tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-215443612024-03-05T09:32:53.702+00:00Five Chinese CrackersBlogging about bad journalism since 2006.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.comBlogger629125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-22911052398180126802013-08-15T23:20:00.002+01:002013-08-15T23:21:43.614+01:00What happened to the foreign job theives?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>A classic, I think you'd agree</i></td></tr>
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I used to get quite worked up about how the papers covered employment statistics. Whatever they were, we'd get made up headlines about how migrants had stolen <span style="color: red;">ALL</span> the jobs splashed across the front pages. Yesterday, some new employment figures were published and I got all nostalgic, so I looked to the tabloids to see if they were still pulling the same trick.<br />
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Turns out all sorts of things have been happening in the tabloid 'foreign worker scare story' petri dish while I've been away. I feel like a scientist who comes across a forgotten specimen at the back of a cupboard to find it's...mutated.<br />
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Surprisingly, there haven't been any shouty headlines about how foreigners have taken <span style="color: red;">ALL</span> the new jobs following the most recent figures. That's because the era of migrants taking all the jobs is over. Didn't you know?<br />
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Well it's over in the Mail anyway. In February there were fanfares for the government as the paper reported '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2282007/At-new-jobs-filled-British-workers-thanks-stricter-immigration-policies.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">At last, most new jobs are filled by British workers thanks to stricter immigration policies</a>'. At last! And all thanks to the policy covered the year before in '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1365960/Finally-British-workers-come-Jobs-migrants-slashed-half-visa-clampdown.html" target="_blank">Finally, British workers come first: Jobs for migrants slashed by half in visa clampdown</a>'. Finally!<br />
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Of course, in the coverage of the most recent figures the paper is aghast at the number of jobs going to foreigners, but '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2392657/Unemployment-figures-Number-people-work-reaches-record-high-29-7million-new-jobs-foreign-nationals.html" target="_blank">Number of people in work reaches record high of 29.7million but a third of new jobs go to foreign nationals</a>' is at least clear that it's only a third of the jobs being filched these days.<br />
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Over at the Express though, things are different. The paper doesn't seem to have mentioned the number of migrants getting jobs in its coverage.<br />
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Three weeks ago though, long after the Mail declared that British workers were getting most new jobs, <strike>cack</strike> crack columnist Leo McKinstry informed us in '<a href="http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/leo-mckinstry/418203/Mass-immigration-is-plunging-our-nation-into-crisis" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Mass immigration is plunging our nation into crisis</a>'* that:<br />
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It is ridiculous that when unemployment stands at almost 2.5 million more than half of all new jobs still go to foreigners.</blockquote>
Wait a minute? Doesn't he know it's the dawn of a new age and most new jobs go to British born people now? Maybe not. In June, in '<a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/407149/Male-migrants-enjoy-higher-levels-of-employment-than-men-born-in-Britain" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Male migrants enjoy higher levels of employment than men born in Britain</a>', the Express told us:<br />
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An estimated 225,000 people among the 423,000 who found work in the last year were not born in the UK, showed data released by the Office for National Statistics.</blockquote>
Are migrants taking most new jobs or a third of them? Which paper is right? The answer is both. And neither.<br />
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In the Mail's triumphant piece from February, the paper used the same figures it always used to for its scare stories, but focusing on comparing stats from October to December 2012 with those from the same period in 2011. Most people added to the workforce in that period really were born in the UK.<br />
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So how is the Express right too? The piece from June looked at the same figures as the Mail did, but compared stats from January to March 2013 with the ones from the same period in 2012 - the next three month period on from the Mail's figures. The proportion of people from outside the UK in that period was much higher. Which means the figure has dropped again so the Mail can get its 'one third' number and the Express has just decided not to report it, right?<br />
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Uh, no.<br />
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In it's most recent coverage, the Mail seems to have ditched its traditional method for talking about foreigners taking jobs. If the paper had used the usual methods comparing the latest quarter's figures with last year they'd have got the same proportion that allowed Steve Doughty to yell '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1348417/Foreigners-2-3-new-jobs-200k-vacancies-filled-born-overseas.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">Foreigners take two out of three new jobs as statistics reveal nearly 200,000 vacancies were filled by those born overseas</a>' back in January 2011. In fact even the total number is higher, at 204,000.<br />
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Instead of looking at the same stats, the paper has switched from measuring the rise in the number of people in the workforce born outside the UK to measuring foreign citizens. But this number has always been lower.<br />
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Back in the day, the Mail had a different narrative to push. We needed to be scared about the number of foreigners Labour had let in to ruin the country then. Now, it has to tell us that the tories are great and are saving us from the worst of the swarthy hordes. Switching the measure makes that possible.<br />
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The Express, however, hasn't changed so much. Since<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/peteroborne/100221069/patrick-oflynn-a-catch-that-ukip-can-boast-about/" target="_blank"> its Political Editor announced he'd be standing for election as a UKIP MEP</a>, the paper has no reason to prop up the coalition where it can be outflanked on the right, so it'll carry on telling us mass migration is going to bring on the zombie apocalypse.<br />
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One thing that neither paper has done this time, which used to be a fun staple, is pick another arbitrary time period to measure. It's one way the papers could claim migrants had taken <span style="color: red;">ALL</span> the new jobs.<br />
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What if we compare the current quarter with the previous one? We'd see that the total number of people in had risen by 112,000 - while the number of those born overseas has risen by 136,000. Whoah! That's over 100%! Back in 2007 when the Express made a similar calculation that showed foreigners took more new jobs that were actually available, <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2007/11/liberal-elite-where-are-you_820.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">it led to a front page headline</a>. Now, nothing.<br />
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(Of course, that might be because the PCC slapped them on the wrist and made them take the story down from their website, but they used the same method to calculate their scare stories ever since).<br />
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Measuring how many new jobs had been stolen by foreigners since Labour came to power was another favourite. So, what happens if we look at what has happened since the last election? Comparing July to September 2010 with the most recent figures shows that the number of people in work overall has risen by 426,000, while the number of people born outside the UK has risen by <i>* pffft! * SHIT!</i> 2,256,000! That's, that's over 500% of new jobs that have been snatched by foreigners!<br />
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Of course, no they haven't. These figures are just as crap as they always were. It's just interesting to see the tabloids not bothering with them any more.<br />
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This could be because they have a new target now. The Romanians and Bulgarians. Dun-dun-durrrn! Today the Express yelped '<a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/422186/Number-of-Romanian-and-Bulgarian-workers-in-Britain-soars-36-per-cent" target="_blank">Number of Romanian and Bulgarian workers in Britain soars 36 per cent</a>', while the Mail squeals '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2394211/100-Romanians-Bulgarians-job-Britain-day-official-figures-show.html" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">100 Romanians and Bulgarians take a job in Britain every day, official figures show</a>'.<br />
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If you put it another way, you could say that the percentage of Romanian and Bulgarian nationals in the workforce has risen from 0.31% to 0.42% but that doesn't make as scary a headline.<br />
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Nice to see the're still up to some tricks, I guess.<br />
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<ul>
<li><a href="http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/publications/all-releases.html?definition=tcm:77-21589" target="_blank">Here's a link to the ONS employment statistics, where you can find tables for all the figures I looked at today</a>. Knock yourself out. Go on. Knock yourself out. I dare you.</li>
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*This is just four days after he told us '<a href="http://www.express.co.uk/comment/columnists/leo-mckinstry/417307/Mass-immigration-is-destroying-the-fabric-of-society" target="_blank">Mass immigration is destroying the fabric of society</a>'. That's what I hate about McKinstry. Too timid to tell us what he really thinks about immigration.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-50063139851808651302013-07-31T20:28:00.001+01:002013-07-31T20:30:29.731+01:00I'll have a racist 99 please!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Last week, two vans with massive posters on the side telling illegal immigrants to fuck off or get arrested were driven around six select London boroughs. Rumours that they played a plinky-plonky ice cream van version of Wagner's 'Ride of the Valkyries' as they went remain unconfirmed.<br />
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'In the UK illegally?' they asked politely of everyone before bellowing, 'GO HOME OR FACE ARREST' presumably at people who were indeed in the UK illegally. To assorted right wingers and racist people, however, they shouted 'WE ARE BEING ALL HARD ABOUT FOREIGNS. PLEASE DON'T VOTE FOR THE UKIPS'. I'll leave you to guess which of those was the actual primary message. (HINT: It was the second one, Einstein).<br />
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The thing about immigration is that it's an incredibly difficult issue that is by no means easy to deal with, both practically and ethically, but our politicians and media would never acknowledge that. Listen to those guys and you'd think the only obstacle to 'seizing control of our borders' were the all-powerful left, who despite being nowhere near government manage to make the subject impossible to even mention, even though it's in newspapers and on radio and television almost every day, often being mentioned by people complaining that they're not allowed to mention it.<br />
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Try to find any estimate of how much it would cost or how it would be logistically possible to restrict immigration as far as they'd like on the websites of any of our anti-immigration press or people like MigrationWatch, and you'll end up wasting a lot of time you could be using more usefully watching <a href="http://youtu.be/pB7gnB31NnI">YouTube videos of people getting hit in the groin</a>. You might as well just say restricting immigration is free and can be staffed by magic pixies for all the attention that side of things gets.<br />
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The immigration story of choice in the papers a few weeks ago was the news that <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/immigration/10176439/Immigration-backlog-tops-500000-and-will-take-37-years-to-clear-warn-MPs.html">the backlog of cases being dealt with by the Home Office stood at over half a million and would take over 37 years to clear</a>. Difficult, right? What could the government do in the face of a 37 year backlog, especially when they'd<a href="http://blogs.spectator.co.uk/coffeehouse/2013/03/theresa-mays-abolition-of-ukba-shows-how-the-immigration-consensus-favours-the-tories-and-her/"> already shown off about changes that were supposed to fix the system</a>? Increase budgets? Hire more staff? Think about an amnesty for the ones who've been here longest?<br />
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No, fuck all that. All you need is a couple of vans with posters on to drive around six of the 32 boroughs in London. That'll deal with the problem. Not the problem of the actual backlog, but the problem of the people you, along with your buddies in the right wing media, have conditioned to think that immigration isn't a difficult issue at all suddenly believing you're mucking up the easiest thing in the world.<br />
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Thanks to the van, two weeks after the 37 year backlog was revealed the news was flooded with lots of lovely government people talking about how they'd reduced net migration (without mentioning how much was lost in fees from blocked foreign students), they're totally not racist and anyone who opposes them want people to be encouraged to break the law.<br />
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That last argument is real by the way.* It's taken from the Daily Mail article '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2381051/MARK-HARPER-Racism-It-racist-ask-people-illegally-leave-Britain.html">Racism? It is not racist to ask people who are here illegally to leave Britain</a>' by Immigration Minister Mark Harper, answering a charge nobody I saw actually make. Still, it was good for him to counter accusations that the execution of the idea was racist in a paper renowned for its zealously anti-racist readers who balk at the mere suggestion of anything racially untoward.<br />
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Ha ha. I did a funny. No it's not. It's renowned for a readership that hates immigration and anything being described as racist unless it has a whiff of discriminating against white British people. They'd never have had a problem with the vans in the first place. Why, it's almost as if the whole thing were a cynical attempt at targeting the anti immigrant vote.<br />
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But were the vans racist? Who gives a shit what you think, chump? They're not for you. Of course, saying they're racist and<a href="http://youtu.be/oQ7Y7RDUNq8"> arguing against them on TV</a> or radio gives the intended audience the treat of seeing a tory face down someone they hate over a topic dear to their cold, cold, reptillian hearts anyway, so it's not as if your opinion counts for nothing. It just doesn't count in the way you'd like.**<br />
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Apparently, the vans will be rolled out in more places if the campaign is successful. Unfortunately, Zoe Williams didn't get any sort of explanation of what it was that would make it a success in '<a href="http://www.theguardian.com/theguardian/2013/jul/26/illegal-immigrant-billboard-stunt">The Home Office anti-immigration billboards are just a publicity stunt</a>' - but since the Mail ran an article about the Mark Harper piece on the same day with the headline '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2381069/Controversial-Go-home-migrant-vans-tour-country-says-defiant-minister-Mark-Harper.html">Controversial 'Go home' migrant vans should tour the country, says defiant minister</a>', I'd say there's a chance we'll see them again.<br />
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*The article is well worth a read. It's terrible. Nobody in a million years would expect any of the arguments to win over an opponent. It's like a parody of a bullshitting politician.<br />
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**Unless you're Nigel Farage, the only person with a real chance to have an effect. He called the vans 'nasty' in an attempt to wrong foot the government and keep hold of some of those supporters the tories are trying to lure back.<br />
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<br />Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-91851164038280967602013-03-08T17:21:00.001+00:002013-03-08T18:10:10.189+00:00Bulgarian government, Bulgarian TV station or British Sunday tabloid?<div>
On last night's BBC Question Time, Diane James of UKIP claimed that a Bulgarian government survey showed that 56% of Bulgarians have said they want to move to the UK. </div>
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This instantly sounded fishy to me. Last month, <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/376733/Millions-of-poverty-striken-Bulgarians-want-to-move-to-Britain">the Sunday Express said that 54% of Bulgarians wanted to come to the UK</a> after it took UKIP's Paul Nuttall to Bulgaria on a fact finding mission. The paper claimed the figures came from a survey by Bulgarian TV station bTV. The Daily Star on Sunday reported the figure at 55%, leaving out mention of any source. These are probably the same numbers Diane James was talking about, since her leaflet mentions 4 million Bulgarians like the Express article.</div>
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The thing is, the Sunday Express claiming a Bulgarian TV station said something is very different to the Bulgarian government actually saying it. Because of course, the Sunday Express interpreting survey results is quite smelly in itself. Especially when we're talking about foreigners.</div>
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The Express and stablemate the Star have a long and illustrious history of taking shoddy phone and website polls and claiming the results represent the whole of the UK. <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/1350/Veil-should-be-banned-say-98-37">98% of Britons want to ban the veil, you know</a>. <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/213821/99-of-you-say-Get-us-out-of-Europe">99% of people say get us out of Europe</a>. Blimey.</div>
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We know the last one is rubbish because recently the Express revealed that <a href="http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/278966/Three-quarters-of-Britons-say-quit-EU-now/">75% is the actual number who want to get out of Europe NOW, according to YouGov</a>. </div>
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Except no it isn't. <a href="http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.co.uk/2011/10/express-misleads-on-eu-poll-results.html">The paper monkeyed around with the results to get a figure even that high</a>. The real number was 28%, with another 47% saying they'd want to renegotiate membership terms. See, you can't really trust the Express, and when it hides its working you really have to be on your guard.</div>
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So when the Sunday Express first revealed that over half of Bulgaria's entire population wanted to come to the UK, it seemed pretty obvious that something would be up with the paper's figures. I dug around a little on the <a href="http://www.btv.bg/">bTV website</a> at the time to see what I could find, with the help of Google Translate. I did come across a short article referencing the Sunday Express story, but it didn't mention anything about the actual figures in it at all, even to say that bTV itself was supposed to be the source. </div>
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Plus, despite the UK press's love of churnalising content from other sources, no papers other than the Sunday Express and its stablemate the Daily Star on Sunday covered the story at all in the UK. MigrationWatch haven't even referenced it as far as I can tell. Weird.</div>
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I half-heartedly <a href="https://twitter.com/5ChinCrack/status/300727109960204289">tweeted Marco Giannageli</a> at the time to see if I could see the actual survey he got his 54% from, and didn't get an answer. I also emailed bTV to ask some questions about the figures and what they thought about the Express's coverage. I got no answer from there either, although that reference to the story I mentioned has since disappeared from their website (along with another one I found, based on how horrible some comments about Bulgarians on the Daily Mail website were).*</div>
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My hunch is that Giannegeli has taken one of the polls from the homepage of the bTV site and dressed it up to look more significant than it actually is, while doing some Express style mashing together of categories at the same time. Maybe the 54% represent the only people who said anything other than 'I will never visit any other EU country in my life, ever' or something. For all we know, he could have just made them up. Of course, it's just as likely that he's taken a much more representative poll and reported it honestly, but we'll only know that for sure if someone actually lets us see the proper figures. </div>
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With that in mind, I <a href="https://twitter.com/5ChinCrack/status/310006623299047424">tweeted Diane James, UKIP, Marco Giannageli, and the Sunday Express today</a> to ask to see the figures. Of course, I've had no reply so far and don't expect one. I've also emailed Marco Giannageli (who'se email bounced), UKIP and both the Sunday Express news desk and Political Editor with the following:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Dear all, </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
On February 10, the Sunday Express published the front page headline '4M MIGRANTS VOTE TO COME HERE', which claimed a survey by Bulgarian television company bTV had revealed that 'more than half the population of 7.5 million have their sights set on Britain'. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
The same figure turned up in leaflets for Diane James' Eastleigh campaign, which said that '4 million Bulgarians have already said they would like to come to the UK'. On last night's BBC Question Time, Ms James claimed the figure came from a Bulgarian government survey. She also claimed that 56% of Bulgarians wanted to come to the UK, rather than the 54% claimed by the Sunday Express. </blockquote>
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There seems to be a certain amount of confusion about this figure of 4 million Bulgarians and where it came from. I'm sure both the Sunday Express and UKIP would like people to know they are being above board and honest with their numbers, so I'd like to ask you all to let me have a copy of the survey or surveys you've taken them from including all the results and all questions that were asked. That way it would be possible to check your working and we can make sure there aren't any mishaps with the translation and everybody is reporting things properly and accurately. </blockquote>
