Not only must justice be not done, it must also be seen to be not done

Put these three statements in order of soul-draining awfulness, and you could win a luxury lifetime holiday stuck in Britain.

1.
A group of teenagers cornered three passengers on a Croydon tram, and attacked them with poles, sticks and socks filled with ballast, pulling the emergency door release so the vehicle could not move on, and taking turns to attack the victims for ten minutes. One was kicked so hard against an internal glass door that it smashed. The tram, filled with terrified pasengers, sustained over £3,400 worth of damage and had to be taken out of service. A supposed 'revenge attack', the victims were in fact entirely unconnected with the earlier confrontation that had prompted the assault.

2.
The six men were handed suspended jail sentences for violent disorder.

3.
Detective Constable Ostin Elkins of British Transport Police said: "We welcome the sentences handed down."

(Source)

While we were sleeping (a round-up)

Interesting how quickly interest waned in the Thatcher circus, proof yet again of how difficult sustained effort comes to Britain's spoonfed campus attention-seekers and their media class brownhatters.
(To keep those memories alive, though, here are some nice photographs of that quintessentially British alliance of feral losers and champagne socialists who took to the streets to celebrate: I especially like the pudgy-faced old boiler in the jaunty black hat: now there's a woman who's clearly suffered in her life.)
Here and there some interesting fallout, however, like the minor hypocrisy of the BBC defending the jokes on Have I Got News For You? (I know: I couldn't believe they were still making it either) on the grounds that "it would have been impossible to ignore her death as the programme covers the biggest stories of the week" (a suggestion that will indeed be news to anyone whose memory stretches back as far as the death of Princess Diana), and this account of how the 45 year old teacher (yes, social optimists: a 45 year old teacher) who organised the 'Witch is Dead Party!' (sic) Facebook group (without getting fired, needless to say) benefited from Thatcher's right to buy council house scheme to the tune of more than 150000 big ones. (This scheme, enormously popular with socialists, enabled council tenants to buy their own homes and thus deny anyone benefiting similarly in the future.)
Click on the link, look at her beautiful face, and speculate on which worthy charities she distributed all that loot amongst.

The funeral itself went off with surprisingly little bother, the only major gesture of disrespect being Obama's deliciously typical decision not to take it seriously, sending only a couple of clapped-out old Republican has-beens as representatives of the American government.
Not often I have a good word to say for Obama, but I must say in all sincerity that I've always found the fact he's never bothered to pretend that Britain and the 'special relationship' are anything but a big joke to the US administration to be refreshingly honest, and useful in popping the absurd Churchillian balloon of self-regard in which we still conduct foreign policy.
It's also funny to see his worshippers among the British politcal elite and media class falling over themselves not to notice. (Some of his best gestures of contempt for Britain are listed here: I cherish the image of Gordon Brown being sent on his way with a pat on the head and a box full of shit DVDs that the poor boob couldn't even watch without a multi-region player.)
Nonetheless, Obama's decision to sprinkle his magic ambiguity dust over the issue of the sovereignty of the Falklands Islands - and there are few issues as clear cut and less meriting his trademark six-of-one shuffle - might have even penetrated the six-inch skulls of the British metroproles. (Still, at least he didn't call the Islands the Malvinas, which is one up on John Lewis.)

Sticking with the greatest human who ever lived or shall: he also went on a middle east trip, where he reaffirmed America's belief in Israel's legitimacy while redesigning its map so it no longer has a capital, and compared Israeli-Palestine relations to those between the US and Canada. With his customary clarity and razor insight, he explained to Israelis that, while there is no excuse for attacking them and no hope for any ideology that seeks to deny them the right to exist, the future of peace was to be found in seeing things the way Palestinians do.
Meanwhile the Palestinians celebrated his historic bridge-building by burning American flags and chanting “Allahu Akbar.”  And this despite the fact that back at home, pupils in something called 'fifth grade' at Flour Bluff Independent School in Texas were given a test in which the correct answer to the question, 'Why might the US be a target for terrorism?' was: "Decisions we made in the United States have had negative effects on people elsewhere."
Obama really must wonder just what more he has to do to please these people.

One person who won't be following the great peacemaker to Israel, incidentally, is Professor Stephen Hawking, who has boycotted an Israel academic conference due to political objections which, given that he was more than happy to visit Iran, are presumably rooted in opposition to regimes that wouldn't exterminate him.
(And I know we all do funny things and it's naughty to single out Muslims, but just briefly: here's the story of a 28 year old Iranian who attacked the priceless 14th century astronomical clock in Lyon's John the Baptist Cathedral with an iron bar because "the beauty of the clock prevented believers from concentrating on their prayers".)

