 2.4%.

So in actual fact (instead of woolly supposition), we are earning proportionally more for working shorter hours. Not that this gets in the way of their gist.

"Alongside economic insecurity a new set of social problems has emerged - widespread mental ill-health, systemic loneliness, growing numbers of psychologically damaged children, eating disorders, obesity, alcoholism and drug addiction"

OK. So lets say that tomorrow we identify a new condition. This happens all the time. Some guy in a white coat sees fourteen people who all express a belief that life will be better if the government takes all of their money and spends on ill-advised computer projects. Hey - maybe this is a psychological condition! I'll call it Communism Syndrome. All of a sudden, the incidence of Communism Syndrome has gone from nothing to fourteen!! We're being overrun by Communist Syndrome sufferers.

Does this mean that there were never any communists before? Of course not! So there are two possible explanations here for 'widespread mental ill-health'. Maybe there is more mental ill-health today. Or maybe - just maybe - diagnostic approaches have changed. There is more diagnosis going on. More diagnosers are out there diagnosing. Things that once were seen as moral problems (classroom loutishness) are now rediagnosed as 'attention deficit syndrome'.

So is the world going to hell in a handcart? Or are we just putting on a different set of spectacles to view it?

If getting more stuff is making people unhappy, then why are so many of us going about trying to find ways of getting more stuff? And if having more stuff turns out to be a mere chimaera of happiness, why aren't the people with stuff getting rid of some of that stuff? Society is a self-fulfilling prophecy: the outcome is a direct result of desires. If you've got a big house and it brings you no happiness, sell the fucking thing and go to sleep in the chicken shed with your friends, the chickens. Whatever floats your boat.

But these 'people' - these misanthropic turds in human form - these life-sapping, handwringing prognosticators of sorrow want to stop you and me from doing what we want. They want us to be good, clean, healthy upstanding citizens. Fine - who could disagree? But they and their poisonous ilk want to define what those things are.

They speak the speak for sure: "This is the age of autonomy. People quite rightly want to become the masters of their own destiny." But their way to entrench and extend that autonomy? "setting up a commission on oil independence... establish new global mechanisms such as a world environment organisation... free social care and universal childcare geared to the needs of children... a ban on advertising to children... a minimum income standards commission "

Yep. That's right. More experts. More rules. More strictures and diktats. More cunts telling you what to do, when to do it and who to do it with. And I don't think you could throw a spoon in the Compass offices without it landing in the yoghurt pot of someone who thinks that they are the person to enforce all of this. For all the rhetoric of freedom and self-determination, you don't think that you are the person to decide how to live your life, do you?

All 2000 words, summarised in one? Cunts.

Jamie Cunting Bastard Fucking Oliver

2006-09-20T08:43:00.000-07:00

"I’ve spent two years being PC about parents. It’s kind of time to say if you're giving very young kids bottles and bottles of fizzy drink you’re a fucking arsehole, you’re a tosser. If you're giving bags of shitty sweets at that very young age, you’re an idiot."

See it tonight on his new program (if you're not busy vomiting your own faeces or feeding your baby mashed up disabled immigrant seals). Actually: don't. Spare yourself a lecture. In fact, I urge and implore you to go to your nearest KFC or the diciest kebab house you can find and revel in their unctuous salty pleasure.

I used to kind of like Jamie Oliver. Unlike Gary Rhodes, who prompts recurring nightmares in the Carpsio household (picture waking up, tied to a bed with him slavering over you with a pastry brush) he at least made it look like you could whip up a half decent meal without needing loads of weird specialist ingredients and chrome instrumentation. Gary Rhodes makes my skin itch. I think there I might have repressed childhood memories about him.

Anyway, Oliver's joining the ever-lengthening list of cunts who feel it is their right - nay! duty - to poke and prod, pry and peer into our lives. Like some kind of half-arsed vegetarian socialist or feminist anarchist, he is now in full campaigning mode, in which your moral indignation gives you the the absolute right to decry any and all.

I mean - get real, you fat-tongued cunting mongpiss (now that's PC!) I used to eat school burgers and chips every single dinner time, except for the times we used to sneak out to Fuzzy Roy's chippy for chips "with curry and red", or the golf centre for cans of pop, bags of crisps and 231 penny chews (an ideal distraction for shoplifters, Popkids!) Now I still do something like that once a week or so.

My question for you is, Jamie: so fucking what? You want your kids to eat rocket and eel mash with mango jus and fennel ice cream? Great. Good for you. Go to it. More power to your elbow. Just get the fuck out of my fucking face. Stop waving your fat mockney tongue at me. I'm not even going to argue fact with you (aside to point out that our kids will outlive us, and have never vomited their own shit, despite what your scaremongering, ill-informed shrivelled 'experts' are telling you). I just want you, and your fucking craven media cohorts out of my fridge. Now.

You think we've got a shortage of unelected "opinion-formers" in this country? You think I can't find any number of really passionate diseased arseholes just gagging for the chance to tell me what to drive, what to eat, what to wear, how to act, who to like? You think I need more celebrity advice? Is there a shortage and I missed it?

I hate to overuse the word (again), but you're a cunt.

Not so daily any more...

2006-09-18T09:01:00.000-07:00

The Daily Ablution is, sadly, becoming the 'At unspecified intervals when personal circumstances allow Ablution.'

You'll be sorely missed Scott.