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I'll be reproducing this letter over at www.fivechinesecrackers.com and will be only too happy to publish the actual figures from the poll once I have them. </blockquote>
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Thank you, </blockquote>
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5cc</blockquote>
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I'll also be tweeting them all with a link so they can see this (especially since Marco Giannegeli's email bounced). Now, of course I won't get a reply if there's anything amiss with the numbers but no reply doesn't have to mean there's anything shady going on. </div>
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The trouble is, there is probably nothing else that can be done to get to the bottom of these figures if I don't get a reply. The Sunday Express and the Daily Star on Sunday have pulled out of the PCC, so can't be pressured by anyone to produce anything. It might even have been difficult to make a PCC complaint on accuracy grounds anyway, since I have no counter evidence to argue the case with.</div>
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It seems there is no way to stop newspapers producing anything they like if they make their references difficult to check. It takes very little for these things to be taken up by political parties, mentioned unchallenged on national television and given the little boost of credibility that comes from changing the source from a low quality Sunday tabloid to an official government survey.</div>
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Of course, if anyone knows any different about where these figures can be found or what can be done, do let me know in the comments, on twitter or at fivechinesecrackers at gmail dot com.</div>
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*Unless someone with better Bulgarian than me can find them anywhere.</div>
Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-51945859404662665992013-02-13T22:45:00.000+00:002013-02-14T09:57:40.197+00:00Toby Young - not much better than Delingpole<br />
A while ago now (although it was <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2012/11/james-delingpole-not-very-good.html">in my last post here</a>) I looked at a James Delingpole column and went through the logical fallacies I spotted in it. I think I got most of them.<br />
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In it, I mentioned Toby Young, one of the other big professional Gumbys who earns at least some of his living spouting nonsense the media thinks someone should be representing, even if it's an idiot with a knotted hanky and wellies on standing in the middle of a field.<br />
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For larks, I decided to do the same thing with Young's latest Telegraph blog* as I did with Delingpole's and go through the logical fallacies. I must just miss the rock n roll lifestyle.<br />
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Toby Young's style is similar to Delingpole's, but it's far more convoluted, and way more about himself than attempting to appear objective. He uses similar kinds of fallacy in quite familiar ways. The strawmen lead up to a bait and switch and get topped of by question begging assertions. We know the drill.<br />
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The post, '<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100202482/pope-benedict-xvi-is-right-about-the-dangers-of-moral-relativism/">Pope Benedict XVI is right about the dangers of moral relativism</a>' tackles the big philosphical question of how humans can be expected to behave without the existence of objective morals. It's aiming a little bit higher than Delingpole's post about how we should, like, totally kill badgers.<br />
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It opens with a bit of blah about how Young doesn't agree with the Pope about things like using condoms or thinking homosexuality is an intrinsic moral evil, but militant atheism being like nazism? Well, that moral relativism thingy is a bit scary.<br />
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He says:<br />
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Now, I don't think that moral relativism inevitably leads to the sort of lawless behaviour we witnessed in England's cities in 2011 (or Nazi-ism), but I do think there's a link, something I blogged about at the time. </blockquote>
That's it. What can you say to 'I think this' other than 'Well done you'? It's <i><a href="http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Argument_by_assertion">argument by assertion</a></i>. Luckily, Toby does follow with something weighty to back his thoughts up - quotes from GK Chesterton and someone in the Brothers Karamazov.<br />
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That makes it a poor <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority">argument from authority</a></i>. Instead of these being Toby Young's thoughts, they're GK Chesterton's, and there's one from a character in a Dostoevsky novel. See, clever people think this stuff. In Russian novels too. Must be right.<br />
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The trouble is, it's not really clear what he's arguing here. Is he arguing that individuals need to base their morality on some objective foundation or they'll end up rioting, or society as a whole needs to? It's a bit of a muddle.<br />
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The person he links to for support is, naturally, himself. I'll not go through <a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100100532/moral-relativism-is-to-blame-for-the-riots-not-gang-culture/">his other blog post</a> in any real detail, because it's let down pretty much by the same thing as this abbreviated argument. Anyway - somehow, a lack of an objective set of morals contributed to the riots in 2011.<br />
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Whatever he means, he follows it up with a bunch of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)">cherrypicking</a></i> and <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man">strawmen</a></i>. Starting with:<br />
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Secular humanists always dismiss this point, believing that something vaguely recognisable as Judaeo-Christian moral values, prohibiting murder and so forth, can be rooted in Western traditions and institutions. (See John Rawls's Theory of Justice for the most robust statement of this position.) </blockquote>
This is <i>cherrypicking</i> because Young has chosen only one set of people who might object to his analysis. You don't have to be a secular humanist to spot the many flaws in it. There are also more people than John Rawls he could reference.<br />
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It's also a<i> strawman</i>, or rather two <i>strawmen</i>. Firstly, this is not necessarily what secular humanists believe. <a href="http://www.secularhumanism.org/index.php?section=library&page=sharris_26_3">Here's an article at secularhumanism.org</a> that argues against the notion that right and wrong are 'merely matters of social construction'.<br />
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Secondly, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Rawls#Principles_of_Justice">John Rawls's Theory of Justice</a> is probably a bit more complex than the single sentence Young uses to describe the position here.<br />
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We also have another kind of <i>argument from authority</i>, although rather than choosing an authority figure to back his argument up, he chooses a watered down version of something from someone high-falutin' to argue against. In doing so, he manages to avoid the are far easier objections it's possible to make to what he has said while still looking all clever and that.<br />
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Just for fun, here are some easy objections: Three quarters of the UK population defined themselves as following a religion in the 2011 census. Are we to believe the rioters came from the quarter with no religion, or that they're influenced more by 'the left' than their own religious teaching? Why didn't the fact that the majority of people in the UK accept an objective basis for morals prevent rioting?<br />
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<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_riots_in_London">Here's a list of riots in London</a>. The first on the list is from a time when society was much more explicitly religious - the massacre of the Jews at the coronation of Richard I. Here one set of people with an objective set of morals derived from their religion robbed, assaulted and murdered another set of people whose objective set of morals came from the same apparently objective source, but a different religion. In a riot. The names of these two groups of people make up the description 'Judaeo-Christian', which wasn't coined until the 19th Century. Before that, they weren't seen so much as sharing values.<br />
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But let's not think about any of those things, and go after a pretend argument from some imagined opponents instead.<br />
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But the problem with this approach is that if those principles are based on nothing more solid that a shared culture – an "overlapping consensus", in Rawls's words...</blockquote>
Of course, '<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overlapping_consensus">overlapping consensus</a>' is a little more complex than that, and I've already linked to a secular humanist argument against his conclusion. The thing is, this is where we build up to a change in argument:<br />
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...they become endangered by widespread immigration from countries with very different moral values to our own, such as Pakistan.</blockquote>
Here's the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait_and_switch">bait and switch</a></i>. What Young imagines he's argued up until now is that an objective basis for morals derived from something like religion will help people behave better. He hasn't even tried to demonstrate it would be any better at all in the face of immigration from places like Pakistan, but he shifts the argument to that as if he has already.<br />
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Plus, most of the people coming from Pakistan believe in an objective basis for moral values, and the country they've come from bases its laws on principles apparently derived from that objective religious basis. If Young is right, they should be perfectly well behaved in the first place and not pose any danger, and Pakistan should be nicely riot free. <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-17523041">Whoops</a>.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It also makes it difficult to condemn people who don't share our Judaeo-Christian heritage for engaging in practices we find abhorrent, such as female genital mutilation.</blockquote>
This is another <i>argument by assertion</i>. Of course, an objective basis for morality hasn't stopped many of the people who engage in this practice either, given that a large number of them have a set of apparently objective moral values and the practice has been condemned by lots of their religious leaders.<br />
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Secular liberals tend to be quite complacent about this, assuming their moral values are likely to prevail in the absence of any counter-vailing religious belief systems, but, as Pope Benedict pointed out, such naive optimism flies in the face of 20th Century history.</blockquote>
He appears to be assuming something strikingly similar to his imagined secular opponent here. How would non-secular moral values prevail in the face of counter-vailing belief systems? If he believes the answer is pretty, such naive optimism flies in the face of history going way back before the 20th Century. Like those riots in London where Christians massacred Jews in the days before religion was liberalised enough to allow the two to be mushed together to create one word.<br />
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Now, the final paragraph:<br />
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So, just to be clear, I don't share the Pope's morality – and his attempt to base his conservative version of Catholicism on what he called the "natural moral order" doesn't bear much scrutiny. But I think he was bang on about the moral vacuum at the heart of atheism. Secular humanists like Dawkins imagine that their moral values go hand-in-hand with their antipathy to religion – that they're sanctioned by reason and science – but there's no logical connection between atheism and liberalism.</blockquote>
All I'm going to say to this is: Really? You're going to use <i>Richard Dawkins</i> as an example of how wishy washy secular liberalism is weak in the face of morality of people coming from countries like Pakistan. <i>Richard Dawkins</i>?<br />
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On the contrary, atheism is as likely to lead to Stalin's Russia or Mao's China as it is to a socialist Shangri-La. </blockquote>
Well, yeah. And theism is just as likely to lead to the Spanish Inquisition and human sacrifice as it is to a sweetly deferential society where everyone knows their place and is lovely to each other. Your point is?<br />
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The problem for atheists that has never been satisfactorily addressed is that it's very, very hard to find a solid foundation for any moral values in the absence of a belief in God. Reason and science alone simply won't cut it.</blockquote>
This problem has been satisfactorily addressed a gazillion times over. Just Google it.<br />
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It isn't difficult at all to find such a foundation. Toby should just be able to ask him bloody self. What's the foundation of his moral values? On what basis does he himself say homosexuality isn't evil or that it's okay to use condoms or that rioting is wrong? How do we decide which bloody 'objective' morality is the right one?<br />
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This whole article is just one great question begging exercise. And a weak one at that. And like Delingpole's it's just...not very good.<br />
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Hang on - I should have summed things up with the words of a great writer to make my post look super clever. Here goes. As a great writer said - a dog turd covered in frosting is not a wedding cake; it is simply a frosted dog turd.<br />
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*It was the last one when I started this post last night. I'm not bloody starting again.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-50714522264240692032012-11-05T15:40:00.002+00:002012-11-05T15:46:09.800+00:00James Delingpole - not very good<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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A few weeks ago, I joined the Blocked by James Delingpole club on Twitter. It's not a very select club, it must be said. <a href="http://storify.com/ellispritchard/jamesdelingpole-gets-confused">The criteria for entry seems to be disagreeing with him</a>, whether or not you use the sort of colourful language I did. You can even get in if your name's not down and you're wearing jeans and trainers.<br />
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Delingpole is one of those professional Gumbys that are employed because they represent a point of view that people in the media feel needs to be expressed by someone, even if it's<a href="http://youtu.be/T7GBwO3_czc"> an idiot in wellies and a knotted hanky standing in a field expressing it in a stupid voice</a>.<br />
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<a name='more'></a>Delingpole's pet subject is climate change, which he is sceptical of. On climate change he's not worth paying any more attention to than a flat-earther or a young earth creationist or one of those guys who think Larry Hagman is a cyborg from the future sent to bring about zombie armageddon from infected pizza. I'm sure that if it really did emerge that climate change was not happening or was definitely not caused by humans, we'd find out from <a href="http://youtu.be/vuQLvK6kxeU">someone a lot better with reason and evidence than this guy</a>.<br />
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Recently though, I found out he talks about more than the one subject he's most famous for. I got myself blocked by him on twitter for wading into <a href="http://robinince.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/this-pointless-spat/">an exchange between him and Robin Ince</a> and pointing out he was wrong to say there was only one possible interpretation of something Ince had said. That led to my discovery of <a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/author/james-delingpole/">Delingpole's Spectator blog</a>, which led me to tweet:<br />
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<a href="https://twitter.com/5ChinCrack/status/261498129445158912">James Delingpole's articles are great aren't they? Like case study examples for a list of logical fallacies.</a></blockquote>
So, let's have a look at his latest column. I've picked the latest because I like to be cutting edge on the blog I don't update for months on end.<br />
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"<a href="http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/james-delingpole/8742101/why-on-earth-do-we-think-badgers-are-charismatic/">Why on earth do we think badgers are charismatic?</a>" is about badgers. It opens:<br />
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Did you know that the badger is one of the most charismatic creatures in our countryside? It says so on an advisory leaflet produced by Scottish Natural Heritage called ‘Badgers And The Law’.</blockquote>
This is <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)">cherrypicking</a></i>. Delingpole has chosen to base his article on one sentence from one leaflet he tells us nothing more about. This leaves things open to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Lying_by_omission"><i>lying by omission</i></a>.<br />
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It's also plain old wrong. The line about badgers being charismatic comes from a leaflet produced by the Scottish Executive and The Partnership for Action Against Wildlife Crime called '<a href="http://www.snh.org.uk/wildlifecrimeschools/documents/Badgers%20Leaflet.pdf">Badgers and the Law<b> in Scotland</b></a>'. (Remember the 'in Scotland' bit I emphasised there. It's important). Scottish Natural Heritage does have a section on its website titled '<a href="http://www.snh.gov.uk/about-scotlands-nature/wildlife-and-you/badgers/badgers-and-the-law/">Badgers and the Law</a>' but it doesn't include the 'charismatic' line, instead calling badgers 'popular and familiar' in an earlier section.*</div>
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This opening gambit is followed by two paragraphs of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man"><i>straw men</i></a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reductio_ad_absurdum"><i>reductio ad absurdum</i></a>, in which he creates poor jokes from several ridiculous reasons for why someone might describe badgers as 'charismatic' instead of the most likely, which is that they were thinking along the lines of the Wikipedia definition, "<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charisma">compelling attractiveness or charm that can inspire devotion in others</a>".</div>
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This is all done to create a great big <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem"><i>ad hominem</i></a>, in which we're invited to dismiss the idea of badgers being charismatic because of several pretend qualities of the person who said they were that are entirely speculative and made up.</div>
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Having devoted three paragraphs to proving that anyone who thinks badgers are charismatic are stupidy-stupids, he goes on to say:</div>
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Look, for the record — and more importantly, for the benefit of any homicidal animal rights nutcases reading this — I too like badgers. But I also like hedgehogs, lapwings, dairy cattle and human beings. And I really can’t see why, just because Mr Brock has got an engaging stripy face and a poodle-haired guitarist from a high-camp 1970s rock band really rates him, he deserves special protection rights which trump those of all his competitors in the ecosystem.</blockquote>
This is where the <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)"><i>cherrypicking</i></a> pays off with some nice <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Lying_by_omission">lying by </a></i><span style="color: #0000ee;"><i>omission</i></span>. The leaflet very clearly explains why there are laws that protect badgers, since it's entirely about laws to prevent <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badger-baiting">badger-baiting</a>. This explanation comes in the sentence immediately following the one Delingpole quotes. It's very clear, but he completely leaves it out and gives us an <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Argument_from_incredulity.2FLack_of_imagination">argument from personal incredulity</a></i> instead.<br />
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It's not even as if badgers are that unusual in having laws to protect them against cruel sports (see laws to prevent harming other animals by bear-baiting, bull-baiting, dog fighting, cock fighting, hare coursing, hunting with dogs and so on).<br />
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Then, Delingpole gets his earlier <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)">cherrypicking</a></i> to pay off again:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
One of the more dangerous misconceptions of the environmental movement is the notion — plucked from the ether by influential ecologists such as Howard T. and Eugene Odum, and based on no evidence whatsoever — that the natural world is a stable system. Freed from man’s unwelcome intrusion, the theory goes, nature will return to a state of perfect balance. </blockquote>
This is a <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch">bait and switch</a></i>. The leaflet the article has been about up until now has nothing to do with this theory, and doesn't mention it once. By quickly shifting the subject without warning, Delingpole has made it look as though there's a leaflet about laws protecting badgers because of a theory about the natural world being a stable system. Instead, there's a leaflet about laws protecting badgers that exist to prevent a cruel sport that harms and kills them.<br />
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This <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch">bait and switch</a></i> is followed quickly by another, bigger one:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
You only have to look at the current badger problem to realise this is nonsense. Apart from the Ford Mondeo the badger has no natural predator, so since in the early 1980s legislation made it illegal to kill badgers, their population has rocketed to unsustainable levels. The consequences have been disastrous: TB in both badgers and cattle has soared; hedgehog and ground-nesting bird populations have been devastated; farmers’ livelihoods have been destroyed; vast sums of taxpayers’ money — the figure last year was £100 million — have been squandered; and Britain is now at risk of having an EU ban on all its beef and dairy exports, at a cost to the economy of more than £2 billion a year.</blockquote>
This paragraph does a lot of work.<br />
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For a start, he's switched to moving toward the discussion of badger culling, as if the opposition to it is based on the idea that badgers are charismatic, taken from a leaflet that has nothing to do with badger culling at all - and the idea that humans shouldn't interfere with the environment, which he chucked in apropos of nothing in such a way that could make it look as though it came from the same leaflet.<br />