Guess who's going to be "earning more than President Obama", according to the Mail? None other than David Miliband, who's abandoned politics and followed Tony Blair into the netherworld of huge international charity organisations. He's taken his boyish charm and cute fuzzy hairdo to New York, there to trouser the £300000 salary that comes of being president of something called the International Rescue Organisation.
The glorious World Socialist Website ("published by the International Committee of the Fourth International") is worried Millie's appointment will make it more difficult for the organisation to suck up to the Taliban (a fair point, as far as it goes) and adds these amusing general comments about the lad's progress since his political trajectory was stymied by his comedy brother:

When interviewed, he appears as a petulant schoolboy waiting for something bigger and better to come along. In the meantime, he has turned his hand to making considerable amounts of money. He has reportedly amassed almost £1 million through public speaking engagements such as the recent lecture he gave in Abu Dhabi, for which he received £25,000. He set up a company, The Office of David Miliband Limited, which right-wing commentator Toby Young has attacked as a tax-avoidance scheme through which his non-parliamentary earnings are channelled.

I can't see him being too worried by a golden oldie drubbing from the International Committee of the Fourth International; altogether more worrying for him, potentially, is a ringing testimonial from creepy sex pest Bill Clinton ("one of the ablest, most creative public servants of our time"), generally a kiss of death akin to a pop group getting an endorsement from Paul Morley.

At the same time, he's resigned as vice-chairman of Sunderland Football Club because some new player or manager or something, from Italy I think, has spoken in favour of fascism.
No clearer sign that he's giving up politics than that! For any silver spoon leftist seriously intent on political credibility, pretending to share the funny poor people's love of football is simply non-negotiable. Certainly it far outweighs queasy displays of political ethics, especially the sort that comes from people who see no reason to disown a youth spent larking around with unapologetic Stalinists. Footie transcends anything, mate.
The further irony that football is, in its essence, an enactment of every impulse and principle on which fascism rests, is presumably as lost on Millie as it is on Weyman Bennett, joint national secretary of Unite Against Fascism (which, in its frequent alliance with Islamists to oppose inarticulate nationalist pressure groups might be better named 'Unite With Fascism'), who applauded Miliband's decision, and made the truly strange claim that "football has made great strides in opposing fascism", possibly in recollection of the Sylvester Stallone movie 'Escape to Victory'.

Last of all, here's some great footage of a woman being booted off an American Airlines plane for refusing to stop shrieking Whitney Houston's 'I Will Always Love You' because she's a diabetic.

No argument from me

Huffington Post headline:
"Zooey Deschanel Is Unrecognisable"

Sometimes you just have to smile

Iran to chair UN arms control forum

Lessons from the death of Margaret Thatcher

1. They love to fight yesterday's battles

The most darkly comic feature of the Thatcher death parties was their bizarre cowardice. As if Thatcher, the week before, was still an intimidating enough presence to stay their hands! People celebrate the death of a tyrant because they are no longer subject to them, and thus have no need to fear their wrath. The Thatcher parties, by contrast, were an expression of contempt, but one they waited until the very moment that it made least sense to give vent to. This was either cowardice, or a display of extreme respect to the woman that negates the whole point of the exercise in the first place. Which is to say, it was cowardice.
Yet this is ever the story. Looking back over their shoulders to the time when they bravely stood up to some existential menace; it's always the past. Ask them to oppose true injustice in the present and their cowardice will sting them so much they'll accuse you of provocation.


2. They need people to hate

It happened to be her. There may or may not have been another suitable candidate had it not been her, but the need precedes the selection, nonetheless.
They are incapable of not reducing politics to personalities. The fact that people who disagree with them are permitted a voice - the cornerstone of an oppositional democracy and the guarantee of their right to hold and express their own views - is intolerable, because people who disagree with them must by definition be malevolent. They are innately totalitarian, and bridle at the charge only because of its popular (if largely fallacious) association with right wing dictatorships. A totalitarian state conducted to their satisfaction wouldn't be oppressive at all in their eyes, because they are self-evidently benevolent and self-evidently right. They love the idea of no opposition, and they love the idea of getting rid of troublemakers.


3. They think of politics as the clash of icons

Whether hero-worshipping or burning-in-effigy, the Left refuses to concentrate on issues and insists upon personalising its hopes and fears in the form of gods and monsters. Witness their toe-curling (and in context rather comic) lapping at the altar of Obama, the flipside of the demonising of Thatcher. Doubtless many of those joining in the frolics over the death of a frail 87 year old woman were also to be counted among the weepers and wailers when their own team lost a former Ku Klux Klan member (see here). To them, our leaders - a dubious enough term in itself - are not extensions of themselves, the voices they have elected to speak for them, but saints to grovel before, or fiends to damn to hellfire.
When a right winger dies, the response is muted, and the emphasis is on their message. (The thought of them celebrating the death of a left-winger is also, of course, unthinkable.) This is healthy, and respectful not merely in the sense of mannered, decent and polite, but respectful of the whole notion of democratic representation and the freedoms guaranteed to all by the democratic system. The Thatcher death parties display more than contempt for a woman, they are also contemptuous of the freedoms and safeguards that make them permissible in the first place.
They are demonstrations not of freedom but of impatience with freedom. They are overtly fascistic.


