How Not to Get a Good Night's Sleep

I was about to go to bed when I thought I'd check up on Lenin. It turns out he's had an article in today's Graun about the Murdoch implosion, which obviously I'm finding satisfying on a number of levels. Specifically he was commenting on Ed 'Twat' Miliband's decision to stick the boot in now the beast is wounded*.

Point is, much though I enjoy Richard's writing, CiF becomes an even worse bearpit than usual under his articles. A brief survey of the comments suggests at least 3 sub-species of Trollus Cryptofascistus.

• The 'cynic'. This is a common troll endemic to CiF threads. Cynics usually acknowledge that something is not good but then proceed to offer up whatever banal platitudes they use to ensure they don't actually have to do anything about it and lets them drown out the little squeals of guilt that occasionally erupt from the dustier layers of their reptilian hindbrains. These trolls' comments usually have the effect of siding with the aggressor against the victim - ach, you see it every day in the playground, bless them. Typical examples include iamaliberal:

Labour - the party with the bravery to kick someone when they are already down.

• The 'clearly a hack'. Typical examples include Ilohan:

Whilst the media, liberal commenators, Ed Miliband etc get in a hysterical tizzy about events that happened years ago and are, in any case, a side effect of having a free press....1000s of people are losing their jobs in Derby cos we have no meaningful industrial policy**...

But some dodgy phone tapping is a national crisis...

I don't know...but have we al lost our minds?

• The 'Sir Thickington Thickalot'. These are generally just your examples of either pig-ignorance or outright barefaced lying. Possibly a witches' brew of both. Examples include flatpackhamster:

Did you know that Richard Seymour, the author of this article, is an active member of the Socialist Worker's Party? Did you know that his party campaigns for totalitarian rule and glorifies the Soviet era?

The last ones do at least have comedy value. However, it brings out the worst in me.

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* For the record, it's great that he is sticking the boot in, long may it continue. However little confidence I have that it will, should Murdoch manage to pull something out of the bag to stop the rot and begin reinflating his rancid bladder of a media empire. Maybe he could do something about his unfortunate tattoo whilst he's at it.

**PS - it's not because 'we have no meaningful industrial policy' - at least, not in the sense I suspect Ilohan means. It is, as ever, because of the way capitalism runs industry. And if you want to stop the job losses, there's a public meeting next Tuesday.

UPDATE: Having grabbed a few hours sleep, I've come to the conclusion that in fact this is a pretty normal CiF crowd. And in some ways, isn't that the biggest disappointment of them all, eh?

Exciting new bloggertunity

The brilliant, acerbic and rather lovely Siobhan Schwartzberg has started a new blog. I reckon it'll be well worth keeping your peepers on.

That is all.

Although it is on wordpress, so expect much FYWP in coming months...

Wingnuts and Neologisms

'Well, it's quite simple, really.' Henry leaned forward and threw another log on the fire. ... 'The trick is to keep doing outrageous things. There's no point in passing some scandalous piece of legislation and then giving everyone time to get worked up about it. You have to get right in there and top it with something even worse, before the public have had a chance to work out what's hit them.'

- Henry Winshaw, What a Carve Up! by Jonathan Coe (1995:313)

A frequent guilty pleasure of mine is Sadly, No!, a US-based snark-blog that takes the piss out of American wingnuts (whose 'grassroots' movement actually called themselves teabaggers, then blamed Urban Dictionary for making it sound naughty). The gift, and the trauma, of American wingnuttery, is that there appears to be no bottom to the barrel. It reminds me of the everlasting pint of Guinness in the old gag, and just like that magical pintpot, it spews forward a gusher of foul, sticky, black bile that turns the stomach.

Take, for example, this, in which a man spends 5 pages calling Shirley Sherrod (the woman who lost her job after a wingnut edited a video to make her look like a racist) a liar because she described the racist beating to death of one of her relatives as a 'lynching'.

Plain as day, Ms. Sherrod says that Bobby Hall, a Sherrod relative, was lynched. As she puts it, describing the actions of the 1940s-era Sheriff Claude Screws: "Claude Screws lynched a black man."