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It's also quite possibly another <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lie#Lying_by_omission">lie by omission</a>.</i> The laws to protect badgers (actually from 1973 and <a href="http://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1992/51/introduction/enacted">updated in 1992</a>) include exemptions for anyone killing a badger "if he shows that his action was necessary for the purpose of preventing serious damage to land, crops, poultry or any other form of property." It also allows for the granting of licences to kill badgers to prevent the spread of disease.** We simply do not have laws based on the idea that humans should not interfere with their environment.<br />
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Finally for this paragraph, we have the <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_hoc_ergo_propter_hoc">post hoc ergo propter hoc</a></i> fallacy - saying that because something happened after something else, the thing that came first must have caused the thing that came second.<br />
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This is what makes it my favourite bit of the article. If you want to disprove the idea that laws against killing badgers described in the leaflet Delingpole quotes have led to the crisis in bovine TB, all you'd have to do is find a place with the same laws that is TB free.<br />
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You won't have to look very far. The leaflet is from Scotland. <a href="http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Topics/farmingrural/Agriculture/animal-welfare/Diseases/disease/tuberculosis/guidance/free">Scotland has been declared TB free</a>. That's why the proposed cull would only deal with England. In a desire to find the best quote to <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)">cherrypick</a></i> to make his opposition look stupidy-stupid, Delingpole has chosen a leaflet that goes a long way toward destroying his own argument. That's just lovely.<br />
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The next couple of paragraphs address the science behind the arguments for and against a badger cull, and they're extraordinary in that they do it by not quoting the science or linking to it at all, bar one single <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cherry_picking_(fallacy)">cherrypicked</a></i> unclear and unsourced statistic.<br />
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All we have is an <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_authority">argument from authority</a></i> (the Evironment Secretary knows what he's on about because he's tabled over 600 questions on the subject) mixed with a bunch of <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem">ad-hominems</a></i> (the opposition to the bans are a 'ragbag of bleeding-heart celebs, eco-terrorists, opportunist politicians, left-liberal media outfits and activist scientists') and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_from_ignorance#Argument_from_incredulity.2FLack_of_imagination"><i>arguing from personal incredulity</i></a>. Without a hint of irony or self awareness, he actually says:<br />
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Sure, they’ve managed to come up with any number of superficially plausible ‘scientific’ reasons as to why culls don’t work. But as we’ve seen with ‘climate change’, if you’ve decided in advance what your conclusion is, it’s amazing how easy it is to manipulate the ‘evidence’ into saying whatever it is you’d like it to say.</blockquote>
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The real reason for opposition is ideological. The proof is because Delingpole says so, mainly backed up by evidence taken from a leaflet outlining laws against mistreating badgers from a place where nobody's said a badger cull is necessary because it's officially TB free. Well done, sir.</div>
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Then:</div>
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Once, in the days before Christianity was replaced by Gaia-worship, we instinctively understood that the natural world was man’s dominion.</blockquote>
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This and what follows is an <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_tradition">appeal to tradition</a></i> (the only reason offered for why 'the days before Gaia worship' might be better is that we used to do it) and, well, fantasy (our official state religion is a particular branch of protestant Christianity) - peppered with <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem">ad-hominems</a></i> ('bunny huggers') and <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man">straw men</a></i> ('why should the life of a badger be considered any less valuable and meaningful than that of a dairy farmer?') but essentially it's another great big <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch">bait and switch</a></i>. </div>
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Up until now, he's been talking about a particular human intervention into the environment. Now, he starts talking about them in general. It's quite possible to believe that some interference in the environment is acceptable or even desirable without believing that culling badgers is the best thing to do to prevent bovine TB. So not only is this a <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bait-and-switch" style="font-style: italic;">bait and switch</a>, it's also a <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Straw_man">straw man</a></i>.</div>
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Perhaps most fittingly, the conclusion is this:</div>
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I’ve little doubt that, given the opportunity, Mr Brock would most heartily agree with me. ‘Give me a nice peaceful death, humanely gassed in my sett, any day, than a slow, painful demise, shivering and emaciated from tuberculosis.’ Unfortunately, though, I can’t prove this because unlike the charismatic, waistcoat-wearing, stripy-faced fellow in Brian May’s imagination, Mr Brock isn’t an honorary human. He’s just a badger.</blockquote>
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Of course, Mister Brock isn't 'just a badger', he's a fictional personification of one. So Delingpole finishes an article that opens by pointing out how stupid it is to personify animals and give them the qualities you'd like them to have in order to decide what to do in a crisis by personifying an animal and giving it the qualities he'd like it to have in order to decide what to do in a crisis, using an imaginary quote he made up himself.</div>
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This kind of stuff...it's really very bad. It surely doesn't deserve publication, unless of course you're publishing something designed to reinforce prejudices rather than actually examine issues with any sort of intellectual honesty.</div>
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Perhaps we give these professional Gumbys' opinions too much credence by arguing against them, guaranteeing their continued employment. But we have to keep exposing them as not very clever or good at making proper arguments. You know why? Toby Young runs a<i> school</i>. </div>
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Imagine what might happen if there weren't people to point and laugh.</div>
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<a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/cartoon/2012/mar/16/1?CMP=twt_gu#_">What we'd get is this</a>, on a bigger scale.</div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">*This could be deliberate. The omission of the 'in Scotland' draws attention away from the fact that we're talking about a leaflet covering laws that apply to somewhere that is bovine TB free. 'Scottish Natural Heritage' also sounds much more wishy-washy and environmentalist than 'The Scottish Executive'. Of course, it could also be a mistake. With Delingpole that possibility is never far away.</span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">**Of course, there's always the possibility that this isn't a lie because Delingpole has never bothered to look at the legislation he's arguing against, or misunderstood it when he did. With Delingpole that possibility is never far away.</span></div>
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Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-35359606338495932512012-08-16T21:05:00.000+01:002012-08-16T21:11:46.961+01:00Frumpy A-Levels! 5 bits of advice for those who didn't do so well<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5lXtjYfKYZJagq4T9pSjRVO825vROq466iOL7cmnfT1X60CWo4iTA3IMEb0J1-xnV_GTJczvvXtar5oC6b0QkZYybY9El4dGCfMOqn-Ygy5nI_m6OcbMgMP_1QCWxdWcbZSiE/s1600/sexyalevels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="217" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi5lXtjYfKYZJagq4T9pSjRVO825vROq466iOL7cmnfT1X60CWo4iTA3IMEb0J1-xnV_GTJczvvXtar5oC6b0QkZYybY9El4dGCfMOqn-Ygy5nI_m6OcbMgMP_1QCWxdWcbZSiE/s400/sexyalevels.jpg" width="400" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Via the late <a href="http://sexyalevels.tumblr.com/">sexyalevels</a></i></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
So, today was A-Level results day.<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/08/level-results-and-leaping-home-counties-teenagers"> If you picked up a newspaper you'd have seen the pictures of pretty girls jumping</a> that decorate the occasion like tinsel at Christmas. Look at them, all excited because they got what they want. Aren't they lucky?<br />
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But not everyone's so lucky. You won't see any pictures of kids whose results look more like the name of a well known cable news channel thinking 'shit, what do I do now?' in the papers.<br />
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If you were one of those people today, you're not alone. I experienced A-Level results day three times. At none of them did I jump for joy outside the front of my school. So here's some friendly advice from some twat who has a blog and is desperately trying to fight off incipient middle-aged spread. Like a <i>boss.</i><br />
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<ol>
<li><b>You can always retake.</b><br /><br />It's a cliche because it's true: life is not a sprint. You might be looking at your results and dreading the idea of watching your friends go ahead while you now have to fart about with younger kids, but seriously, don't worry about it. One day you'll have friends ten years younger than you, and ten years older - maybe more. One or two years is nothing.</li><br />
<li><b>Don't rush into anything.</b><br /><br />So you might have dodgy A-Level results but via clearing you can get into some place you've never heard of doing a subject that's never occurred to you before. Great!<br /><br />No, not great. Bad idea, my friend. You could end up finding out the place is rubbish and the course is a joke while you're half way through your first boring year there.<br /><b><br /></b></li><br />
<li><b>Don't be afraid to start all over again.</b><br /><br />You might feel like you've painted yourself into a corner, or that you've wasted the years you spent on the subjects you didn't like so much and haven't done well at. <br /><br />You haven't. You spent your time learning these subjects weren't for you, and that's a good thing. You'll only be wasting your time if you carry on bashing your head against them. It's okay to put them all to one side.<br /><br />This leads neatly on to...<br /><b><br /></b></li>
<li><b>Don't choose your subjects based purely on what job they might get you.</b><br />It's more important to enjoy what you're doing. If you're picking a bunch of shitty subjects you hate in the hope they'll get you a dream job, you're kidding yourself. You'll have a miserable time and you might well end up getting the job and hating it, because guess what? You still have to do all those shitty things you hated doing at school and now it's your job.<br /><br />Imagine how much you'd feel like you'd painted yourself into a corner if you were five years into a career as you slowly realise it's not what what you imagined, it's not going to get any better and now you have a mortgage and a partner to think about. Who's in a corner now?<br /><b><br /></b></li>
<li><b>Education is its own reward.</b><br /><br />It is. It bloody is. When I finally went to University at 28 to study English Literature, people constantly asked me, "what's that gonna get you?"<br /><br />I never said, "It's gonna get me an English degree, bitches!" but I should have. Does it help me with my job? A bit. It helps with this blog too. But I'm re-reading 'The Shining' right now and enjoying it a lot more than I did before I'd studied Gothic Fiction and all that good stuff. I get much more involved in what I read, and I loved doing that in the first place.<br /><br />There's no way I can see 'knowing a load more stuff about things you enjoy' could be a bad thing. Unless you enjoy Nazism or blowing things up or pushing little kids over or something.</li>
</ol>
It's easy to think the bottom's fallen out of your world on results day. You can feel like you've buggered up your whole future. But you know what? You probably haven't. A-Levels take two years, and you've got - what - another 60 or 70 of those to go?<br />
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Take a deep breath. You'll be alright.<br />
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<br />Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com7tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-87712497063508366252012-07-17T13:36:00.003+01:002012-07-17T13:36:55.587+01:00No offence<br />
I told my first ever joke in front of an audience when I was eight years old. I was at my mate's ninth birthday party, and all the other kids had gone home with their parents. We were the only kids left, and our parents and aunts and uncles were busy boozing in the dining room while the two of us watched The Two Ronnies and something I think was The Comedians in the front room, until we thought we'd go and wow the grownups with the jokes we'd just seen. It was going to be great.<br />
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I opened with a joke about a black man on top of a burning building who refuses to let firemen rescue him because he don't trust no white man. In the end, the firemen get out their big trampoline thing they hold and call for him to jump into it. The punchline is that since he don't trust none a dem whiteys, he'll only jump if dey all put dat dere ting on de floor. I did it complete with comedy West Indian accent and asides involving kids marching around the bottom of the building singing, 'Hot, chocolate - drinking chocolate,' everything.<br />
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Maybe you can imagine what happened next. Horrified, gape mothed adults. Quiet explanations of how we shouldn't really make that sort of joke. One inappropriate uncle trying to stifle his giggles. Confused tears. Early bedtime.<br />
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If that's what you imagined - <i>bzzzt!</i> Wrong! I got enough laughs for us to both launch into telling Ronnie Corbett's monologue and bicker over what asides were important to the story, which got more laughs. Then we went to play Star Wars figures and my aunt slipped on her arse on the way home.<br />
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This was 1982. I'd taken the gag from a a prime-time TV show. The guy who told it had only just stopped hosting a children's programme, and he went on to be in East Enders. There was no controversy. The papers didn't mention it. This was normal. <a href="http://youtu.be/8WanOpp4Kvw">We liked that kind of thing</a> on our TVs back then. That shit was hi-larious.<br />
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But everything changed, to the point that the 70s and early 80s seem weird and otherworldly now. Like an old episode of the Twilight Zone where some bloke wakes up and everyone is completely unthinkingly being an insufferable shit to each other and they all think he's weird because he doesn't call anyone a coon. They even made a whole detective series out of the concept. One reason for those days seeming so weird is the rise of alternative comedy.<br />
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Alternative comedy arose from the conviction that it's possible to create funny stuff without targeting people weaker than you - without being sexist, racist, homophobic or disablist. The old mainstream comics looked down on the alternative comedians as po-faced killjoys at the time. They didn't see what could be so harmful about a joke. Jokes aren't serious. None of them apparently had a racist bone in their bodies. Jim Davidson's Chalky was just a thick character with a great big knob who happened to be black (Davidson apparently being the victim of a bizarre coincidence where those were the racist stereotypes of the time - D'oh!). Anyway - it's just a joke for Christ's sake. People should be allowed to joke about anything. You can't censor jokes. And so on.<br />
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In the end, they lost. They slowly disappeared from our screens except for fronting the odd game show. You probably wouldn't see any of them at your local comedy club. Some of them still made a good living touring and one played almost exclusively at his own club, but they lost the spotlight.<br />
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Alternative comedy thrived, but gradually something got lost. It became difficult to be transgressive once people got used to jokes about sex and bodily functions, and being transgressive can get big laughs. With the traditional targets removed from the table, jokes attacking people outside the group got much harder. For a while some comics just attacked people with ginger hair, but that got old quickly and was never very good in the first place.<br />
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Still, it was possible to tell those old school style attack gags. By using irony to distance themselves, some comics managed to get the thrill of the naughty back into their sets. If the audience knows the comic doesn't mean the nasty bit in the joke, they can laugh not with the joke, but at it - and maybe even question their response. Like, 'ha ha, that bloke just did a joke about gypsies and that's not right - ooh, should I have laughed at that?' rather than, 'ha ha, aren't gypsies disgusting'.<br />
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Or at least, that's the theory.<br />
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Every few months, there seems to be a Twitter storm about how some comic or other has said something about disabled children or told a hilarious joke about women being raped that someone in the audience has taken exception to. People pile in, the controversy grows, the comic defends themself and others jump in to defend them. You can't censor humour, they say. They're just pushing the boundaries of what you think is safe and making you ask questions. You can joke about anything. Nothing's off limits in comedy. It's just a joke, for Christ's sake. Nobody's actually saying rape itself is okay.<br />
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I can't help thinking - haven't we been here before?<br />
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Of course, there are differences. The older comedians back in the 80s never argued from some rarified position of artistic purity as if they were casting pearls - pearls! in front of people who barely deserve to receive such wisdom as can only be imparted through the delicate medium of a joke following a one-liner about old people doing a fart. They're also coming less from a position of ignorance than the old comics did. But we're still in the position where we have some people saying it's not right to joke about certain things and some comics telling them to lighten up and getting angry about being challenged in the first place.<br />
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The thing is, if you're a comic breaking taboos and pushing barriers you run the risk of breaking someone's barrier. Otherwise you're not pushing them at all.<br />
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It's at the point where barriers get broken that two opposing social taboos collide. On the one hand, there's the taboo that says you shouldn't make light of rape/people with cancer/disabled children/whatever. On the other, there's the taboo that says if you're not holding the microphone at a comedy show, you shut the fuck up unless you're spoken to or you're laughing. And don't attempt to restrict the comic's freedom of speech and artistic expression by telling them not to joke about certain subjects. Especially if you weren't even there.<br />
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Each month's twitterstorm around whatever offensive thing some comic said are really arguments about whose taboo trumps the other's. The offended audience member and their supporters are saying it's more important that the comic involved joked about their taboo subject (or did so badly) than it is to keep quiet. The comic and their supporters are usually arguing the opposite, unless we're talking purely about whether or not the audience member understood or is telling the truth.<br />
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The comic has freedom of speech. The audience does not have the right to not be offended.<br />
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But surely, the audience has freedom of speech too. If you're a comic and you're arguing that the audience should shut the fuck up no matter how strongly they feel about what you've said, you're not really championing free speech.<br />
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The whole point of stand-up comedy is that the audience participates. That's where the excitement is. The success or faliure of any given comic performance rides on the audience participating in the way the comic wants them to, primarily by laughing. Sometimes you really do want to take away an audience member's freedom to say what they want. If some drunk is shouting bullshit or getting aggressive for no reason, nobody will mind if they're thrown out.<br />
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But if the audience doesn't laugh, tough luck. If someone calls out because you've genuinely upset them, tough luck. You failed to win that audience member over. You made them feel so strongly about whatever it was you said that they fought against their social conditioning and spoke up when they knew they shouldn't and knew a whole room full of people might be against them. For most people, that's not an easy thing to do. And with some subjects, you can bet that for every person who speaks out, there are more who feel the same way but keep quiet. Not everyone who speaks out is deliberately being offended for attention, even if some are.<br />
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If you're a comic and this happens to you, you have three options, and they're exactly the same options as you have if your material's not making anyone laugh:<br />
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1. Ditch what hasn't worked<br />
2. Rework it until it does<br />
3. Keep going on with it. You're sure it's only troublemakers who are speaking out and they're wrong.<br />
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There is no option where you stop people being upset by force of will, or by the force of your unbridled genius.<br />
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Which option you pick depends partly on who your target was. If you were punching up, at something more powerful than you, it's option 3 all the way.<br />
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If you weren't, and you were getting laughs from joking about people less powerful, what you do depends on where you are on the comedy ladder. The closer you are to the bottom doing five minute open spots in rooms in the back of pubs to audiences made up mostly of other comics and your mates, the more likely option number 1 is for you. The closer to the top, touring theatres with your own show, the more you're able to pick option 3. But wherever you are on the ladder, don't kid yourself that you're Lenny Bruce or Bill Hicks or George Carlin or Louis CK. You're probably not. There are only four of those guys, and only one is still alive.<br />