4. The links between Leftism, Progressivism and Fascism are as strong as ever

At the risk of some smartarse invoking 'Godwin's Law', their newest stupid attempt to close down legitimate debate (a reasonable analogy with Hitler is no more off-limits that a reasonable analogy with anything else,  but please, if you must smugly indulge this latest idiocy, at least pay me the compliment of assuming I might have heard it before: it's not so much the inevitable resorting to it that offends me as the presumption that I simultaneously need to be told what the fucking thing means), the similarities between the Thatcher death displays and the similar provocations of Nazism and other fascist intimidation cults are obvious.
Here, plainly, is a woman who is neither tyrant nor dictator, but a three-time democratically elected representative of her people. That she alienated those who did not vote for her is, of course, inevitable, but it is not any kind of injustice. Mass displays of hatred, of the kind we have been seeing, are therefore sinister, because they imply that democratic process can and should be overturned if the need arises (the need to be decided, of course, by them).
This is not merely a classically fascist tactic, it is how fascism actually works, and gains influence and power: a basically minority concern making careful and effective public displays of punching above its weight, coupled with declamations of moral and social fervour, salted with intimidation and threat.
The illusion is therefore created that a small group of people represent a much larger and more important constituency than they in fact do, (just as the fact that Thatcher could only have come to power - and then retained that power in subsequent free elections - because more people wanted her in power than did not becomes mysteriously forgotten in the clamour). The careful appeal to grievance and resentment swells the numbers of course, along with the careful selection of monsters or a monster-class to vent the frustration against. So the voice gets louder, the tone more certain, the demands more insistent, the pretence of victimhood more central to the message.

The ability to make public one's opposition to and dissent from one's government is one of the many great luxuries of a political system that allows you to vote out people you don't want.
Celebrating the death of a leader only even makes sense if that leader is a tyrant or dictator whose death is the only legal means of their being displaced. Even then, such celebrations may be short-lived, because without the right to choose the replacement, there is every reason to think the next in line will be just as unpleasant, if not worse.
The celebration of the death of a former democratic leader is something entirely different. It is a frightening reminder of how strong the siren lure of fascism remains.
Look at the hideous faces of those who took to the streets, the complacent joy, the pantomime sneers, the facile gestures of outrage toward a long-dead consensus of permissible conduct.
How did they get there? They were mobilised, which is to say they were instructed. They are there because they are obeying orders. Few would have done the same alone. Like the happy torturers of the Inquisition, the assurance of a moral justification for their outrages is all the excuse they need to get out the pincers and enjoy themselves. The thrill is of being simultaneously provocative and cosseted, cosseted by numbers, by the assurances of their leaders, by the fact that their friends are all doing the same. Of course they are happy: they have been told they are free. But their job, what they are actually doing, is trying to intimidate the rest of us.
The world is full of people who are happy to do as they are told, and people just waiting for the excuse to do the telling. Nothing demands greater vigilance for those who believe in self-determination, and that vigilance is harder than ever to enforce, now that the willing stooges control the media and popular right-thinking, and social media makes mass-mobilisation so trivially easy that it has become a popular sport.
A whole new age of fascism may be about to dawn.

Iran to sue Hollywood over 'unrealistic' portrayal

"The website also reported that the conference intends to send a statement to the Human Rights Council on the matter."

 I like it!

Iran to sue Hollywood over 'unrealistic' portrayal of secretive state in Ben Affleck movie

The Law of Snowball Momentum

As you'll know, here at Venerable Beads we like to keep you up to date with the frontiers of empirical discovery, especially when those discoveries just happen to conform to pre-determined ideological prejudices. You know, as if by magic.

There used to be a corny notion, thankfully dying out, that the real job of science is to add to our store of knowledge about the universe. If you want that sort of thing, go to some square old outlet like New Scientist. Those of us with a better grasp of such things know that the real job of science is to serve the state, by offering empirical validation of their nutball dogma.
So I'm proud to say that while those old-white coated squares were messing about trying to cure cancer and work out how the universe started, we were at the real cutting edge, reporting such life-changing discoveries as the fact that heart disease medication can 'cure racism', conservatives have lower IQs, white people find it easier to identify an ape if they've been shown a photo of a black man for a fraction of a second first, greater use of contraception can help prevent global warming, and heterosexuality is an illusion created by Walt Disney films.