This is not true. It did not happen. How do we know this? ... [quotes from Supreme Court judgement on the case] Hall, a young negro about thirty years of age, was handcuffed and taken by car to the courthouse. As Hall alighted from the car at the courthouse square, the three petitioners began beating him with their fists and with a solid-bar blackjack about eight inches long and weighing two pounds. They claimed Hall had reached for a gun and had used insulting language as he alighted from the car. But after Hall, still handcuffed, had been knocked to the ground, they continued to beat him from fifteen to thirty minutes until he was unconscious. Hall was then dragged feet first through the courthouse yard into the jail and thrown upon the floor, dying. An ambulance was called, and Hall was removed to a hospital, where he died within the hour and without regaining consciousness. There was evidence that Screws held a grudge against Hall, and had threatened to "get" him.

Yeah, Jeff, right on! How dare she call that a lynching? What was she thinking? She's like worse than Obamhitler.

But anyway, I thought that was going to be the vilest thing I read all week. But somehow, the EvilGuinness keeps pumping away, delivering new globs of devilfoam to parts you thought it could not possibly reach. Here's a man called Dan Popp.

Let's broaden our campaigns to keep not only our sports stars, but all our rich neighbors in the neighborhood. Let's not discriminate against white CEOs just because they can't jump. Instead of vilifying the rich and forcing them to justify their success, irrationally presuming that it must have come at the price of someone else's failure, let's embrace all those who bring value to our society.

If you're with me on this, please go to the nearest window, stick your head out, and shout:

Rich people, we're sorry. We've committed the sin of envy, the sin of covetousness, and the sin of slander. We have believed the lie and borne false witness against you. Forgive us for the nasty things we said. Please don't go. We want you here. We are all better off with mega-successful neighbors. We're going to tear down the "Keep Out" signs. We're going to stop robbing you of the rewards you've earned, confiscating your wealth as if you were convicted criminals. Please come and do what you do: increase the quality of life for all of us.

Now, I don't know what your reaction to reading that was, but *clever reveal* THAT'S THE POINT. I don't know how to describe my reactions to these pieces. On the one hand, there's a sense of disbelief, as though you've just witnessed someone chowing down on their own chod bin contents and pronouncing it to be as delicious as the finest Haribo. On the other there's a depressing element of 'where do you start' - it's so many kinds of wrong at once, like moving into digs previously occupied by students armed only with half a pack of J-cloths and Happy Shopper polish. It's an unequal struggle, is my point.

It's virtually impossible to comprehensively describe. There needs to be a new set of words to describe the emotional response to reading one of these articles. I've tried to make a list:

1. Anger
2. Annoyance
3. Animosity
4. Disappointment
5. Disorientation
   
6. Despair
7. Ennui
8. Flaberghastliness (already a compound emotion)
9. Irritation
10. Sarcastic
    
11. Shock
12. Slaptacular (yet to make it into the OED, nevertheless a perfectly expressive word)
    
13. Superior, in a somewhat pointless and hard to defend way
    
14. Weariness

Plus about 7 others I don't have a name for. It's one of those times that you wish English lent itself to compound nouns as easily as German does. It would mean that wingnuts have achieved something - the response to their madness would have outpaced antidisestablishmentarianism with ease, and make a good go for Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch.

In the end though, it just makes me wish I was the sort of person who only made the same mistake once. The lesson is clear: don't get out of the boat. One day, perhaps I will learn this.

Trivial Aside on the PCC

Anton Vowl's got a very good post on the PCC. There's been a fair bit on the ol' blogosphere recently about the PCC, as a whole new generation has discovered how bloody useless it is.

I just thought it was worth noting that Anton's suspicions that

You have to wonder, if someone makes the same kind of mistake again and again, whether it's down to sheer incompetence or not giving a flying one about the consequences. Consequences which in the case of the Pathetically Craven Commission mean a very nasty finger-wagging if you do something like ruining someone's life or completely misrepresenting them; or even a much sterner tut-tutting if you drive someone to suicide or destroy a dead person's memory.

are more than justified. The organisation is, as you would suspect from a body whose members are senior figures in the very industry they are supposed to be regulating, designed to be as ineffective an instrument of restraint as possible.