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If you're at the top of the comedy ladder and you pick number 3, you can legitimately make the argument that people should know what you're like and should stay away if they think they won't like it. If you go to see a comedian who's known to be edgy and offensive, don't be surprised when they're edgy and offensive.<br />
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At the same time, if you're a comic who built your act around being edgy and offensive, don't be surprised when your act actually offends someone. It's what you were playing with when you started. <br />
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(Plus, even if you're at the top, lots of people get tickets bought for them, or go to a show not knowing who the hell you are. Don't assume everyone is aware of the groundbreaking genius of the person on the poster).<br />
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It's all a question of free speech. The comic should definitely have the freedom to joke about whatever they want, but the audience is not obliged to laugh, or to shut up and like it. If someone is really and genuinely upset, they have the right to say so.<br />
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These days they have the ability to go away and make that widely known, which makes things more difficult. It can be really harsh for comics trying to make difficult new stuff work. It can easily create problems if someone misunderstands, mishears or misrepresents what the comic said, and it's ridiculous to judge an entire performance by looking at one out of context gag. But you can't stop people sharing when they've been upset. You can only exercise your freedom to explain or argue back, or ignore them and carry on.<br />
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In the end, if enough people in audiences decide they've had enough of one type of joke or another this kind of stuff could go the way of the ginger gag, slowly disappearing because they become hack subjects, their familiarity removing their naughty transgressiveness. I've been to a few low level, mainly open spot gigs recently. At a couple, some of the comics had rape or paedophilia or cancer material somewhere in their set that died on its arse - and more than one of them berated the audience for not laughing. When everyone's doing this stuff, it's not really transgressive any more. It's just old.<br />
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If that doesn't happen, and if enough people are genuinely upset by certain types of material and stop going to comedy clubs or complain, there's always the possibility that bookers will listen to audience criticism and stop booking certain types of act (or at least those who rely heavily on certain types of material). <a href="http://bit.ly/Ny8Vlz">Sometimes this isn't honest, or special interest groups representing very powerful targets can interfere</a>, which is no doubt a bad thing. But targets aren't always powerful, and it's not always bad when you stop seeing certain types of material.<br />
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I don't know about you, but I don't much miss Chalky.<br />Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-4758745327037890902012-06-27T22:28:00.001+01:002012-06-27T22:38:34.027+01:00The more things change...<br />
Hey, did you know one of the classic tabloid PC Gone Mad urban legends had cropped up again recently? I had no idea, but a couple of months ago, the old favourite 'can't even sing Baa Baa Black Sheep any more' story got a brand new airing in the Daily Mail.<br />
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There's something new in this latest version. I hope you're sitting down for this, because it might be a bit shocking for you. Ready?<br />
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This time, the Mail reports the story honestly. Well, almost.<br />
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PC Gone Mad stories in the papers usually go like this:<br />
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<li><span style="background-color: white;">Bold claim in the headline about something being BANNED because of PC Gone Mad. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white;">Lede that either restates the headline or waters it down a bit by saying something like 'a council has BANNED...'. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white;">Quotes from people the hack has rung up to ask what they think of the thing being BANNED because of PC Gone Mad. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white;">List of other things that have allegedly been BANNED in the past that leave out any facts that cast doubt on those cases. </span></li>
<li><span style="background-color: white;">A quote from someone explaining nothing has been banned and it's all a misunderstanding in the last couple of paragraphs.</span></li>
</ul>
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The headline of this one is: '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126037/Baa-Baa-Little-Sheep-How-private-school-abandoned-nursery-rhymes-lyrics-Easter-sparking-political-correctness-accusations.html">Baa Baa Little Sheep: How private school abandoned nursery rhyme's lyrics for Easter show sparking political correctness accusations</a>'.<br />
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There's only one school mentioned there in the headline. It's made clear that the school is private. The lyrics are abandoned rather than BANNED. There are only accusations of political correctness rather than a bold statement.<br />
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The story itself breaks the traditional template too. It's clearly presented as being about how parents saw their kids singing 'Baa Baa Little Sheep', accused the school of political correctness and got a response saying it's nothing of the sort. There are no Philip Davies style buffoons being quoted - just parents and the school. There's even a quote from a parent who seems to accept the change isn't because of PC Gone Mad. The response from the school is not buried in the final paragraphs, but is made part of the story.<br />
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If other PC Gone Mad stories were set out like this, they'd never cause the requisite outrage or find themselves <i>bona fide</i> urban legends. They'd never lead to stories like this one, where people see a change and instantly assume it's because of not offending black people.<br />
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There's an interesting quote from a parent, who says:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
It’s good they want children to think about what different words mean. But this is one nursery rhyme I personally don’t think should be used because it could be so easily misconstrued as political correctness gone mad. They have got to be a bit smarter about it.</blockquote>
Unfortunately for this parent, even if you leave Baa Baa Black Sheep alone you can run into trouble. Back in 2009, <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2009/02/what-do-we-do-with-drunken-sailor_6427.html">I looked at a similar story about playfully changed lyrics to 'What shall we do with the drunken sailor</a>?' Any change of any thing at any time that could be slightly conceivably because of Political Correctness will be accused of that anyway.<br />
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I did say the story is only almost honest though, and here's why. The story keeps one traditional PC Gone Mad story technique. It lists other instances of Baa Baa Black Sheep being banned because of PC Gone Mad while leaving out important details. Important details like how the song wasn't banned because of PC Gone Mad.<br />
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<a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4782856.stm">The story it mentions from 2006 was actually almost identical to this one</a>. Two nurseries sang 'Baa Baa Baa Rainbow Sheep', got accused of PC Gone Mad and pointed out they were singing different words to teach kids vocabulary. The quotes around the 'equal opportunities' here are <a href="http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=1017">mendacity quotes</a>.<br />
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The 'Some children in London have been taught ‘Baa Baa Green Sheep’ line leaves out quite a lot. This is actually a reference to the original Baa Baa Black Sheep PC Gone Mad story from the 80s, which was reported as being a ban by Hackney Council when in fact it was based on one nursery the council never even ran.*<br />
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The 'And in 1999, Birmingham City Council said the rhyme should not be taught at all because it was racially negative' line <a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/600470.stm">leaves out some vital information</a>, which is the Council had been given some guidance by an external agency that was so dusty and old it had forgotten about it, and as soon as an inspector mentioned it once to one nursery, they scrapped it.<br />
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Still, this is a far more honestly presented PC Gone Mad story than I'm used to. Who knows why? It could be because the school is private so there's less of an incentive for the writer to instantly disbelieve the head. It could be because past stories have been debunked, but that's unlikely since a few of them have been rehashed as true here (unless they were added later by a sub). Who knows?<br />
<br />
Whatever the reason, it's good to see the Mail not instantly jerk its knee about any story involving not saying the word 'black'.<br />
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* This is a pretty interesting story about how myths spread in its own right. Apparently back in 1986, a hack at the Star uncovered a nursery in Hackney (Beevers) that wasn't singing the traditional lyrics to 'Baa Baa Black Sheep'.<br />
<br />
The hack contacted the council's press officer, who looked into the story, realised the nursery was run by parents and not the council, and advised making a statement that whatever the nursery was doing was up to them. The council leader changed this to say that although the nursery was independent, the council supported the ban.<br />
<br />
This made the story explode, since it gave the impression that there was a widely supported ban on the nursery rhyme for being racist.<br />
<br />
But, shortly after, a hack on the local paper contacted Beevers nursery himself. Turns out there was no ban after all.<br />
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The story was still picked up by other papers who reported it as true, and the Mail uncovered a similar ban by Haringey Council (that turned out to be fabricated, natch) and the story continued to grow.<br />
<br />
The twist in the tale is that after this story was widely reported, some people in nurseries thought there really was a call to ban 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' because of racism, and actually stopped singing it.<br />
<br />
In his campaign for the 1987 General Election, Neil Kinnock even attempted to debunk the myth when he visited a nursery and sang nursery rhymes, including 'Baa Baa Black Sheep'. It didn't work though, and we're here a quarter of a century later with people still assuming the ban is widespread.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loony_left">There's more detail about the original story here</a>, and in Julian Petley's '<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Culture-Wars-Media-British-Left/dp/0748619178/ref=sr_1_9?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1255984194&sr=1-9">Culture Wars: The Media and the British Left</a>', which looks at how a lot of classic 80s PC Gone Mad stories we still hear about today got their start. They're not all true you know.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-90679802226426705912012-05-03T21:42:00.001+01:002012-05-03T21:42:46.019+01:00Crackers SMASH!I just got a new phone. I synced my Five Chinese Crackers account with it, and then deleted the Picasa pictures because I didn't want them taking up disk space.<div>
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It seems I deleted my entire Picasa account - and every photo I ever put on this blog. </div>
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I are an arse.</div>
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Looks like I'll be bringing forward those plans to give the place a new lick of paint.</div>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-27371161191406490012012-05-01T12:41:00.002+01:002012-05-09T12:01:20.040+01:00What about the existing evidence on Hunt?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<br />
Less than a year ago, John Yates resigned from the Metropolitan Police over his handling of the Met's investigation into phone hacking.<br />
<br />
One of the major criticisms that led to his resignation was, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/jul/12/john-yates-phone-hacking-questions">as Nick Davies said before Yates went</a>:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Amid a political storm, Yates agreed to look at new evidence to see if it [<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/05/magazine/05hacking-t.html?pagewanted=all">The New York Times article of September 2010</a>] justified any further prosecution. Again, he has a series of difficulties. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
First, it is difficult to understand why, knowing that Scotland Yard had a mass of material seized from Mulcaire and knowing this had never been properly searched, he ruled that only "new" evidence should be explored.</blockquote>
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<a name='more'></a>There were bin bags full of 11,000 pages of evidence that Yates already had, but he took just 8 hours to decide none of it mattered. It looked just a little bit like he'd deliberately tried to push people away from it, like a traffic cop saying, "move along, there's nothing to see here," as a wookiee in a Hawaiian shirt did skateboard tricks behind him.<br />
<br />
In the end, he called this decision "<a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/phone-hacking/8627599/John-Yates-Phone-hacking-investigation-was-a-cock-up.html">pretty crap</a>".<br />
<br />
Yesterday, <a href="http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201212/cmhansrd/cm120430/debtext/120430-0001.htm#1204305000004">David Cameron made a petulant appearance in the Commons</a> after being summoned by the speaker. Ed Milliband asked him if he'd be investigating whether Jeremy Hunt has been in breach of the ministerial code, since Hunt is responsible for the actions of his advisers.<br />
<br />
Cameron said no - he would wait until Hunt appears in front of the Leveson inquiry. Curiously, he said that one reason for this is:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Let me repeat that what we have is a judge-led inquiry, witnesses required to give evidence under oath, full access to papers and records, and cross-examination by barristers, all live on television. There is nothing this tough or this rigorous that the civil service or the independent adviser could provide.</blockquote>
Which doesn't say much for his faith in Hunt telling the truth and being up front without being compelled to. He also said:<br />
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I will not wait until the end of the Leveson inquiry to take action if action is needed. If new evidence emerges from the Leveson inquiry that the ministerial code has been broken, I will either seek the advice of Sir Alex Allan or take action directly...</blockquote>
If <i>new</i> evidence emerges, he will take action. If <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/david-cameron/9237325/David-Cameron-has-not-seen-Jeremy-Hunts-News-Corporation-emails-and-texts.html">this, from yesterday's Telegraph</a> is anything to go by, he hasn't seen the existing evidence yet.<br />
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You could be forgiven for mistaking the guy on his left for a skateboarding wookiee.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-4984018328479684482012-04-27T11:33:00.003+01:002012-09-03T14:49:18.608+01:00So, I found out I've got superpowers<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Finding out you've got superpowers isn't like they tell you it is in stories. Stories all make it seem exciting and mysterious and sexy and full of motorbike chases and explosions and shady government departments, but it's not. It's boring.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I found out about my special mental abilities in an ordinary room in a yellow brick building on a busy road in Bromley. I didn't have to go through a fake lobby at the bottom of a mysteriously empty office block, I hadn't been kidnapped and taken in the back of a van by men in black suits, Professor X never turned up on my doorstep, I didn't take part in any experiments with powerful psychotropic drugs and I never once met any <a href="http://www.imdb.com/character/ch0020677/">Cherokee hitmen with an eyepatch</a>.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">All the books and websites said I have a race-car brain that zooms faster than other people's, like - </span><i style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">WHOOSH!</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> - like that. They said I have the ability to hyperfocus. </span><i style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Hyperfocus</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">, people! I should be in the fucking X-Men, looking all cool with my fingers on my temples and circles coming out of my head. You'd at least have expected my brain to be hooked up to a booping machine for some experiments with cards with squiggly lines on to have that confirmed.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Instead, all that happened is that I had a couple of sessions with a psychiatrist. The highlight was watching her read, eyebrow raised, through my old school reports while my wife listed all the bloody annoying things I do all the time. I half expected all my teeth to fall out just as I realised I'd forgotten to put trousers on and then wake up with a shock, but that didn't happen. The psychiatrist just told me I do indeed have what the books and websites say I do, made sure I hadn't felt like harming myself or anyone else recently and sent us on our way. It was all a bit underwhelming. My wife bought me a nice lunch to make up for it.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">A couple of weeks later, I got a letter that confirmed I am hyperkinetic. That sounds so cool. I'm like a cross between <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Grey">Jean Grey</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_flash">the Flash</a>, zooming about and flinging people into walls without touching them - but I haven't had any bloody motorbike chases or even nerve pinched anyone yet.</span>
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /><br />Here's why. </span>
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">On my letter, next to the word 'hyperkinetic' is the word 'disorder'. </span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br />Hyperkinetic Disorder is another term for </span><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivity_disorder" style="font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Attention Deficit Disorder</a><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">. In reality, I'd make a shit X-Man. My superpowers actually just make me double book myself, forget my keys and get on the wrong train and wake up in Tonbridge. That sort of thing. It's a bit like I was bitten by a radioactive stoner.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">All that stuff about having a race car brain is just trying to make people like me feel better about the fact that if you send me to Sainbury's for bread and milk, I'm coming back with some coriander, an ice pole and a Wham! bar. </span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Frankly, it's no good having a brain that does millions more things at once than other people if what it's doing is simulatneously working out if grizzly bears can become zombies, imagining Rupert Murdoch dancing to Luther Vandross, wondering what happened to the cast of </span><i style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">"<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CHiPs">CHiPS</a>"</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">, remembering you've forgotten to do something at work, singing a song about farts, working out where you would have jammed your fingers if that one shifty looking bloke on the tube had attacked and playing </span><i style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Photograph</i><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> by Def Leppard on a loop as you fumble in the pockets for your keys that you left in the flat because your head was going through the same sort of bloody thing when you left that morning.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Hyperfocus though, that's real. What happens with hyperfocus is that instead of being all over the place and thinking about at least 170 varieties of nonsense at once, your focus settles on one thing and will. Not. Budge. No matter what. This used to happen with obviously rubbish tabloid stories, but it doesn't so much any more.</span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Both these things would actually be useful if I could control what my brain thought about when it was zooming all over the place or hyperfocusing. If I could think of all my work projects at once, or focus on writing a novel unil it was finished, it would be grand. But I have very little power over what it is that pops into my head or commands my attention from one minute to the next.</span><br />
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<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">The articles all say that ADD means you have no real ability to make your attention settle on one thing unless it's something you're interested in, but that's not quite right. I'm interested in lots of things my attention rarely settles on, while I can get lost in a string of episodes of <i>Cowboy Builders</i> even though I don't give shit one about cowboy bloody builders and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_Littlewood">Dominic Littlewood</a> irritates me with his righteous outrage schtick. "'Ow can you live wiv yourself knowin' you've left this blind ole lady 'oo can't even feel 'er legs wiv no garridge and substandard brickwork?" - <i>I don't even care but for god's sake don't turn this shit off until I find out!</i></span><br />