In addition to whatever the issue at hand happens to be, such discoveries confirm various other things, too.
One is what I have elsewhere termed Bollock's Law, which is simply that any experiment which is set up not to test but to prove a contention, and is devised by people who want that contention to be true, will probably end up demonstrating what they want it to.

Another is Barnum's Law, also known as the universal law of eternal gullibility.
The interesting thing about this law is that it operates not only among laymen: when state power is strong and ideological conformity an essential price of getting ahead, other scientists are just as happy to be born every minute as the rest of us. Hence the fact of the identifying apes experiment, my favourite of those linked to above, being reported solemnly and without even respectful dissent in the science page of the London Times.

Yet another is the curious phenomenon we might call the Law of Intellectual Snowball Momentum.
There is no excuse - not even the wish for a quiet life, for just ten seconds of the day to be free from their endless aggrieved yapping - for giving ground on any of these issues, because it never, ever stops.
Each fresh  concession only leads to louder and more insistent cries that we must then go a step further. Think of any fashionable but divisive political issue, and you will see this law operate in almost every case. No matter how much ground is given, even if far in excess of that initially requested, more will always be demanded, and the urgency and lack of compromise will only increase.
The importance of the issue somehow increases the faster and more successfully it cuts through dissent and becomes accepted in the wider culture.

Obviously, the biggest, most shining goal of the State is to obliterate the family, to have sole and unquestioned authority over your private life and reproductive rights.
An essential part of this goal is of course to take away your responsibility for your own children, with a battery of laws enabling it to remove children from the home and insist by law that any child be raised in accordance with the the elite's own prejudices and preferences, with non-compliance punishable by law. This is now entirely above board in institutions that are responsible for the well-being of children - education, fostering, adoption etc -and it will be the smallest of steps for such decrees to be applied to the family itself, with regular checks, pledges of allegiance and, for dissenters, the legal separation of parent and child.

One way science can help is by honing in on traditional elements of child-raising, where conservatives, with their sneaky ideas of personal freedom, are most likely to reveal themselves.
And thus the campaign, now more or less won, against the use of physical chastisement in child rearing. With its ideal combination of interference and compassion, it was the easiest and most successful means for the state to get a legal toehold in the institution of the family itself.

There's nothing wrong with disliking the idea of parents smacking children, and suggesting there might be a better way. But more fool anyone who thought that such concern was the real issue, or even an issue at all, with this most successful of intrusive campaigns. The point was to make an opening in the family unit - that most essentially private and unimpeachable institution - wide enough to let the state through. And the best way was by milking the compassion of child psychologists and behaviourists and liberal pundits (with their nannies and child minders).
If that were really the issue, it would stop there.
But if it were operating to a model more along the lines I have been suggesting, we should be expecting the Law of Intellectual Snowball Momentum to kick in about now, and to see the experts in child health suddenly making some new and amazing discovery that will protect the welfare of the child even more (and who but a monster could object to protecting the welfare of children?) and that will also - entirely incidentally, of course! - empower the state still further to stick its greasy face through your curtains.

And so, ladies and gentlemen, may I be the first to inform you that shouting at children gives them cancer.

Only slavery will set you free!

It never ceases to amaze me what our cultural leaders decide to claim is empowering to women.
I also wonder, with profound fear and dismay, how much longer it will be before sadistic hardcore pornography is entirely above ground, shameless and free.

I do know that our current relationship with porn is unsustainable.
The changes its reputation has undergone in my lifetime have been extraordinary: no other phenomenon maps out the contours of the sexual revolution so plainly, or with so keen a cutting edge.
And it's important because for a lot of that time porn was unequivocally accepted in all approved discourse as the dark side of sexual freedom: in the seventies and eighties the dominant radical feminist view of it (basically the same as the pre-existing general popular view of it, though this was dismissed as patriarchal, and suspect in its motives) was that it was a plain social evil, with practical ramifications in terms of sexual crime.

When I was a child, less than forty years ago, and until well into my teenage, true pornography - ie in which the sexual act was not simulated and shown in clinical detail - was literally illegal - was prosecutable, in theory and instance - in Britain.
While sex shops made a brisk trade of censored videos in which every clear instance of penetration was cut out, the rest of us found relief in top shelf magazines in which women posed in attitudes of solitude and what might today be innocently mistaken for dignity. Their genitalia could be shown, but squads of enforcers recruited just for this purpose regularly checked to ensure they were not using any object to show or even suggest penetration, or holding their vaginas open slightly with their hands: these, too, were punishable offences until the twentieth century was almost spent.
(Incidentally, I notice that these magazines are still on sale, in exactly the same profusion as ever they were. I don't doubt the contents will be unrecognisably more explicit now than the sort we crowded round in the playground, but even so, who still buys them when actual moving pornography is free on everyone's computer? It's an absolute mystery, like still seeing rows and rows of Super 8 movies in the Blu-ray age.)