As any regular readers may know, my current quotable text of choice is the 1997 blockbuster Power Without Responsibility: The Press and Broadcasting in Britain*, and having ploughed through nearly all of it now, I thought I would once again share Seaton and Curran's words of wisdom with you.

[The PCC was] established in 1989. It was investigated four years later and found wanting by Sir David Calcutt who concluded:

The Press Complaints Commission is not, in my view, an effective regulator of the press. It has not been set up in a way, and is not operating a code of conduct, which enables it to command not only press but also public confidence ... It is not the truly independent body that it should be.

Following this report, the [PCC] duly appointed a new chairman and promised significant improvements. Once again, the cycle of public scrutiny and condemnation, followed by contrition and the promise of reform, was resumed. However, nothing much changed.

So, this was a problem known about over 15 years ago, long before Anton rightly fingered it as a 'cargo cult construction.'**

It's enough to make you tut really, isn't it?

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*'A riproaring, adrenaline fuelled ride' - Maxim
'A comedy of errors as sublime as it is fuelled with white-knuckle suspense and ultra violence' - Christian Science Monitor
'I loved the bit where they discussed the abolition on taxes on the press, before his mother turned out to be one of the aliens.' - Chris Moyles
'Quite long.' - Christie Malry

**A case of Paul Dacre, he come, if you will. You won't? Please yourself then.

Is this the least funny comments thread ever?

I've recently become something of a fan of Laurie Penny, but I honestly can't understand the comments thread from her last couple of posts. I think what's happened is that a bunch of wankers who think they're funny but actually come off like stoned sixth-formers have descended en masse, but I can't be sure.

I mean that, I genuinely can't be sure, because it's about one-tenth as coherent as Have Your Say. It could just be really rubbish sockpuppeting or a joke I'm too much of a newb to get. Can anyone with a spare minute pop over there, take a look, and give me a second opinion? Otherwise it's going to bug me for ages...

(Yes I know worrying about a comments thread on the prestigious interwebs is a complete hiding to nothing, but humour me, OK? It's bugging me for a reason, and the reason is this: Penny Red is a quite interesting, reasonably intellectual blog that has an apparent audience of - well, that's just it: I can't tell if they're Tory misogynists, well-meaning sense-of-humour-bypass victims or somewhere in the middle.

And it's unusual to find that on the left-wing blogs. At least, the ones I use. Generally speaking you get a mixture of people posting links to a petition to save the cheese workers of Guatemala; someone who wants to talk about NuLabour, regardless of whatever the actual topic was, and a few people earnestly stating the obvious. Except for Florence Durrant on Lenin's Tomb of course, she's in a league of her own. What I'm trying to say, is that it's usually a bit more sedate and less CiF/HYS)

Update: Gods, it's just descended to a new low. Honestly, how do these people walk about all day? Surely they must keep getting distracted when they see someone in a shiny surface who keeps copying everything they do?

Please Read This

No, not this, numbnuts, this. It's dead important: it's about the interwebs ((c) Iain Dale, pat. pending).

If you were already here I wouldn't need to tell you to read the thing in front of you would I? Your eyes are already being dragged unwillingly over the text, your reptilian brain trudging towards the end of the sentence with all the enthusiasm of a gulag worker who knows his next shift is with Alexandr Solzhenitsyn.

Anyway, I was characteristically behind on the greatest scandal of our blogging times, until I found out about it from Laurie Penny, but The Quail seems to be spot on, and very funny to boot. Go read it.

Moving House

I've been getting a bit fed up with the decidedly unpretty livejournal recently, so I've decided to have move into Blogger's loving embrace. If it turns out to be better than LJ I may even move permanently, but for the moment I'll cross-post and see how that works.

It's a bit like having a life, but, you know, cheaper.

I like a few of the features - you can have a blogroll, for a start. I'm hoping I can get a tag cloud going and some other bits and bobs as I go along. See how it goes.