<span style="background-color: rgba(255, 255, 255, 0.917969); color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">On top of that is poor impulse control, which makes it really difficult to force myself to stop farting about and get stuff done. I might know I need to take the rubbish down, but I'll just have a couple of fights on <i>EA Sports MMA </i>first<i>.</i> Oh dear, the whole day has gone and I haven't taken the rubbish out, but I am world middleweight champion now, so <i>in </i>your<i> face</i>!</span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">It's all been a bit overwhelming, finding this out. To be honest, I'm still coming to terms with it. The diagnosis explains a whole heck of a lot about what my life's been like, and it's made me look at things in a far more positive light. Instead of 'why did you stop doing that/haven't done that, you useless lump?' I'm thinking more along the lines of 'woah, look at all the stuff you did while you had this weird thing holding you back and making you dance in your pants in the kitchen, singing about <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Airwolf">Airwolf</a>'.*</i></span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">But it's frustrating, too. Most of the cool things I've managed to do or wanted to do were probably actually lit from the sparks of creativity that come from having ADD, but it's that very same thing that makes me stop doing them. </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">With any luck, now I know what's up I'll be better able to work around it and get the things I want to do done. One difficult thing is working out what that is, since ADD makes you crap at making decisions and prioritising things. </span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">I'm allowed Ritalin if I want it but frankly, I don't. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">It's tempting though. Maybe Ritalin would make things like <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Limitless">Limitless</a></i>, but I doubt it. My hair might fall out for a start. </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> </span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">Things are already starting to get better at work and home now I have charts and coloured boxes and so on.</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"> </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">We'll just have to see how things go. </span><br />
<span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;"><br /></span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">*Ye</span><span style="color: #222222; font-family: arial, sans-serif;">ah. I didn't really get round to talking about hyperactivity. I don't really get it much, but sometimes I just gotta dance. (In private, of course).</span><br />
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<br />Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-40615766858362485422012-02-24T12:05:00.001+00:002012-02-24T12:06:28.513+00:00I told you - there are no space hoppers in football<br />
As if to prove the thrust of <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2012/02/there-are-no-space-hoppers-in-football.html">yesterday's post</a>, Chris Grayling apparently popped up on Radio 4 this morning to claim that <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/the-staggers/2012/02/scheme-greggs-grayling">campaigners against Workfare were part of a front for Socialist Worker</a>, and <strike>pretend</strike> <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2012/02/24/chris-grayling-email-hacked-work-experience-tesco-poundland_n_1298549.html">mistakenly assert that they'd hacked his email</a>.<br />
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This comes, of course, after <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-16809400">Michael Gove attacked opponents of Academies for being 'Trots'</a> and both <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/9099913/David-Cameron-attacks-anti-business-rhetoric.html">David Cameron</a> and <a href="http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/9091105/Critics-of-Government-work-experience-programme-are-jobs-snobs-says-minister.html">Chris Grayling</a> apparently independently came up with the idea of calling opponents to Workfare 'snobs'.<br />
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So Tory focus groups have shown potential voters don't like the far left or snobs then. Presumably, being thought of as snobs was damaging the Tory brand, so what better way of fixing it than making the opponents look like the snobs? Clever, eh? Yeah - if you're <i>five.</i><br />
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This technique of attacking an opponent rather than tackling their argument is a fallacy of logic. If you do this sort of thing in an argument, you've lost - but an audience who doesn't know about it might be tricked into thinking you won. Which is why people who know it's a fallacy still do it.<br />
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It's called an <i><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem">argumentum ad hominem</a></i>, which means 'argument against the person'. It's got a Latin name because we've known it's bullshit for <i>thousands of fucking years.</i>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-80908919158860581722012-02-23T21:30:00.003+00:002012-05-09T12:01:52.232+01:00There are no space hoppers in football<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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When I arrived back from India a few weeks ago, I hadn't even got as far as leaving the airport before I was welcomed home by the <i>oh-for-fuck's-sake</i> cortex of my brain being prodded awake for the first time in weeks. "Oh yeah, this again," it said, as my shoulders slumped.<br />
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It was the Daily Mail's fault. I caught a glimpse of the front page in Smiths after coming through customs. That day, it was angry that some representatives of a religion that preaches charity and helping poor people had criticised government proposals to reduce the amount of help given to poor people. Apparently, a better representative was fine with the not helping poor people so much thing, so all the rest should just shut up. A bit like Ecclesiastical Top Trumps.<br />
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Lots of things had been keeping me from blogging or paying much attention to the press or politics or anything else for a while before I went to India. Coming back to see that shouty headline was just part of a culture shock that lasted a few days. Or weeks.<br />
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You know what was really ridiculous when I got home? Masterchef. I mean, I was only giving it half my attention while I was reading Captain America, but I looked up to see the totally banal non action of whether or not some bloke's sponge was going to rise accompanied by the same sort of soundtrack as a Bourne movie action sequence. The show was trying to provoke the same emotional response from whether or not a cake was going to be nice as a scene where you're wondering whether a man armed only with a biro can survive an attack against a trained assassin in a kung fu fight to the death. There wasn't even deadly poison in the bloody cake. I felt cheated.<br />
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I tried to get back into the swing of things with the news and the politics and the internet and the blah blah blah, but I have to say my heart wasn't in it. Good old Steven Baxter covered the feeling in <a href="http://enemiesofreason.co.uk/2012/02/17/it-doesnt-matter-that-much/">'It doesn't matter that much</a>' over at the Enemies of Reason. I'm going to quote him:<br />
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Things seem much more important than they really are, when you're sitting in a world surrounded by tweets and blogposts and articles and people linking to stuff disagreeing with other people disagreeing about stuff. So much disagreement, so much energy, so much anger and resentment and bitterness and pettiness. And really, when you take a step back, as I've been forced to due to lack of energy and lack of motivation, you realise, for Christ's sake, this isn't all as big and massive and important as it seemed.</blockquote>
To ironically quote an ironic quote like some sort of meta hipster - word.<br />
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For me, it's this and more besides. All the blogposts and articles and spats aren't that important in the grand scheme of things, but there are important things that need to be engaged with and challenged and worked out - it's just that we might be going about it in the wrong way.<br />
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I'm not just talking about blogging and criticising things and the back and forth of the internet, I'm talking about political discourse in this country at its very core. If you're interested in trying to work out what the best things to do to improve people's lives and help everyone get along are, and then go and make those things happen (which I always sort of naively thought was the point of politics), there's precious little you can do. People in and around politics generally aren't doing that.<br />
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Here's a laboured analogy. Imagine you want to play football in the park. You go, you pick your teams and you kick off.<br />
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Then, some numpty bounces past on a space-hopper, scoops up the ball, throws it in a tree and shouts in your face "ONE NIL! ONE NIL!" The opposing team all start running about cheering and hugging each other.<br />
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So you get the ball back, put it down, explain there are no space-hoppers in football, the tree's not the goal and you can't pick up the ball so it's not one nil and kick off again.<br />
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A fat bloke dressed in luminous lycra and a bum-bag like Mister Motivator boings up next to you on a pogo stick, goes sprawling on his big arse and shouts, "Ten jumps! I done ten jumps! Two nil! TWO NIL!" The rest of the team start cheering and chanting again and you try to ask what the bloody hell's going on and explain that you want to play football, not jump on a fucking pogo stick, but you're drowned out by baying morons.<br />
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As you pick the ball up to go home because you've had enough, the big arsed Mister Motivator calls, "There you go. Typical of your lot. Just because I done ten jumps. Always shutting down the game and playing the 'that's not football' card when you're losing."<br />
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So you're faced with a choice. Try to do more pogo stick bounces than some ridiculous buffoon whose willy outline is showing through his shorts and pretend that's football, or go home and allow the team with the spacehoppers and pogo sticks and hats with propellers go on to win the FA Cup.<br />
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That's politics in the UK that is.<br />
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Okay. It's an imperfect analogy. Really, both teams would have their share of people in football boots and shinpads looking on bemused as some of their team mates bounce up and down on things while wearing hats with propellors on (and there'd be more than two teams), but that's what it feels like to me when I watch Question Time or read the papers or listen to some droning knobhole farting on about this or that measure on the news.<br />
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Take the Health Service. Call me crazy, but I think that any discussion or policy to do with it should be centred around what the best way is to keep as many people as possible in good health and to alleviate as much suffering as we can for the others.<br />
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Or the welfare system. We should be trying to decide the best way of helping people into work where they can and preventing them from falling into poverty, homelessness and crime and all the rest of it where we can't. These aren't complex concepts.<br />
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The government, though, wants to do neither of these things. The government wants to trick you into thinking that's what it wants to do when really all it's interested in is getting one of those big mops with the hinge in it you see in train stations and sweep vast drifts of cash into the laps of its mates and other people it wants to suck up to because they might give some of that cash back. Which is difficult to do when you're bouncing on a pogo stick.<br />
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It wouldn't be much more obvious that Lansley and Cameron don't give a monkey's raas about patient care with their ridiculous Bill if they had 'SHOW ME THE MONEY' emblazoned accross their bouncing, lycra clad arses, but to engage you either have to pretend they do care or waste your time pointing out that you know they're lying - at which point they can attack you and draw attention away from their obvious scheming with some sort of stupid arsery. Probably another lie, or pretending you've said something you haven't, or calling you names. Remember when Lansley <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIonm0KXolY">sneered at that woman who said she didn't trust him on Question Time</a>? That.<br />
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It's the same with workfare. Point out that the government shouldn't be subsidising corporations who earn multi-million pound profits by supplying them with free labour, or that people who do a job ought to get paid at least the minimum they're legally entitled to and apparently you're a job snob. You're not, of course. Iain Duncan-Smith and Chris Grayling are just jumping on pogo sticks and telling you it's football.<br />
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It's not a party political thing either. Labour would be doing the same if they were in power - the only consolation we'd have is that they might be using a smaller broom. Pogo sticks and space hoppers would still abound.<br />
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One level down from that, the media love joining in with the pogo stick space hopper game. Today's Daily Mail headline is nothing but an attempt to discredit and attack a group of people who have vocally opposed the government's Health and Social Care Bill. I don't have the energy or inclination to check, but the likelihood of it being wrong or distorted or taken out of context is pretty high. The thing is, what's the point of expending the energy pointing out the motives when a) it's nakedly obvious and b) all that'll happen is that people of a particular political persuasion will go boinging off in their lycra and their twirly propellor hats, licking their big comedy lollies and shouting "ONE NIL!" anyway? The twats.<br />
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And below that we're really into Steven Baxter's 'it really doesn't matter' territory. James Delingpole? Toby Young? Harry Cole? Iain Dale? Harry's Place? Shit off.<br />
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I'm below even them, so where does that leave me then?<br />
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I've come skidding up to a bit of a chasm. I still think it's important to point out when the papers are lying and where politicians are trying to hoodwink everyone, but I'm not sure I want to be one of the people that does it anymore. There are loads of other good people that do it better than me, and I've been kicking about for months and months feeling pretty much the same way I did <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2011/04/i-can-see-emperors-winky.html">when I read Littlejohn's books and when I read the Sun for a week</a>. That slow realisation that this is all just shit has robbed me of any motivation to do anything about it.<br />
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There are things I've always been meaning to do while I've been writing this blog, and one of those is write stuff that I actually like about things that are important to me and write it as well as I can. Instead, I've spent a lot of time procrastinating, answering the same sort of nonsense over and over again and banging out first draft stuff without even thinking. Sometimes I write half decent things here, a lot of the time I wince when I read it back to myself. Whatever the quality or lack thereof, it's been less and less fun recently and I've been doing it out of a sense of duty rather than because of any passion for it, except for the odd post here and there. The bullshit awards were fun until they felt like a chore, but that's what they ended up feeling like.<br />
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Recently though, I read Patton Oswalt's '<a href="http://www.amazon.co.uk/Zombie-Spaceship-Wasteland-Patton-Oswalt/dp/1439149097/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1330028124&sr=1-3">Zombie Spaceship Wasteland</a>'*, and thought, "this is the stuff". It's been staring me right in the face all along. Why don't I use the blog, you know, like a blog? It's crazy, but it just might work.<br />
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So, if it all goes to plan, expect a wider mix of stuff that cares less about what you people who come here might want. Some of it will be personal, some of it will be stupid, some of it will be rubbish. There might even be drawings. But there'll be less trying to crowbar bum jokes into moaning about newspapers, or struggling to find the enthusiasm to point out yet again that the foreign people the tabloids are talking about might not actually be foreign and what they're saying are jobs aren't jobs (although there might still be a bit of that now and again). <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2012/02/my-dads-better-than-your-dad.html">My last post</a> was the first stab at it, and there'll be more to come. Sorry if you hated that by the way.<br />
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Hope I can keep it up, and hope you like it.<br />
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*Worth it if only for the Erik Blevins script treatments and Neil Cumpston film reviews, but there's way more than that.<br />
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<b>**UPDATE** </b><a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2012/02/there-are-no-space-hoppers-in-football.html">The Tories have been pogoing about to help me make my point today</a>.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-84165450276892781632012-02-10T20:59:00.000+00:002012-05-09T12:02:05.613+01:00My dad's better than your dadOne of the weird things about growing up without a dad is that you don't really have a concrete idea of who he was. At least not from your own perspective. What you get is cobbled together mostly from what other people who loved him and want to remember the good things have told you. Your own memories are few and seen through a gauze of childish idolatry, so you don't really have a clear idea of what he was actually like as a man.<br />
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Here are the two images I think are most typical of my dad.<br />
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In one, he's sitting on a bed with his legs straight out on front of him. His trousers are pulled up his shins and you can see sock suspenders holding up his black socks. On his head is a 'KISS ME QUICK' bowler hat and on his face is the cheesiest grin you're ever likely to see. He's on holiday at Butlin's, probably Skegness. He's pratting about.<br />
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In another, my brothers are fighting. I have three of them, all older than me. At this point, they would have been about 10, 12 and 19. When I say they were fighting, I mean Chinese burns, dead arms, Chinese haircuts, tickling - not, you know,<i> fighting. </i>The oldest one is throwing the littler ones onto the sofa, there's a godawful racket, things are getting knocked over, my mum's shouting, nobody's listening.<br />
<br />
Then, without warning, my dad leaps into the room and shouts, 'HAH!' swinging a clumsy karate chop at the air. 'Come on! I'll take you all on.' He's wearing a judo gi that's too small for him. He just bought it that day for my 12 year old brother and nobody even knew it existed.<br />
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The fight ends. All three brothers fall in a heap laughing as my dad poorly performs the moves and howls the howls he's seen in Bruce Lee films. From that incident, I learned shouting and getting annoyed isn't always the best way to get you what you want.<br />
<br />
But here's the thing. Neither of those images are my memories. The first one is a black & white photo taken in the late sixties, five years before I was born. When the second happened I would have only been about three. I can see it clearly in my head, right down to the threadbare green sofa and godawful orange and yellow sunburst wallpaper behind it, but it's not a first hand memory. I've just built it up from years of hearing it told over and over.<br />
<br />
Three big memories that are my own are these. There are others, but these stick the most.<br />
<br />
He used to finish work early on a Wednesday. He ran a greengrocer's in the suburbs and either he shut up shop early or one of his brothers took over, I don't know which. Every Wednesday, he'd drive to my school and pick me up in his shitty little van. I think it was a Ford Escort van or something, one of the ones from the seventies. It was yellow at the back, and the front end was red. He was between proper vans, the blue ford transit before it and the green minibus that came after that you could see the words LONDON FIRE BRIGADE painted over on the side.<br />
<br />
My mum would be sitting in the front with my new niece in her lap. In the back, which had no seats so you had to sit on the floor would be my sister (older than my oldest brother). My dad stopped off for cakes on the way every time, so I'd be sitting in the back of the van destroying a jam doughnut or an iced finger or a Chelsea bun while being shaken home on the hard top of the wheel arch. Every Wednesday. It was ace.<br />
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When I was around the same age (all my memories of dad are from around the same age - any younger and I'd be too young to remember, any older and he'd be gone - I have a window of about three years), I did something that really pissed my mum off. I'd probably thrown a ball in the house and it hit something that made a noise. That would rile her up even more than narrowly missing something fragile. I could bounce stuff off the telly or make an ornament wobble or skin a mirror by half an inch all day, but the minute something clattered onto a tea tray I was in big trouble.<br />
<br />
Whatever happened, I was sent to bed with no tea. This is the only time that ever happened, so I must've done something really bad and already been smacked and everything. I didn't think my mum was that serious, so I went downstairs a couple of times to test the water. I got sent back up.<br />
<br />
Then I started to get really hungry. I went down to ask for something to eat and got nothing. My mum wasn't budging.<br />
<br />
So I went back upstairs. I was lying on the bed feeling sorry for myself, not playing action man, not reading any comics, just feeling sorry for myself and being hungry. After a while, the door opened and my dad sneaked in. He sat on the edge of the bed and I sat up. "Here," he said, and gave me a banana.<br />
<br />
"What's that for?" I thought he was going to tell me a joke or something, since I wasn't allowed to eat.<br />
<br />
"You're hungry and mum's still upset." I just looked at him. He said, "eat it, then." So I chomped it down. When I finished, he said, "Give me the skin," so I did. Then, he took a handful of custard creams from his pocket and gave them to me. "Here. Don't tell your mum." And he left.<br />
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The third one was the first time I drew anything any good. I'd been okay at drawing, but it was mainly Superman or Batman by that point, and I hadn't worked out how to draw capes so they had clumsy triangles sprouting up from behind their head. This time, I'd got out my Tom & Jerry colouring book and carefully copied a picture of the two of them having a snowfight. It was excellent. I remember it as not looking childish at all, but it probably did.<br />
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I'd done this while kneeling up at one of the armchairs in our front room, with my colouring book and paper on the seat in front of me. It was only when I was finished that I realised my dad was sitting in the one that faced it. He usually sat on the floor in front of the fire, resting his back on the sofa. He'd been sitting in the chair just to watch me.<br />
<br />
When I finished he whipped it up and took it around the house to show my mum and everyone else. "Look at what he did. No, it wasn't me. He did it by himself! No, he didn't trace it! I was watching him!" Man, thinking of it now still makes me beam.<br />
<br />
In the end, while he was in hospital, I bombarded him with new pictures. Tom & Jerry gave way to Spider-Man, Iron-Man and the Vision, carefully copied from my Marvel Super Heroes and Spider-Man Annuals. They all said 'Get well soon' on them. You can probably guess how that went.<br />