The rehabilitation of porn began early in America and the rest of  Europe: though the feminist influence was felt strongly there too, nothing could stop it once legalised.
But still it remained an underground, somewhat embarrassing thing. A steely nerve was required to walk up to the counter and purchase some, especially if the person serving was a comely wench. Nothing more ably revealed the schizophrenia of porn: I am about to pay for the privilege of entering a fantasy world in which I am master and all women are my slaves, but what this ordinary girl in a crummy job, who I would give anything to impress, can see with laser penetration in my shifting gaze, dry lips and moist palms is that the only slave in the room is me.
Porn was for losers, everybody knew that really.

Now, for the first time, that really has changed.
In Britain, it was the lad culture of the 1990s that resulted in the attitude shift, and then of course the internet that made the idea of any of us standing around waffling about it utterly pointless.
It's here now, whether we like it or not, and in such degrading, bestial forms as would make the most hardened consumer of top shelf material of, say, twenty five years ago, weep. And it's free, and it's instant, and you need not assume that any man you meet in any capacity in the course of your day is unfamiliar with it. Especially if he's just the cooler side of middle-aged. Then it's more or less a dead cert.

The law of diminishing returns in material of this sort (same as with violence) is so obvious, and the analogy with drugs (the constant need for a greater and greater dose just to reach the same plateau of stimulation), is so undeniable that those who do deny it - and there's no shortage of them - are to be shunned and condemned as much, indeed far more, than any helplessly in thrall to it.
Its obvious effect on society in terms of the nature of sexual relations, particularly in the underclass from which English law and the interest of hypocritical social reformers has entirely retreated in terror, is incalculable in terms of misery inflicted (upon women), crimes committed (against women), and progress reversed (for women).
It's even being used as an excuse in British courts: young teenage boys raping ten year old girls are pitied because they learned their sexual attitudes hunched over a computer screen watching anal gang bangs.

The question is: what is going to happen when this generation begets the next? And the next?
I truly have no idea what the official legal status of pornography is in Britain now, but it is plainly irrelevant, whatever it is. When the internet exists, and offers such a profusion of unimaginably sadistic and misogynistic material at no expense and seemingly no risk, how long will the idea that it is still somehow and in some sense disapproved of, floating as if in a cloud above the issue, with no anchor in law or social practice, possibly survive?
How will they even know, even if they might be receptive to the notion, that there was a time when it was felt to be a social evil? By whom? And who will be around to tell them?

The idea that we should accommodate the fact of porn is everywhere now.
It's still not quite de rigeur to make plain our love of it, but reinforcement of the fact that we live in a world where it exists, and that that's fine, is everywhere. And women must accept this too.

This Huffington Post feature is a typical example. It's a series of photos of some of the people who were once called 'porn stars', as in porn 'stars', but are now just called porn stars, without their make-up on.
Three things, in particular, strike me.
First, just how monumentally hideous so many of these women are. They look like the gargoyles on a medieval church. This is the case in many instances even with their make up on, and in a few cases it is difficult to even tell which photo is which, so grotesquely mangled are their features even in their naked state.
But they are not just ugly. Their faces are profoundly sad. Some of them are much older than they might otherwise appear. Many, many of them, are much, much younger.
Look at the token smiles, the hollow eyes, the nervous, insecure stances. These are lost, empty, abused, plain, unprotected  young girls, victims in an industry that loathes them and sells their despair as aids to masturbation.

But that is not what we are supposed to see. The focus of the piece is not that the women featured are pornography 'stars': they might be 'stars' of any sort. The issue is that we should think about our attitudes towards women - not pornography whores but women generally - appearing without make-up.
As the article begins:

Whether they're being papped without their slap on, uploading photos to Twitter, or taking part in charity campaigns, the world has seen its fair share of female celebrities without make-up in recent months. So, as the latest batch of make-up free photographs go viral, this time a selection before and after shots of porn stars taken by make-up artist Melissa Murphy, HuffPost UK Lifestyle can't help but wonder why 'baring all' continues to make the headlines?

We are not supposed to be questioning the mass-acceptance of the pornography industry. Instead, we are being asked to interpret as evidence of our own unreasonable attitudes towards women the supposed need for the 'stars' of such productions to be made-up whenever seen in public!
As the safe, warm, untroubled, well-paid mental defective who wrote the article continues:

For women in the public eye, the decision to go make-up free can lead to criticism from onlookers... Despite the fact that women commonly go make-up free in everyday life, when it comes to celebrities we seem to have different standards.

Just remind yourself who these "women in the public eye", these "celebrities", that we are discussing are! How small-minded of us to react adversely to the sight of women, whose sole reason for existence is to serve as sexual playthings, indeed by proxy as the sexual playthings of every man on the planet, when they appear without make-up!

And lastly, and most importantly, note that all this is being sold as female empowerment.
What 'HuffPost Lifestyle UK' is telling you is that women - women like you, like your daughter, like that girl on the estate that her boyfriend keeps locked up except on the one night of the week he drags her in tottering heels to the nightclub and then beats her to a watermelon pulp when she gets home because she made eye contact with another man for three fifths of a second - should find some sort of inspiration in the sight of these pathetic, wasted fools parading the true extent of their hopelessness by daring to be seen without cosmetics. Cosmetics, those tools of female enslavement!
The terrifying line, that leaps from the screen and spits mucus in your shocked, open mouth, is:

HuffPost UK Lifestyle believe that pictures such as (these) could have the capacity to empower women and address body image issues.

Whoever wrote that deserves a fortnight in the stocks. And no, that is not a flight of figurative fancy on my part. I'm not being whimsical, or exaggerating for effect. Whoever wrote that deserves a fortnight in the stocks.
But please don't misunderstand me. I get no pleasure from seeing people being spat on and pelted with rotten fruit. It's empowering.

HuffPost UK Lifestyle thinks that being nailed into a block of wood and assaulted by random passers by has the capacity to empower idiots who refer to themselves as a stupid-sounding third person collective, and address body image issues... 

Electronic lice

According to broadcaster Jeremy Paxman, the trouble all started with "an influx of people from a very, very different culture."

Whaaaaaat? 
How is that man still in a job? At the BBC of all places!
Don't worry.
He hadn't gone bananas and started ranting about jobs being taken by unskilled Eastern European immigrants, the connection between sex grooming rings and young Islamic men, or even Romanian horses in the food supply.
What he was talking about, however, was something much more interesting: the threat to society posed by disc-jockeys.

He wouldn’t have put it quite like that, of course, and I’m sure his account of what he did mean would fall far short of what I intend suggesting it means.
But it’s interesting all the same.
I was about to expound now on the subject of disc-jockeys, only to find by chance, typing finger poised and about to go crazeeee, that I have already done so.
What I said, ages back, was this:

 I'm assuming that like the rest of us, you know how to put a record on. Being a pop star, making the kind of rubbish you all listen to and then being senselessly adored just for existing, may be one of the cushiest jobs out there, but it pales beside those who earn their fortunes by taking that music, putting it on a turntable, playing it, and - here's where their special contribution comes in, apparently - saying what it is called before playing the next one. 
 There's no equivalent in any other art form. Film fans don't make named, lavishly rewarded heroes out of projectionists, for instance. And what's more, if they had a loudspeaker and interspersed each reel with "okay, that was the trailers there, some good stuff coming up, I think you'll agree, main feature follows in just a few minutes but first here's one of those hilarious Orange 'turn off your phone' quickies" I suspect they'd venerate them less rather than more. 

So to get back to Paxo. He was talking on record to the Pollard enquiry about the BBC’s lack of internal accountability, clogged arteries of inter-departmental communication, and specifically how these problems led to his own programme Newsnight squelching a report on Jimmy Savile’s molestation of children.
But he also makes the following sweeping but fascinating shot at the underlying ethos of the entire institution:

What was the BBC doing promoting this absurd figure, this absurd and malign figure? And I think that has to do with the fact of the BBC having been aloof from popular culture for so long. Suddenly pirate radio comes along and all these people in metaphorical cardigans suddenly have to deal with an influx - once pirate radio, once pop radio is legalised, they suddenly have to deal with an influx of people from a very, very different culture and they never got control of them and I'm not sure even now they have.

What indeed was the BBC doing promoting this absurd figure? A good question.
That's not to say that his malignity should necessarily have been inferred from his absurdity, of course (though it should have come as no massive surprise either).
But it's relevant to note that his absurdity was not enough to have kept him from the airwaves anyway, as it surely would have been before the pop culture revolution of the late 1950s.
Savile was a poseur and a buffoon of a sort the British people were once profoundly adept at seeing through, simultaneously vapid and pompous, and a revolutionary who helped reinvent an organisation that had hitherto identified itself as a bastion of sobriety and seriousness. When you abandon sobriety and seriousness, and hallow in its place superficiality and incontinence, of course you end up wallowing at the shallow end with fools like Savile.
I'm pleased to say that I distanced myself from the man in print - just enough - long before the bubble burst. In a 2011 post on 'Britain's Unloveable Eccentrics' (way back when I, like most of us, had not yet seen his surname in print anything like often enough to realise it only had one 'l' in it), I used him as an example of those who "try a bit too hard, or else are just that little bit too alienatingly weird, to ever inspire that bemused tolerance in the British breast that turns, through the passage of time and the reassurance of familiarity, into something like love":

Jimmy Saville, for instance. I mean no disrespect to the man, but I think the majority would agree that he's just a bit too peculiar, in ways you can't precisely put your finger on, and a bit too aware of his own idiosyncrasies, and pleased with them, to measure up to true loveable eccentric status.