<br />
My dad was awesome, right? We're in agreement on that for sure. But you and I don't have a complete picture.<br />
<br />
I have some idea that there was something more. One family story is about him punching the crap out of this man who'd hit my oldest brother, but it turned out my brother had sworn at the man first, so he was in big trouble. (This is told as a story with a twist, like the poor man was in the right all along. I can't get my head around that, how in those days not only did people routinely hit their kids, but allowed other adults to hit them too). In another, he pulled a teacher who'd been picking on the same brother across his desk by his tie and, nose to nose, growled to leave him alone. I find it hard to imagine my whip-thin, Brylcreemed, funny dad doing that, but he did. There are other stories that hint at shady dealings, and in a local history book about our area of West London that a guy who works at the same school as my brother had, criminal brothers with our family name are mentioned. One of them would've probably been my dad.<br />
<br />
A couple of years ago, I was at a wedding, and I ended up sitting next to this old guy who grew up a street away from my mother. I told him my dad's surname and he said, "Which one? There were brothers." I told him, and he held up his fists and said, "Cor. He weren't half good with them!"<br />
<br />
If I'm honest, only a tiny part of me is troubled by that. I can't help the bigger part thinking it's beyond awesome that not only was my dad nice and funny as hell, but he was badass like all little boys think their dads are too. I suppose when it comes to my dad, I'll never grow up.<br />
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It's typical of the way my stupid brain works that I first realised this in a ridiculous dream. I was at a table in a bar next to a tropical beach with TC and Rick out of Magnum and my dad, and we were all wearing Hawaiian shirts and leis, drinking out of coconuts and having a great time, just sitting around and joking. I woke up realising that's something my dad and I will never have. Not a tropical coconut drinks party with the supporting cast of Magnum P.I. - that might still happen for me at least - just the chance to sit around having a laugh together. I was upset for days after that dream at the same time as being cheered up by having a laugh with TC and Rick and my dad in Hawaii.<br />
<br />
I'll never know what he would think of me. I know he'd have been as proud as he was of my drawing when I did some things, like my slots at the Comedy Store, and I know he'd have been disappointed with me for others, like stopping doing stand-up at all. But I can never be sure. Would he even like me if he met me tomorrow? Would he be as impressed with me as I always was with him? I'll never know.<br />
<br />
There is one consolation I have when I think about how he never saw me grow up. When I contemplate what my dad and I never found out about each other, I think of that day he watched me draw Tom & Jerry. <br />
<br />
At least he saw me be good at something.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-68964186180561707512012-02-09T18:58:00.000+00:002012-05-09T12:02:14.233+01:00Tube fun<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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I was standing up on the tube this morning, reading my book, and I couldn't help overhearing a couple of snatches of the conversation going on between three women sitting in front of me, all in their twenties, dressed up smart and on the way to work together. One of them didn't say a word. The one in the middle and the one on the right were talking. I've recorded some of their words for posterity.</div>
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<i>Woman on the right:</i> How much to lick that girl’s bunion?</div>
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<i>Woman in the middle:</i> What, to lick her face?</div>
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<i>Right:</i> Yeah.</div>
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<i>Middle:</i> [Thinks for a bit] I’d do it for a fiver.</div>
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[None of them laugh. They just stop for a bit and then start going on about TOWIE and how one of the women on it is just dirty and bitch and a slag, and I tune out for a bit.</div>
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I get distracted again by this bit, and I’m annoyed I missed the beginning.]</div>
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<i>Right:</i> Is he gonna lick your face?</div>
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<i>Middle:</i> No.</div>
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<i>Right:</i> Is he gonna lick your flange?</div>
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<i>Middle:</i> <b>No</b> way.</div>
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[Silent pause]</div>
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<i>Right:</i> I was gonna ask you a personal question then, but I remembered where we are.</div>
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Then they got off, and the one in the middle pushed the one on the right back into her seat by her head as she passed.</div>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-74757675080035070322012-01-05T23:32:00.001+00:002012-01-05T23:32:53.887+00:00Diane Abbot's so racist - it's just like David Starkey. Oh, hang on.<br />
<i>Today, I break cover from my self imposed stint of blogging hermitry* to point and laugh at <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIlKiRPSNGA">professional Gumby</a> Toby Young. Ha ha.</i><br />
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Not six months ago, historian David Starkey cropped up on Newsnight to examine the causes of the riots that burned their way through some of our cities last summer. You might remember him putting his foot in it by saying a number of things that were on the surface of it, pretty racist.<br />
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But guess what? Scratch the surface of those things and underneath, and they were pretty racist.<br />
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That didn't stop the chorus of totally not racist right-wingers turning up to deliver the traditional response to accusations of racism levelled against probably ignorant oafs who stumble about saying racist things and then being all surprised when they get called out on it. You know the sort of thing. <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2011/08/david-starkeys-not-being-racist-butoh.html">I covered it here.</a><br />
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While covering it, I looked at one particularly good example. Toby Young had grabbed his knotted hanky, pulled it down over his forehead and declared Starkey's comments to be totally not racist, so everything was alright. Except it wasn't.<br />
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What Young had done was pull out a box of rhetorical tricks and wave his hands about. He expertly directed us away from the things Starkey was in trouble for saying toward some other things he said instead for context, demanding strict adherence to one particular definition of racism from one dictionary along the way. Then, with a wave of a knotted hanky...poof! The racism disappeared! Except it didn't.<br />
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I mention all this because last night Diane Abbott said something on Twitter, inviting fresh racism-accusing shenanigans all over the place. Toby Young knotted his hanky again and swooped in. Ms Abbott must have breathed a big sigh of relief to see the Gumby who can magic away accusations of racism charging to the rescue. Except - you can guess what's coming next.<br />
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In today's effort, Young is appalled by the horrible racism on display. All the rhetorical tricks he deployed to defend Starkey have been left locked away.<br />
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The headlines tell the story pretty well. Back in August, the question was '<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100100845/was-david-starkey-being-racist-on-newsnight-last-night/">Was David Starkey being racist on Newsnight last night?</a>' Today, the question is '<a href="http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/tobyyoung/100127409/was-diane-abbotts-tweet-racist/">Was Diane Abbott's tweet racist?</a>' One of those invites us to look at a lot of things one person said in a discussion on a TV programme. The other restricts everything to the contents of one 140 character tweet in an exchange.<br />
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Abbott is guilty of 'playing the race card' for mentioning race in a dicsussion about, uh, race. Starkey of course wasn't accused at all of playing the race card when he brought up race in a discussion about the causes of riots.<br />
<br />
All Young's speculation about Abbott errs on the negative. What she was doing when she warned that not seeing a "black community" was playing into a "divide and rule agenda" was "effectively saying that any criticism of black leaders was a betrayal of her ethnic heritage."<br />
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But Starkey? When he attempted to explain the causes of riots by saying Enoch Powell's speech that warned about how allowing black immigration would lead to civil unrest was absolutely right - except that it wasn't inter-communal violence because "the whites have become black" - hey, we don't know what he means. Could be something nice.<br />
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When Starkey said that if you listened to David Lammy without seeing him you'd think he was white, he was just "condemning a particular sub-culture, one that may have originated in parts of the African-Caribbean community, but which has now been taken up by some white people as well." By saying you'd think black people who didn't sound obviously criminal were white if you listened to them - after saying that white people who spoke with "this language which is wholly false, which is this Jamaican patois that's been intruded in England" were literally black.<br />
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"Imangine the uproar," we're asked today, "if an equally prominent white Conservative MP said something similar about black people on Twitter?"<br />
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Now I don't know about you, but I think I can imagine pretty well what Toby Young would be doing.<br />
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*I'll be away out of the country for a while after this weekend, and there's a lot going along offline that's keeping me away from blogging for a while. I'll explain some of it when I'm back from India at the end of the month.<br />Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-35982437606622507832011-11-21T15:11:00.001+00:002012-05-09T12:02:39.246+01:00Tabloid bullshit of the month award: October 2011<br />
Finally, it turns up. Wobbling like a drunkard and with a face like like an angry basset hound, it's the <b>5cc tabliod bullshit of the month award for October 2011</b>. And, er, me, who's had a stinking ear infection that buggered up my balance and made me sad and weak. Sad and weak. That's no mood to write a bullshit award in, so I never did.<br />
<br />
I'm feeling a bit better now, despite the muffled hearing in one ear, so here it is, a bullshit award in a month positively awash with complete and utter rubbish.<br />
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October kicked off the Leveson Inquiry with an appearance by Paul Dacre on the very week his paper told us Amanda Knox had her appeal overturned when she hadn't (filling in some nice, colourful, totally invented detail along the way), as well as repeating a cling-film transparent immigration myth that had been debunked years ago on its front page. Hurrah for Paul Dacre. I can totally see why he'd be annoyed that there were no people with tabloid experience on the panel who can explain this stuff away as totally normal and acceptable.<br />
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At least he can console himself with the idea that having a corrections column on page two makes up for all the rubbish his paper prints. Makes I laugh, that one.<br />
<br />
We also had the Times and various other outlets parping on about how most of the tents at Occupy LSX in St Paul's were unoccupied, <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2011/oct/26/occupy-london-tents-rubbish-science">a claim described as 'rubbish science' by someone who uses the same sort of camera for his specialised job</a> that the paper had used. The paper had the camera on the wrong setting, apparently. <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aBYAUl4O5v4">Here's a video of some people coming out of an unoccupied tent</a>. Witches! Burn them!<br />
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Oh, and there's obviously the Express with news of how filthy immigrants are eating our Mogwais and the EU causes cancer, plus the Star inevitably chuckling on about some celebrity's conkers and Big Brother or something. Who even looks at that crap any more?<br />
<br />
Enough intro! Onto the winners! The award is shared by two stories this month, both from the Mail. We have '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2045794/Theresa-May-cat-claim-Truth-Tory-cat-gate-row.html">Truth about Tory catfight: Judge DID rule migrant's pet was a reason he shouldn't be deported</a>' by Nick Fagge (no stranger to this blog) and Jason Groves, and '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052714/Failed-asylum-seeker-Amir-Beheshti-stay-goes-GYM.html">Failed asylum seeker who has dodged deportation for a decade told he can stay... because he goes to the GYM</a>', by Sarah Bruce.<br />
<br />
Here's the email:<br />
<blockquote>
Dear Nick Fagge, Jason Groves and Sarah Bruce,<br />
<br />
Congratulations, people. You are the winners of a journalism award given to only the select, the creme de la creme of British tabloid journalists, masters and mistresses in their craft. You can swagger about Derry Street like you own the joint now, for you are the proud winners of the October <b>5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award</b>. With such a crowded field in October, you should be dead chuffed.<br />
<br />
You win for the sterling efforts in '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2045794/Theresa-May-cat-claim-Truth-Tory-cat-gate-row.html">Truth about Tory catfight: Judge DID rule migrant's pet was a reason he shouldn't be deported</a>' and '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052714/Failed-asylum-seeker-Amir-Beheshti-stay-goes-GYM.html">Failed asylum seeker who has dodged deportation for a decade told he can stay... because he goes to the GYM</a>'.<br />
<br />
Here's why you won:<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2045794/Theresa-May-cat-claim-Truth-Tory-cat-gate-row.html"><b>Truth about tory catfight</b></a><br />
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Theresa May was wrong. A man wasn't allowed to stay in the country because he had a cat, whether she made that up or not. He was allowed to stay because he was in a relationship. The judgement in the case doesn't 'vindicate Home Secretary Theresa May over the ‘cat-gate’ row', because it rules the defendant was allowed to stay because he was in a committed relationship.<br />
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Seriously, Barry O'Leary, the solicitor in the case, released a lengthy statement rebutting your story. There's an interesting bit in it where he says:<br />
<blockquote>
I stress that it was not argued at any point by this firm, nor by my client, that he would 'suffer from being separated from his cat' nor that 'the pet's quality of life would be affected.'</blockquote>
Gee. I wonder if he was referring specifically to you and your:<br />
<blockquote>
Yesterday it was revealed that the Bolivian not only argued that he would suffer from being separated from his cat, but also that his pet’s quality of life would be affected.</blockquote>
Still -doesn't matter, right? Last time your paper pretended the man was allowed to stay because he had a cat, someone complained to the PCC. <a href="http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2011/10/that-darn-cat.html">As TabloidWatch revealed</a>, the PCC found that your paper's claims were inaccurate, but because neither the Bolivian himself or his solicitor complained there was nothing it could do. Cuh. I'm sure its hands were tied. Still, it "trusted that the newspaper would take heed of the points raised in the complaint and bear them in mind for future coverage."<br />
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I wonder if the Commission realised the bit you would take heed of was the bit where it said it wouldn't do anything if two specific people didn't complain to the PCC?<br />
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Which brings me neatly to: </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052714/Failed-asylum-seeker-Amir-Beheshti-stay-goes-GYM.html"><b>Failed asylum seeker who has dodged deportation for a decade told he can stay</b></a><br />
<br />
This wins mainly because it pulls the exact same trick as the nonsense story about the cat. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<br />
<ul>
<li>The asylum seeker wasn't allowed to stay because he goes to the gym. He was allowed to stay because he'd built a stable life here and made lots of friends. He just happened to make a lot of them at the gym. </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>There's some other lovely stuff in there. Like the claim the guy had been here for a 'decade' in the headline, and the 'nearly a decade' in the opening sentence, when in fact the guy has only been in the country for six years. </li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<br />
<ul>
<li> Plus, I know it was probably a sub and not you, but you gotta love the random shout at the end of the HEADLINE.</li>
</ul>
</blockquote>
<blockquote>
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Doesn't matter if it's rubbish though, right? Unless the man himself or his solicitor complains, you're fine. Even if they do, you'll just face having a 'correction' in a little nib on the graveyard that is page 2 in a few months' time. Oh, the horror! The horror!<br />
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Both of these stories are sterling examples of the well-worn tabloid bullshit trick of the red herring - taking one thing from a long list of points, and claiming it's the only thing on the list. Who cares if a man wasn't allowed to stay in the country just because he had a cat? A cat got mentioned, so let's pretend. If you need any more examples, just look at pretty much every story ever about something being banned because of Muslims.<br />
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Still, it's for the greater good. You're fighting the good fight of sticking the boot into immigrants and Muslims. And gays. And brown people. And lefties. And everyone else the Mail hates. I won't do a full list, this award is already three weeks late.<br />
<br />
That's it, I'm done. As ever, I'll be reproducing this letter over at <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/">www.fivechinesecrackers.com</a>. Please, please reply to leave an acceptance comment or rebuttal. Please. I'm begging. I've been doing these for a whole year now, and heard not a peep from any hack, ever. Not one of you have had the cojones to stand up for yourself and make a defence of what you've written.<br />
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Why, it's almost as if you can't.<br />
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You're also all in the running to win the 5cc tabloid bullshitter of the year award, which will go to the winner of the most monthly awards in the year. With two months left, you might catch up the leaders!<br />
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Cheers then!<br />
<br />
5cc</blockquote>
<br />
That's another month out of the way. Sorry for it being weeks and weeks late, but I really have been pretty ill - I'm only just perking up after about three weeks and a couple of antibiotics prescriptions. I've been doing a lot of sleeping and groaning, but I'm perking up a bit now.<br />
<br />
Enough self pity! Get out!<span id="goog_1200445679"></span><span id="goog_1200445680"></span><a href="http://www.blogger.com/"></a>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-85637280740589504702011-10-25T13:35:00.002+01:002011-10-25T20:22:05.063+01:00FAILED ASYLUM SEEKER ALLOWED TO STAY BECAUSE...YOUR MUM!One of the things that's difficult about writing about the tabloids (which I occasionally do now) is keeping up with the pretence that they're actually acting in good faith, and the 'mistakes' that turn up in articles are the result of laziness, poor judgement or incompetence; they're never, ever deliberate. I fail miserably at that from time to time, as you may have noticed.<br />
<br />
There's a good example of an *ahem* <a href="http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/2011/10/24/avoid-deportation-by-joining-a-gym-claims-daily-mail/">'mistake' in yesterday's Mail</a>. '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2052714/Failed-asylum-seeker-Amir-Beheshti-stay-goes-GYM.html">Failed asylum seeker who has dodged deportation for a decade told he can stay... because he goes to the GYM</a>', it says, shouting the last word inexplicably. I might start trying that in real life. 'Good morning EVERYONE! How was your WEEKEND? Did you get up to anything NICE?'<br />
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Anyway, I'm digressing. This headline firstly makes the, uh, 'mistake' of saying in the headline that some failed asylum seeker dodged deportation for a decade when the story itself points out he didn't arrive until 2005. But secondly, and I might be nitpicking a bit here, he hasn't escaped deportation because he goes to the gym. That's two statements of fact in the headline that are complete nonsense.<br />
<br />
This is all reminiscent of catgate earlier this month, where Theresa May said someone avoided deportation because he had a cat, repeating a story that had been debunked two years ago, and got called out on it by everyone. Everyone except the Mail, which splashed a front page headline about how she was right despite three vital pieces of evidence to the contrary. These were:<br />
<br />
<ol>
<li>She was wrong.</li>
<li>No really, no-one escaped deportation because they had a cat. </li>
<li><a href="http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2011/10/that-darn-cat.html">The Press Complaints Commission had already apparently notified the Mail that this story was bunk last time they tried it and someone complained</a>.</li>
</ol>
Christ knows how Dacre would defend this behaviour in front of the Leveson Inquiry, but I'm sure he'd find a way to polish the turd. Probably talking about a free press and trying hard and a corrections column on page 2.<br />
<br />
I mean, there's no way those fine, if time-pressed, upstanding men and women of speaking truth to power at the Mail could ever have looked at that original PCC rebuke and thought, 'Great! The PCC will <i>never do anything about this shite</i> unless the guy himself or his lawyer complains! We can pick any old shit out of any decision and pretend away!'<br />
<br />
That never happened, of course, and there's really a proper argument that can be made to say he was allowed to stay because he went to the gym. Except, you know, he wasn't.<br />
<br />
Hey, if one of the people do ever complain, the paper might need to put something in the corrections column on page two in a few month's time. Oh, the horror, the horror!<br />
<br />
Be prepared for stories about people being allowed to stay because they watch East Enders, fat people escaping deportation because they like Chipsticks and piano players being allowed to stay because they've got fingers. <br />
<br />
My hat is tipped to <a href="http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/">TabloidWatch</a> and <a href="http://www.butireaditinthepaper.co.uk/">Angry Mob</a> for this one, and <a href="http://twitter.com/#%21/hmallettuk">@hmallettuk</a> from off the twitter.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-79363644114426233002011-10-07T13:56:00.000+01:002012-05-09T12:03:22.719+01:00Crime is the disease...the Daily Express is not the cure<a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2011/09/you-should-be-allowed-to-brutally-kill.html#more">A couple of posts ago</a>, I wrote a smart-alecky series of jibes at the 'you can't even defend yourselves in your own home' tabloid right winger types who all seem to operate under the misconception that they'd be really, really badass and totally wouldn't noisily do a poo in their pyjamas and cry if anyone smashed their way into their house in the night.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
In it, I said this:<br />
<blockquote>
Here's the thing. The reason people who kill or seriously injure burglars or robbers get arrested has precisely bugger all to do with loving the baddies and hating the goodies or PC Gawn Mad...Police arrest people because they need to find out what happened and the person holding the knife might not be telling the truth. </blockquote>
This morning, the Daily Express front page bellowed 'HERO DAD GUNS DOWN BURGLAR! Fury as he's arrested for defending his home', except that's not the front page you'll see represented on their website right now.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5j-eWWjA82Wl5REIbXTeMvy0xAgtQ?docId=N0812441317975854599A">That might have something to do with this</a>:<br />
<blockquote>
Villagers have spoken of their shock after detectives investigating the shooting of a suspected burglar found a "well-organised and large-scale" cannabis farm during forensic searches.</blockquote>
Ah. So maybe not a hero dad defending his home then. Perhaps the case was more complicated than it appeared at first, and police only found out after arresting the 'HERO DAD' and carrying out searches. Who could have guessed?<br />
<br />
Hilariously, '<a href="http://www.express.co.uk/posts/view/276020/Hero-dad-guns-down-burglar">HERO DAD GUNS DOWN BURGLAR</a>' is still available on the Express website right now (although it might end up disappearing). It gets bonus blowhard points for mentioning Tony Martin and revealing in the second paragraph that the 'BURGLAR' wasn't in fact a burglar, but someone trying to break into a car outside the 'HERO DAD'S' house.<br />
<br />
We're only a quarter of the way through the month, and I'm already spoiled for choice for the first anniversay of the <b>5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award</b>. The amount of boneheaded idiocy has been turned right up to eleven this October.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-21952097660829302012011-10-03T00:02:00.000+01:002012-05-09T12:03:34.709+01:00Tabloid bullshit of the month award: September 2011It's that time of the month again. No, not that time of the month, stop looking for werewolves.<br />
<br />
It's time for the <b>5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award</b>. Yee-hah! Here I am! Rock you like a hurricane!<br />
<br />
It had been a slow month for most of September, until the government released a bunch of immigration stats that predictably got the tabloids in a lather. Tabloid immigration fiddling is so 'meh' by this point in the life of the bullshit awards though, so for the longest time the front runner was Jo Willey for her nonsense in the <i>Express</i>, suggested by a lovely reader.<br />
<br />
Don't worry, she must be in the running at some point. I've read her column.<br />
<br />
Then - hoo-boy! The Mail on Sunday and it's sister paper came a knockin' with a brand spanking new Winterval style myth to thrill us all with tales of the end of Western civilisation at the hands of evil Political Correctness Gone Mad, and with the BBC as the culprits!<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
So, this month's winner, in an unprecedented situation, is the entire <i>Daily Mail</i> and <i>Mail on Sunday</i> for the hilariously transparently exaggerated claim that the BBC has <b>BANNED</b> the use of BC and AD, in favour of the <b>HEATHEN </b>BCE and CE.<br />
<br />
It's the end of Western civilisation! Worse even than nuclear war.<br />
<br />
Here's the email:<br />
<blockquote>
Dear the <i>Daily Mail </i>and Mail on<i> Sunday</i>,<br />
<br />
It's time to get out the turntables and switch on the Northcliffe House disco ball. Both of you, yes the entire <i>Daily Mail</i> stable, are the winners of journalism's most coveted prize! Yes, it's the <b>5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award!</b> There's gonna be a party like it's nineteen - fifty-five!<br />
<br />
An entire newspaper has never won the award before, not even the <i>Daily Star</i>, and reading the stories behind the Star's front page headlines is like pulling back the curtain only to find that the Wizard of Oz is actually just a picture of Jordan, a BNP pamphlet and a copy of <i>Mucky Boobs</i>. <br />
<br />
You have really outdone yourselves. Light up a cigar and start a conga!<br />
<br />
Here's why you won*:<br />
<br />
A couple of weeks ago, <a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1317593906XGFQFVTQVE">Peter Hitchens sits innocently watching University Challenge</a>, when the programme only goes and uses an abbreviation that's been the academic standard for decades! Who would have thought it? And on a show that questions people in Universities. It's an outrage!<br />
<br />
Instead of doing a couple of minutes of research to find out if it's true, he decides, "The BBC’s Chief Commissar for Political Correctness (whom I imagine as a tall, stern young woman in cruel glasses issuing edicts from an austere office) was hard at work again last week."<br />
<br />
Jeepers. They have a Commissar now? And such a sexy dominatrix with such unlikely anthropomorphic glasses? (I wonder if she ever takes off her cruel glasses and shakes her hair out, giving Peter's imagination a saucy wink. The <i>minx.</i>)<br />
<br />
Sniffing a new Political Correctness Gone Mad sensation, Paul Dacre gathers his winged monkeys to his lair and screeches, "This could be the new Winterval, and it's about our commercial rivals! <i>Fly! Fly my pretties!"</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1317594148YEOHCVYIHC">Chris Hastings writes the full story</a>. Instead of thinking, <i>hey, Hitchens is given to ridiculous and embarrassing hyperbole, must check to see if this is true, </i>he thinks, <i>hey, Hitchens is given to ridiculous and embarrassing hyperbole, must check to see if this is true. Oh, it isn't. Let's write the story as if it is anyway. There's always the last couple of sentences we can bury stuff in.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
In reality, all that's happened is the BBC has issued no edict about what abbreviations should be used, instead leaving the decision up to individual editors. That's not really Political Correctness going mad is it, allowing people to say what they like? <br />
<br />
You'd imagine this would make an editor spike the story, or embarrassed by how damp the new PC Gone Mad outrage squib really is, cut it short and bury it thirty pages in. Instead - BOOM! Front page headline.<br />
<br />
Then, the monkeys well and truly flew. <a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1317594241NJRRFCLLLI">James Delingpole</a>, lured from his usual home for getting things wrong and making a fool of himself at the Telegraph, and obviously having missed the last two sentences of Hastings' story, declares the usage of an abbreviation an attack on Western Civilisation. A Marxist one, no less. Ooh, those Marxists and their evil 'letting people make their own decisions about what terminology they use' ways. When will we be rid of them?<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1317594324DHQWIPFMWN">Reverend Dr Peter Mullen</a>, who also seems to have missed the last couple of sentences of the previous front page story tells everyone the BBC has stopped using the abbreviations because it wants to obliterate Christianity from public life. As TabloidWatch points out, this nonsense was published less than half an hour after the BBC broadcast the 50th anniversary edition of <i>Songs of Praise.</i><br />
<i><br /></i><br />
Not one to be left out of a panic about Political Correctness, <a href="http://www.freezepage.com/pages">Melanie Phillips</a> parps, "Apparently, [the BBC] has decided that the terms AD and BC (Anno Domini, or the Year of Our Lord, and Before Christ) must be replaced by the terms Common Era and Before Common Era."<br />
<br />
Now, to be fair to Melanie, she follows this up with, "Actually, this edict seems to have been laid down merely by some obscure tributary of the BBC website rather than from on high."<br />
<br />
But to be fair to reality, having this sentence follow a definite claim about the BBC deciding things 'must be replaced' could easily lead the reader to infer that because of an edict from an obscure tributary of its website, the BBC has decided abbreviations across the board must be replaced.<br />
<br />
Plus, a million extra points to Melanie for laughably claiming that, "Christmas has been renamed in various places ‘Winterval’." (In case any of you were wondering, it hasn't. Winterval was an ill thought out marketing exercise used for only two years over a decade ago in only one place, which had Christmas celebrations and everything.** You can see<a href="http://primlystable.blogspot.com/2010/12/winterval-photographic-evidence.html"> a poster from Winterval here</a>, which clearly has the word 'Christmas' in very big letters at the top).<br />
<br />
Then, predictably, <a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-2043482/Whatever-BBC-say-Britain-mainly-white-Christian-straight.html">Richard Littlejohn falls for the new myth hook, line and sinker</a>. This should be no surprise, coming as it does from the man who thought a dog was a woman, 'The Hopscotch Centre' for Asian women exists to teach them hopscotch and that phoenetic spellings of words he doesn't like are hee-lair-ee-yuss. Don't panic!<br />
<br />
But these are just tabloid opinion pieces. As the PCC has pointed out in response to a couple of complaints about columns from <a href="http://enemiesofreason.blogspot.com/2009/07/whats-point-of-pcc.html">Phillips</a> and <a href="http://primlystable.blogspot.com/2010/12/pcc-says-its-ok-to-lie.html">Littlejohn</a>, people will apparently know all this stuff is opinion and not believe it to be true. For people to start thinking it might be true, you'd need the claim to start appearing in news stories.<br />
<br />
So well done Steve Doughty for his second mention in the<b> 5cc tabloid bullshit awards</b>, with '<a href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2043045/Modern-Britain-70-claim-Christians-1-5-gay.html">The make-up of modern Britain: 70% of us claim to be Christians... and only 1.5% are gay</a>', saying:<br />
<blockquote>
The finding that the nation remains overwhelmingly Christian comes days after it emerged that BBC programme-makers have been put under pressure to stop describing dates as BC or AD. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Instead, they have been told to use the non-Christian alternatives Before Common Era and Common Era.</blockquote>
Doughty's article lacks even the final sentence clarification from Hastings' original outraged headline story. Job done. Myth successfully planted in the news.<br />
<br />
The new myth, like so many before it, has spread across the right-wing press to the<i> Express,</i> the <i>Telegraph</i> and even to London's bumbling Mayor.<br />
<br />
The difference is that we've watched this one from the beginning. The BBC have explained the truth several times. The original story from the <i>Mail </i>even includes the true explanation at the bottom - but Western civilisation is still under threat from a Marxist plot.<br />
<br />
Given that this whole thing has sprung from outrage at the BBC allowing its editors to say what they like instead of dictating that they must use the <i>Mail</i> and its commentators' preferred terms, I'd like to bring this to a close by quoting these words:<br />
<blockquote>
But then, political correctness is all about dictating what people are permitted or forbidden to say as a way of controlling and reshaping a society and its values.</blockquote>
Quite.<br />
<br />
That's it. Everyone mentioned in this email, including the editors of the <i>Daily Mail, </i>the <i>Mail on Sunday </i>and MailOnline's <i>RightMinds</i> section can now count one monthly award for themselves, which becomes important at the end of the year when I award the winner of the most the <b>5cc tabloid bullshitter of the year award.</b> Paul Dacre, Richard Littlejohn and Steve Doughty now have two each, so it's all to play for.<br />
<br />
As ever, I will be reproducing this at <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/">www.fivechinesecrackers.com</a>, and you are all warmly invited to reply to this email with an acceptance comment or some sort of attempt at a rebuttal (sending an email rather than commenting on the blog post will let me know it's you). No winners have ever replied yet, exhibiting uncharacteristic coyness for people who often seem so shouty and strident. Why not be the first? Give us all a laugh. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Cheers then,</blockquote>
<blockquote>
<br />
5cc<br />
<br />
*I might have imagined some of what happened in this timeline, much like Richard Littlejohn imagines the contents of his column, but with less of an obsession with <i>Minder,</i> gayness and bins.<br />
<br />
**Angry Mob has <a href="http://www.thedisinformed.co.uk/2010/12/12/the-winterval-myth/">an excellent history of how this particular PC Gone Mad Myth evolved here</a>.</blockquote>
So, that's it for another month. A massive, massive thank you to MacGuffin at TabloidWatch for<a href="http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2011/09/bc-and-ad-not-jettisoned-by-bbc.html"> his coverage</a> of this<a href="http://tabloid-watch.blogspot.com/2011/09/bbc-bans-bcad-lie-continues-to-spread.html"> new myth</a>, which helped me no end in pulling this together.<br />
<br />
I do hope you're enjoying these awards - they're always the most popular on the site unless one of my tweets gets RTed by someone good. They're quite fun to write, so to be fair I'd do them anyway. They've snowballed a bit from what I originally intended, which was to pick the one most rubbish story from the month, but there is a lot of tabloid bullshit out there.<br />
<br />
Tune in at the end of next month for October's awards, which will mark the first anniversary of <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2010/10/tabloid-bullshit-of-month-award-october.html">the first award, won by Jack Doyle</a> - also a favourite to win the end of the year award.<br />
<br />
Thanks for keeping on coming back. Reward yourself <a href="http://youtu.be/sxdmw4tJJ1Y">with this blog's official theme tune</a>.<br />
<br />
Now <i>get out of my house!</i>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-4602864486040678972011-09-29T13:21:00.002+01:002012-05-09T12:31:21.214+01:00Never mind Nicholas Cage, John Travolta and Keanu Reeves as vampires - what about this guy?<br />
There's a bit of a <a href="http://gawker.com/5844963/are-nicolas-cage-and-john-travolta-undead">meme going around the internet</a> at the moment because some old photos and a painting have surfaced of people who look a little bit like some celebrities so they must be vampires or something. Here they are:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoIIy5cx46tIpfuUAjvbrFaNEhCdAEdTvTmB2Y1td6rxkgmnOAedybbn1bTEt3x2ef-T_xmTFuUEeYimjr6rrFTdeqe4WaQZFcupE8DAUPv72vY2K2JVSvo3s2Y1-NokGXafG_/s1600/cagetravoltavampires.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhoIIy5cx46tIpfuUAjvbrFaNEhCdAEdTvTmB2Y1td6rxkgmnOAedybbn1bTEt3x2ef-T_xmTFuUEeYimjr6rrFTdeqe4WaQZFcupE8DAUPv72vY2K2JVSvo3s2Y1-NokGXafG_/s320/cagetravoltavampires.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vampires? <a href="http://gawker.com/5844963/are-nicolas-cage-and-john-travolta-undead">via</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh08P_VjxcjJVJ8_Nm0wrpJVe2WvH9IFpMqFNpqzOfUyPBgWwtxsuqsh3HdrLraHefCFOdDA_7x8RVGdpHdZtHotW9gr9RoBzJT_f8a1MDnv8ENUc878pzydQcWTbuLDejL7gnG/s1600/340x.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="179" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEh08P_VjxcjJVJ8_Nm0wrpJVe2WvH9IFpMqFNpqzOfUyPBgWwtxsuqsh3HdrLraHefCFOdDA_7x8RVGdpHdZtHotW9gr9RoBzJT_f8a1MDnv8ENUc878pzydQcWTbuLDejL7gnG/s320/340x.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Vampires? <a href="http://gawker.com/5844963/are-nicolas-cage-and-john-travolta-undead">via</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<a name='more'></a>The one thing wrong with this theory is that the photos don't look that much like the celebrities they're supposed to*. As far as I'm aware, Nicholas Cage doesn't have a bent chin and enormous left ear, the painting could be Johnny Depp as easily as Keanu and the John Travolta one...well, I'll give you that one. It does look a bit like Travolta. Maybe it's something to do whith thetoos and Xena or some other kind of Scientology cobblers about curing stress by holding coke cans or something.<br />
<br />
But I came across another quite uncanny picture via <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/waxnip">@waxnip</a> on Twitter, who'd found an amusing picture of some street urchins. Here it is:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpsgWPKAde8QUO5q3Nh14qLz0F9pPPOp-QH4D-cQpd6luCRA_1eyJvFiMVf_MVH-lM67Hq0Uz4GWA7XZOkJU0NmRHsFZEgn79VvZCIo0yCTQ0hb6J5wkCHy0cQKncqRQjd1FSN/s1600/Pr0sg.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="292" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpsgWPKAde8QUO5q3Nh14qLz0F9pPPOp-QH4D-cQpd6luCRA_1eyJvFiMVf_MVH-lM67Hq0Uz4GWA7XZOkJU0NmRHsFZEgn79VvZCIo0yCTQ0hb6J5wkCHy0cQKncqRQjd1FSN/s320/Pr0sg.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://i.imgur.com/Pr0sg.jpg">via</a></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
Now look at the guy on the left. Here he is in close up:<br />
<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwQm7Xqn26Y3IE98KwY_cRqNj1albwkuShH8iws16UxTnf7mauhQQUwTURth5bGDTD_n2kdqV3EKODCZeMIZ0AGVLKymkyw5cyR1su6Dpf_PsSXORMvwLW63381l-RAhfxssfs/s1600/isitsid.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgwQm7Xqn26Y3IE98KwY_cRqNj1albwkuShH8iws16UxTnf7mauhQQUwTURth5bGDTD_n2kdqV3EKODCZeMIZ0AGVLKymkyw5cyR1su6Dpf_PsSXORMvwLW63381l-RAhfxssfs/s320/isitsid.jpg" width="277" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Hur hhyah hyah hyah!</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
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</div>
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Compare:<br />
<br />
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<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW-h-ZOUuqyGPGmn_7goVjSrQrult90j7SAiMqRPdqzcM_tiprCZtHv82de9RXQUlIR0WHo__nIlzPXGZpADvSXBqHZaVJl_zAWOYAAbEZC9WpxnO_GEbnBnthZZfkRdzXig23/s1600/SidJames.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhW-h-ZOUuqyGPGmn_7goVjSrQrult90j7SAiMqRPdqzcM_tiprCZtHv82de9RXQUlIR0WHo__nIlzPXGZpADvSXBqHZaVJl_zAWOYAAbEZC9WpxnO_GEbnBnthZZfkRdzXig23/s320/SidJames.jpg" width="270" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">""I vaant to suck your blood! Hur hyah hyah hyah hyah!"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
Was Sid James' 'death' not final? How many times has he 'died'? Has Sid James carried on again?<br />
<br />
Big hat tip to <a href="http://twitter.com/#!/waxnip">@waxnip</a> for that one.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*Oh, alright, that's the second thing wrong with the theory, next to the fact that<i> there are no vampires</i> and life isn't a chuffing <i>Twilight</i> novel, no matter how much you fancy the bloke with the head from the films.</span><br />
<div>
<br /></div>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-66903836322389996252011-09-25T16:06:00.002+01:002012-05-09T12:05:55.151+01:00The Mail joins the BrigadeIt's been a good week, this week, for the Mail forgetting itself and calling for the things it hates in its ridiculously ill thought out panics.<br />
<br />
Earlier in the week, the papers were up in arms about the scandal of cage fighting children. Except the children involved were doing something far less scary than 'cage fighting'. 'Where was their headgear?' asked the knee-jerkers, without being aware that the kids were taking part in a bout where punching and kicking were disallowed, punishable by disqualification.*<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
<br />
This wasn't good enough for top Mail blowhard, James Slack, who points out in his soberly headlined '<a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1316962810GFXDNPXAVP">We have laws to protect dogs, but not our children</a>':<br />
<blockquote>
The organisers would counter that, unlike adult cage-fighting contestants, the children are not allowed to punch, kick, knee or elbow each other during the competitions. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
But the rules are almost inevitably broken, and it’s unsurprising to hear the British Medical Association warning of the dangers of brain injury – or worse.</blockquote>
So one Mail commentator outs himself as a member of the Elf n Safety Brigade, calling for the mandatory wearing of headgear for children just in case they break rules and hit one another.<br />
<br />
I look forward to Mail outrage at the sight of kids not wearing headgear to play football, kiss chase and conkers.<br />
<br />
Today's Mail on Sunday headline shouts "<a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1316962956ICQLVMAYQE">BBC TURNS ITS BACK ON YEAR OF OUR LORD</a>", above a story that closes with:<br />
<blockquote>
The BBC said last night: 'The BBC has not issued editorial guidance on the date systems. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
'Both AD and BC, and CE and BCE are widely accepted date systems and the decision on which term to use lies with individual production and editorial teams.'</blockquote>
So, the Mail is actually arguing against BBC editors being allowed to describe things as they want, and presumably want them to be made to use one permitted term.<br />
<br />
Welcome to the PC and Elf n safety Gone Mad Brigades, the Mail. You'll get your ID cards in the post.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*I've had a frustrating exchange in the comments to <a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/steven-baxter/2011/09/cage-martial-kids-context">Steve Baxter's post on the issue</a>, with someone arguing entirely from their imagination. Fun fun fun.</span>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-67423714614534756582011-09-22T23:32:00.000+01:002011-09-22T23:37:21.879+01:00Won't somebody think of the cage fighting children?<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: left; text-align: left;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QrgAeSM13Fs/Tnu17pnznoI/AAAAAAAABcI/vmw7ZXhwk6M/s1600/POW%2521.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="133" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-QrgAeSM13Fs/Tnu17pnznoI/AAAAAAAABcI/vmw7ZXhwk6M/s200/POW%2521.jpg" width="200" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">JUDO CHOP! Lyoto Machida executing <br />
the sort of move that today's 'cage fighting <br />
kids' weren't allowed to.</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
This morning, sitting with a barely surpressed scowl on the East London Line to work, I looked up from my phone and caught a flash of the Metro in the hands of the person sitting opposite me. The headline yelled something about CAGE FIGHTING KIDS alongside a picture of two boys fighting in a cage. "Meh," I thought, a split second after being shocked at the lack of gloves and headgear. "Bet they weren't allowed to hit each other and were just wrestling."<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Wouldn't you know it, I got to work and fired up the PC to find out I was right. Yay me. After wading through hundreds of words of breathless outrage on the Daily Mirror site, I finally got to the couple of paragraphs at the bottom <a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/09/22/sick-cage-fighting-for-kids-is-slammed-by-experts-as-barbaric-115875-23436934/">of their main article</a> that had been written by someone who actually knows about mixed martial arts to find that the kids involved in the mini-moral panic this morning weren't actually doing what most people think of as cage fighting. This is not much of a surprise. Cage fighting isn't what most people think of as cage fighting.<br />