Okay, not the stinging dismissal I wish it was with hindsight, and the "no disrespect" leaps out somewhat disagreeably now, but I could have been further from the truth with the bit about his being "peculiar, in ways you can't precisely put your finger on". I'm happy enough with that.

Paxman is absolutely right to lay the blame for Savile's uninterrupted rampage on a BBC that had been "aloof from popular culture for so long."
But the problem was not the fact of that aloofness so much as its subsequent high-speed relaxation, and capitulation to a self-congratulating triviality and excess that, as Paxman notes, the institution was almost uniquely incapable of reconciling itself with.
As a result it simply indulged it, which was far worse. And so the mindless cult of youth rebounded on its own acolytes, its own children.

Priestly child abuse is much in the news, too, but it is interesting that while the broad trend is to indict the Catholic church generally and institutionally, when it comes to the discarded altar boys of popular culture the tendency is to be vastly less sweeping, and instead make individual monsters of specific priests, but leave the church and its doctrines still standing.
I'd be inclined to reverse those attitudes, myself.
The Savile outrages are its most unequivocally malevolent consequences, but any positive effects of the pop revolution seem pretty thin on the ground to me.
The "people in metaphorical cardigans" that Paxman identifies (with, I think, a clear trace of mockery, as if even now he sees something preferable in Savile's world) were in truth a line of defence against the pollution of popular culture by self-indulgence, hedonism and that bizarre pretentiousness that insists on making grandiose claims for trivial product inversely relative to merit. (The less deserving the praise, the more grandiose it tends to be, so for instance the lyrics of Bob Dylan, which are uniquely terrible even by the standards of pop lyrics, are hailed by the pundits, including former poet laureate Andrew Motion, as masterly even by the standards of pop lyrics.)
And the simple, basic, fundamental truth that Paxman is inadvertently pointing to, and yet would fight so shy of conceding even now, is that the pop culture revolution of the 1960s was a profound disaster.
It was a disaster for the extant culture, even (indeed especially) for the extant popular culture, and it was a disaster for the society that imbibed it, and assumed its attitudes in blissful ignorance of the fact that decadence and intense superficiality are only sustainable as lifestyles when pursued within the securest imaginable bubble of undeserved wealth and privilege, and are especially useless as replacements for the patience, compromise and respect for contrary opinion that is the only means of oiling a truly efficient oppositional democracy.

In a 1967 Punch article beautifully entitled 'The Weasels of Pop' Anthony Burgess had this to say about disc-jockeys:

Do they merit vitriol, even a drop of it? Yes, because they corrupt the young, persuading them that the mature world, which produced Beethoven and Schweitzer, sets an even higher value on the transient anodynes of youth than does youth itself. For this they stink to heaven... They are electronic lice.

Burgess was one of the heroic few who saw through the bubble. He wasn't alone, but he was in a definite minority, as counter-revolutionaries so often are.
Who were the men who gave their knighthoods back in protest at the awarding of MBEs to The Beatles?
We all know they did it, but I bet you don't know their names. I don't know their names.
There should be statues of them.

‘Pussy Riot’ – an ‘apology’

It has been brought to my attention by a correspondent who considers me "a liar, a slanderer and an all round disgusting human being" that I was wrong to attribute the episode in which a woman stuck a frozen chicken up her vagina in a St Petersburg supermarket to the attention-seeking dingbat conglomerate 'Pussy Riot'.
I am happy to accept that this was the work of a slightly different attention-seeking dingbat conglomerate called Voina, a "performance art group" with at least two members in common with 'Pussy Riot'.
Although one of the joint members was definitely involved when Voina staged a satiric sex orgy in the Timiryazev State Biology Museum in Moscow, there is no specific evidence that a 'Pussy Riot' member was involved in the chicken stunt. Therefore it is possible that they were fully as horrified by it as I was. The odds open at ten million to one.
They did go on to barge into a church and make obnoxious tits of themselves just as I described, and everything else I have stated about their activities is uncontested.

Gay marriage? Not all that interested. Next!