<br />
The children were engaged in a grappling bout, probably using techniques from wrestling, judo and Brazillian jiu-jutsu with strict rules and no striking allowed. It was a demonstration match, meaning that there was no prize for the winner. This sort of thing goes on all the time with kids wearing their gis in sports centres up and down the country to the consternation of nobody.<br />
<br />
This is not to dismiss the whole thing as rubbish though. There were some things wrong with what happened.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/top-stories/2011/09/22/sick-cage-fighting-for-kids-is-slammed-by-experts-as-barbaric-115875-23436934/">Rosi Sexton, an actual living, breathing cage fighter</a> who knows one of the boys and his family well admits there was some confusion over the rules resulting in things being a little rougher than usual.<br />
<br />
Chris Granet (in that bit tucked away at the bottom of the Mirror's coverage) points out that the rules permitted some locks that can potentially lead to long-term damage, and also raises the point that headgear of the sort worn by American high school wrestlers wear to protect against cauliflower ears should have been used.<br />
<br />
In the scheme of things, these are pretty minor compared to the idea of children actually 'cage fighting'. What probably isn't is that <a href="http://t.co/yrUqZlnn">the bout should never have taken place in the evening in a bar with ring card girls in front of an audience of adults</a>. This is what stops everything being about how children compete in martial arts and make it about creating a spectacle for grown-ups - but of course this is easy to say in hindsight.<br />
<br />
As a sport for adults, mixed martial arts is relatively new and constantly growing. Contrary to its reputation for having no rules and being 'no holds barred', <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mixed_martial_arts_rules#Unified_Rules_of_MMA">there are plenty of rules that have been developed since the first Ultimate Fighting Championship in 1991</a>, and these vary between different leagues. You could argue that some of these are safer than boxing. <br />
<br />
But it looks brutal. Knees and elbows and thin gloves mean fighters are more likely to get cut, and bleeding looks scary. Watching people punch an opponent who is on the floor looks barbaric. The cage itself conjures up images of fighters being captive, made to keep fighting against their will, although it is in fact used because fighters rolling around, grappling and throwing can easily fall out of a traditional ring.<br />
<br />
Given MMA's brutal appearance and reputation, any association with children is bound to cause outrage, but children train and compete in all its constituent parts all the time without much concern. For the last few decades, any number of local sports centres has played host to children training and competing in karate, judo, tae kwon do, Japanese ju-jitsu (the Brazillian variant is relatively new) and any number of other martial arts.<br />
<br />
The children in today's story were only competing in one of MMA's constituent parts, possibly even one of the safest, since they weren't allowed to hit each other. Of course we should be concerned with the safety of children, and we should do our utmost to ensure that any children who train in any of the martial arts or combat sports can do so without getting hurt. <br />
<br />
This might even involve stopping children from being able to compete, and only allowing them to train and spar until they're a certain age. That's certainly open for debate. But we shouldn't be jerking our knees at the sight of a poorly thought out event that might seem a lot more brutal at first glance than it actually was.<br />
<br />
Plus, of course, the emphasis in children taking part in these activities should be the children learning and having fun - not in creating entertainment for adults.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Steve Baxter makes many of the same points, probably better, in '<a href="http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/steven-baxter/2011/09/cage-martial-kids-context#reader-comments">Cage fighting kids? The real problem is the knee-jerk reaction</a>'. I didn't copy his homework, honest.</span>Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-59930007537083892332011-09-21T17:58:00.000+01:002011-09-21T17:58:22.078+01:00You should be allowed to brutally kill anyone you like, what are you, communist or something?<br />
<center><iframe allowfullscreen="" frameborder="0" height="369" src="http://www.youtube.com/embed/Yer-amZtEu8" width="500"></iframe></center>
<br />
<br />
There aren't a lot of things to love about reading the right wing press and the assorted blogs that orbit around it, but one of the the few is the sight of grown adults convinced that life in 21st Century UK is exactly like a dodgy 80s film set in the Bronx, that given half the chance they'd be as badass as Snake Plissken, John Rambo and the Punisher all rolled into one bladed, spiky ball of tough-guy awesomeness and the only thing that's stopping them taking out the trash is the lily-livered liberal laws that favour criminals.<br />
<br />
In fact, the only thing that comes close to being as good is watching the logical contortions they have to go through to maintain the illusion.<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
Usually, you get outbursts of armchair-Plisskenism after some tory MP or other pretends we're not allowed to defend ourselves in our own homes, which of course we already are. Clang clang clang, goes Pavlov's bell. "Wuurgh! The law loves criminals and hates the victims! What about <em>my</em> rights? If anyone touches my kids I swear I'll do time!" goes every blowhard in the country.<br />
<br />
The last big outburst I can remember came just before the last election, when David Cameron's advisors made him push a matchstick between his teeth, glare a steely-eyed thousand yard stare and growl, "The moment a burglar steps over your threshold and invades your property, with all the threat that gives to you, your family and your livelihood, I think they leave their human rights outside. Crime is a disease. I'm the cure."*<br />
<br />
They backed this up by pretending that changing the word 'unreasonable' to 'grossly disproportionate' in a law would make any difference to anything, ever.<br />
<br />
Rubbish, right? But it worked! Any suggestion that the law already allows you to defend yourself, backed up with a list of cases where people have killed burglars and been acquitted can be successfully countered with Tony Martin. Or maybe Munir Hussain.<br />
<br />
You can't be allowed to defend yourself in your own home because this one guy chased a man out of his house and called his mates to come and beat him with a cricket bat and an iron bar until he was brain damaged and the cricket bat broke, and <em>the man doing the beating</em> ended up going to prison. (And then being let out on appeal - but let's forget that bit). Imagine that!<br />
<br />
In the last couple of days, there's been <a href="http://news.google.co.uk/news/more?q=vincent+cooke+look/&hl=en&prmd=imvnso&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.&biw=1680&bih=989&um=1&ie=UTF-8&ncl=dLhr8AQxKHGDCMMQPzIcclXj0jOkM&ei=CxV6ToaWFMPNsgaj9aSrDw&sa=X&oi=news_result&ct=more-results&resnum=1&ved=0CDQQqgIwAA">a bit of tabloid outrage over the arrest of Vincent Cooke</a>, who allegedly stabbed an intruder to death at the weekend. It's been a little bit muted because so far there's only been an arrest, but the news has still managed to make the front pages on the strength of the arrest rather than the killing.<br />
<br />
Even so, the Sun, which is usually the worst for arguing in favour of being able to stab the shit out of anyone who acts shiftily within a three mile radius of your house, <a href="http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/3820834/Dad-held-over-burglar-murder.html">was careful in its coverage to emphasise that he's only been arrested</a>, and two other men who'd been arrested for something similar in recent months had been acquitted on self-defence grounds.<br />
<br />
This hasn't stopped a couple of commentators jumping the gun and displaying the 'but Tony Martin' defence of the idea we're not allowed to fight back against burglars, but one has included an interesting new twist.<br />
<br />
Steve Doughty, of '5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award' fame has cropped up at the Mail's <strike>s</strike>wanky new blog section, 'Right Minds' with '<a href="http://www.freezepage.com/1316623727JMELQJWKZA">Victims should be allowed to fight back against burglars</a>'. So far so <em>meh</em>.<br />
<br />
But what's new is that Doughty has looked at the examples the Sun included in its coverage - of the sort that you could have turned up at any time in the last few decades - and used them as evidence that it is okay to defend yourself against burglars <em>now</em>, but in the old days you couldn't, because Tony Martin. It's amazing.
<br />
<br />
Creative as it is, it doesn't stand up to five minutes' scrutiny. The reason Martin's case ended up the way it did is because it was <em>complicated</em>. Martin had shot and killed a sixteen year old in the back as he was running away. He did this with a shotgun he owned illegally, since his licence had been revoked after he shot at a motorist. The two burglars he shot apparently thought there was no-one home, and were unarmed as far as I can tell. Martin left the bleeding youth to die.<br />
<br />
The two other cases Doughty quotes are way more straightforward. One involves a break-in by someone armed with a machete, and the other involves five men armed with guns and a knife trying to rob a shop. These sorts of cases would <em>always</em> have ended up with an acquittal, but if you'd have pointed out this sort of case before the election to show you are allowed to defend yourself, you'd have been met with the 'you're so <em>not</em>, because Tony Martin' defence.<br />
<br />
Doughty's reasoning for the pretend change is that perhaps people were so outraged by the Tony Martin case that the judiciary had to take notice. Ha ha. At least his conclusion wasn't that you can now defend yourself in your home because of David Cameron.<br />
<br />
The right wing blogs can usually be relied on for more of a stereotypical knee-jerk reaction to things when even the press is being a teensy bit more circumspect than usual, and Donal Blaney doesn't disappoint in '<a href="http://www.iaindale.com/posts/dead-men-tell-no-tales">Dead men tell no tales</a>' at Dale & co.** eschewing the mention of the guys who've been recently acquitted.
<br />
<br />
Apparently Tony Martin did what a lot of people wish they'd do if they were burgled. I don't know about you, but I think I'd pass on the whole shooting an unarmed, fleeing sixteen year old in the back with an illegally owned shotgun as the result of a paranoid personality disorder thing. Maybe that's just me.<br />
<br />
In among the run of the mill "the-law-favours-the-guilty-over-the-innocent" hilarity and the quoting of Cameron's empty macho posturing you'd expect from this sort of thing, there is a little claim that needs a bit of unpicking. It's this:<br />
<blockquote>
There's a reason home invasions are less common in states where homeowners make maximum use of their Second Amendment rights. </blockquote>
Really? This is likely to be purest hogwash. 'Home invasion' is not a legally defined federal offence in the States, so any comparison of rates will be based on something else. <a href="http://www.homeinvasionnews.com/if-you-see-these-home-invasion-statistics-dont-look/">Figures about 'home invasions' you find on the internet can often be rubbish</a>.<br />
<br />
I have never seen figures that compare states in the US for this sort of thing, and can't find any.*** I did ask in the comments of his piece and on the twitter just in case there actually were some, but wouldn't you know it, people seem to be too busy to reply.<br />
<br />
The closest I've ever come is "Targeting Guns: Firearms and Their Control" by Gary Kleck, a favourite among pro-gun people, in which he compares the rates of burglary in occupied homes from the US, the Netherlands, Canada and the UK.<br />
<br />
A few years ago, I wasted a few afternoons reading the study in the British Library and emailing the Home Office and the US Bureau of Justice Statistics only to find out that not only is it rubbish on many, many levels, but people often use it to prove something it doesn't anyway. That 'something' would be anything about 'home invasions'.<br />
<br />
Kleck's figures are from the US National Crime Victim Survey's data on burglaries with a household member present. Trouble is, any burglary that results in face to face contact with the intruder is no longer classified as a burglary but a robbery (or whatever crime results from that), so even if Blaney isn't regurgitating some vaguely remembered, well-thumbed claims about Kleck's study that have been passed around and changed urban-legend-stylee over the years, if what he's talking about is based on the US National Crime Survey and burglaries it's useless.<br />
<br />
Here's the thing. The reason people who kill or seriously injure burglars or robbers get arrested has precisely bugger all to do with loving the baddies and hating the goodies or PC Gawn Mad. As Blaney's own headline points out, dead men can't tell their tale - they can't let us know how they died. Police arrest people because <i>they need to find out what happened and the person holding the knife might not be telling the truth.****</i><br />
<br />
Blaney, Doughty and much of the rest of the right wing press have jumped to the conclusion that the man who died was a burglar who broke into Vincent Cooke's house armed with a knife in order to rob or do harm, and Cooke was defending himself, his family and his property. This is probably true, but how much more rubbish would the police be if they made the same assumptions when they turned up at a crime scene?<br />
<br />
"Honest officer, he broke in and I was in fear for my life - I totally didn't invite him round, stab him several times in the neck and then put his fingerprints on a knife and smash a window. Why yes, I would like a cup of tea thanks." Case closed.<br />
<br />
"Absolutely not, officer. I definitely didn't talk him into putting down his knife and then batter him to death with a claw hammer fifteen minutes after he'd calmed down. Two sugars, thanks. " Case closed.<br />
<br />
"Why, no officer, I've never seen him before and he totally didn't break in to get the stuff back I nicked from him in a feud and I swear I didn't take advantage of the fact that you no longer arrest people for killing burglars by shooting him in the back. I'll just be loading up the car as you make your enquiries. Ooh yes, a biscuit <em>would</em> be nice." Case closed.<br />
<br />
The only way Vincent Cooke or anyone like him will end up in prison is if something more is going on than meets the eye. It's always been the case. Don't believe people who tell you there's been some sort of change, don't believe people who tell you you're not allowed to defend yourself in your own home because this one bloke ended up in prison for shooting a kid in the back with an illegally owned gun while he was running away and leaving him to die.<br />
<br />
And just imagine how easy it would be to plan a murder and escape if the police suddenly stopped arresting people for killing burglars. Times that by a gazillion to find out how much easier it would be if a 'burglar' really did forefeit all their rights when they break into your house and you were allowed to kill them even if you weren't in any immediate danger.<br />
<br />
"Why yes, officer. I know he's gaffer-taped to a chair and there are bloody pliers on the table next to his ears, and I know it <em>looks</em> like he might have been undergoing some sort of mob-style interrogation when he died of blood loss but look! A broken window! He was a burglar! Yes, I would like help loading my wordly possessions into this 4X4, thank you."<br />
<br />
That you need to explain this stuff to grown adults is enough to make you feel like a reception-class teacher. Next week from the pundits, 'Now we're not even allowed to eat glue'. Sheesh.<br />
<br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">*I added the last bits myself. I stole them from 'Cobra'. Ho ho. </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">**<a href="http://iaindale.blogspot.com/2011/04/reward-what-should-i-call-my-new-site.html?showComment=1304004467345#c3328628520008956570">My suggestion for a name for that site was way, way better</a>. </span><br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">***Please put a link in the comments if you've ever seen one. I'd be surprised if it isn't balls.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">****I learned about how murderers might lie from Columbo, and because it's, like, all obvious and that. Duh.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: x-small;">Anyone interested in watching all of <i>1990: The Bronx Warriors (and why wouldn't you be?) </i>it's <a href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9jhzC9Ah9c">here on YouTube</a><i>.</i></span></div>
Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-21544361.post-49756274446472450342011-09-04T12:49:00.001+01:002011-09-04T12:50:36.802+01:00Tabloid bullshit of the month award - August 2011<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jKQ-ygmFUak/TUNrfLoSE-I/AAAAAAAABZ0/9BhAF-ezL9c/s1600/5cctabloidaward.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jKQ-ygmFUak/TUNrfLoSE-I/AAAAAAAABZ0/9BhAF-ezL9c/s200/5cctabloidaward.jpg" width="150" /></a>It's here! It's great! It's late! Ha haah!<br />
<br />
It's the <b>5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award</b> for August ought eleven! There's a line of them medieval blokes with long trumpets that have coats of arms hanging off them tooting out a fanfare. In my mind. And yours too now, because I put them there with the magic of words.<br />
<br />
<a name='more'></a><br />
August hasn't been anywhere near as eventful as July in the sulphurous netherworld that is the tabloid press. No papers shut down, some people arrested, but not very high profile. No excellent performances by top cops (as the Sun would call them - see, I pay attention) in front of Committees.<br />
<br />
What we have had, though, is the award very, very nearly being won by our very own Prime Minister, David Shinyface. Very nearly. <br />
<br />
Following on from his awful, tabloid-inspired, mendacious speech about immigration, Shinyface decided to get all Charles Bronson and tough about Human Rights in the Daily Express. That's right. Our Prime Minister elected to show what he's learned about the honesty of tabloids from the News of the World phone hacking scandal by having an article published in a newspaper owned by a pornographer who removed it from the Press Complaints Commission so it doesn't have to face regulation. Even the scant regulation of the PCC, which covers about as much as a porn star's lingerie put through a boil wash. This means the paper is free to do what a free press does best. Lie about Muslims, the EU and the Human Rights Act. Excellent choice, Mr Shinyface. Perfectly shows the utter contempt you hold for the general public, you bloat-faced pantomime baddie.<br />
<br />
But this month I had to ignore the Prime Minister in favour of an absolute sterling example of one of the things the tabloids are excellent at, the sort of story synonymous with the red-tops (and the papers that think they're not red-tops). We're talking about the tabloid hatchet-job, my friends. Early this month, you may remember, the Daily Mirror settled its crosshairs on Steve Wright and BOOM! blew him away with the buckshot of his own depravity.<br />
<br />
The winner is '<a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2011/08/04/steve-wright-the-enigma-inside-the-weird-lonely-world-of-radio-2-legend-115875-23317894/">Steve Wright: inside the weird world of the Radio 2 legend</a>', by Ryan Parry.<br />
<br />
Here's the email:<br />
<blockquote>
Dear Mr Parry, </blockquote>
<blockquote>
You know that bit in 'Footloose' where Kevin Bacon charges around a deserted warehouse jumping about and whirling and kicking up his legs like someone's punted him squarely in the anus? You might want to start doing that now, and doing it for joy! You've won the <b>5cc tabloid bullshit of the month award </b>for August 2011! Kick off your Sunday shoes, my friend. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
You already know what you've won for, I bet. If you don't, and the man who wrote '<a href="http://www.mirror.co.uk/celebs/news/2011/08/04/steve-wright-the-enigma-inside-the-weird-lonely-world-of-radio-2-legend-115875-23317894/">Steve Wright: inside the weird world of the Radio 2 legend</a>' is sitting there wondering what he might be getting a bullshit award for, you probably need to book some appointments with someone. Here's why you won (I hope you've already said this to yourself over and again in shame as you struggle to sleep, shivering): </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>Imagine someone in radio listening to other people's shows to pick up ideas. Why, it's almost as if this would be entirely normal behaviour for someone who works in bloody radio, but you've seen through the veneer of totally banal normality to expose the unspeakable evil behind a man just getting on with his job.</li>
<li>"For breakfast, he usually asks for poached or scrambled eggs on brown toast from a restaurant called Avelli’s, porridge from Make Mine or Eat, a small bacon or sausage butty with ketchup from Eat and a skinny latte with one sweetener." The bastard! Eggs? For breakfast? He's worse than Fred West!</li>
<li>As if having eggs or porridge for breakfast wasn't enough, this depraved, thoroughly evil man has his lunch at 1.30. Or 'lunchtime' as it's often known. I, for one, have never heard the like. I hope our top psychologists are coming up with a suitable treatment for such inhuman, despicable behaviour.</li>
<li>Wait, what? On Fridays he often goes to visit his mum? Oh my god, hanging would be too good for this monster! I mean - having eggs for breakfast and eating lunch at lunchtime you can almost understand, but visiting your mother? I think I've just been a bit sick in my mouth.</li>
<li>If you're trying to do a tabloid hatchet-job and you can't dig up anything worse than 'he likes eating', you should probably, you know, just stop. You might make yourself look stupid. Well, stupid or weirder than the person you're trying to hatchet. </li>
</ul>
Keep it up though! It's this sort of thing that keeps tabloid journalists at the bottom of the list of the most trusted professions, below estate agents, carnies and serial killers. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
I will be publishing this email over at <a href="http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/">www.fivechinesecrackers.com</a>. As ever, you are more than welcome to have a reply published by simply replying to this email. You're actually encouraged. I've been sending out this award for nearly a year now, and not a single recipient has ever had the courage to respond. It's like you guys prefer skulking in the shadows or something. I bet you all have your lunch at lunchtime as well, you sick bastards. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
You're also in with a chance to win the 5cc tabloid bullshitter of the year award, which I'll be giving to the hack who's won most monthly awards by the end of the year. If you're going to make an effort to win, please don't do it by creepily attacking people for going about their business. It's just not nice. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Cheers then! </blockquote>
<blockquote>
5cc</blockquote>
Okay, you people. That's it for August. Tune in at the end of September for the next one. If I have a month as busy as August it might be late again, but never mind. It's not like I'm eating eggs for breakfast or anything evil like that.Five Chinese Crackershttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09395982651352498540noreply@blogger.com13