The right to apathy is an often overlooked, yet utterly vital democratic freedom.
The right to vote is not the obligation to: an obligation to vote is a soft (if ironic) form of oppression. The free citizen must be allowed disinterest as much as dissent.
Consider this fact, first:
I have no idea who or what won Oscars last week.

My understanding is that Daniel Day Lewis picked one of the little chaps up, which is great, because the one thing everybody knows about him is that he works so hard at his job. So it's only fair.
Don't get me wrong. All those actors work hard. All of them are out in all weathers, slaving away, selflessly, for your benefit, week in and week out, pretending to be other people for vast sums of money to save you the effort of buying a piano and entertaining yourselves like those poor bastards had to do in the dark days before internet pornography. They're all heroes, those actors.
But Dan's one of those extra special ones that goes above and beyond.
He sometimes actually makes himself ill, did you know that? All for you. So selfless. Seriously: he was playing Hamlet on stage, and it was so demanding, so taxing, so wearying, that he actually had to pull out of the production mid-run, citing exhaustion. I'm not making this up. He exhausted himself so much, from the strain of playing Hamlet so well, that he had to stop playing Hamlet before he was contractually supposed to, just so he could have a little rest from playing Hamlet for a while.
God, I'd like to shake that man by the hand.
Just the thought of it humbles me. The thought of this wonderful man dressing up and repeating lines he's learned, and doing it all so realistically, so convincingly, so incisively, that it makes him ill, and all just so I can have a decadent night out at the theatre at his expense. It's a bit like eating foie gras: the tacit acceptance that my pleasure is worth the infliction of unimaginable suffering.
God bless you, Daniel Day Lewis.
And now he's just as impressively taken on the mantle of Abraham Lincoln. Grew his own beard. Mastered the accent. Put on the stove pipe hat. And learned all the words and said them in the right order.
And, luckily for our consciences, managed to get through the ordeal this time without doing himself serious harm, thank the Lord.
If that's not worth the ultimate accolade of a twelve inch gold-plated statuette of a nude man I don't know what could be.

But as I say, I'm not certain he did win it. I think he did. Not so sure that Lincoln won best film;  don't think it did, actually. But I'm not sure what did win. Haven't the first clue who the best actress was.
But please don't misunderstand the reason why I don't know any of these things. It's not because I'm not all that interested.
It's because I'm not interested at all.

But now, forget all that.
Pretend I was just a regular fellow, perhaps the chap on the next bar stool to you. A bright smile and a joke and gin and tonics all round. We're chatting away, and the subject moves to the Oscars, and I just happen to mention I don't know who won them.
You might, perhaps, be surprised, maybe even curious. But I doubt you'd be affronted. You certainly wouldn't leap instantly, as the only possible explanation, to the conclusion that I actively loathe Oscars, loathe even the fact that they’re called 'Oscars' in the first place (I mean for God's sake, how can you even say the word without feeling stupid? Only 'Pepsi Cola' sounds more idiotic coming out of the mouth of a fully grown adult), that I wish they’d stop issuing the things, and wish above all else that people would stop imagining they prove something objective or important or interesting, other than what an incredibly small group of people think of each other from one year to the next.
That, as it happens, is what I think. But you'd be unlikely to assume it. You'd probably just think I had no particular interest in that particular subject.

But if someone said they had no particular interest in gay marriage that would be totally different.
That really could mean only one thing, right? They oppose it.
The notion that it might be a subject they simply hadn't given much thought to, because it didn't strike them as particularly interesting or important, would be absurd.
For one thing, it's impossible: it's one of those subjects that everyone is interested in enough to have a fixed view of. I know. They said so on the telly.
And for another it's not acceptable: it's so important that to be uninterested is to be immoral. Apathy is a form of provocation, and what it must be, the only thing it could possibly be, deep down, is evidence of bigotry.

You may think you're a modern, switched-on kind of a person, with views on pretty much all topics.
But that's not enough if you want to really be in touch with the Zeitgeist  and therefore safe from those who police it. To be really tuned in, and really safe, you need to prioritise. You need to know not only what's important but what's most important.
It's easy enough to find out what those extra-important subjects are. Just make it known that you have no fixed views on any topic. Even, if you're brave, let slip the dread phrase: "I've never really given it much thought, to be honest..."
If it's basket-weaving, fine. If it's the Oscars, you're an eccentric. If it's gay marriage, what the hell's the matter with you? Don't you care about anything? What are you doing later on tonight? Setting fire to an orphanage?
There are hundreds of issues the savvy thinking person may have talked themselves into a particular stance on. But does it define them? Does it matter? Does it matter what any given politician's view is? Or a policeman's? Or a TV sports commentator? Not a bit.
But imagine asking a politician what his views are on gay marriage and getting the answer, "I've never really given it much thought, to be honest..."
No reason in the world why they shouldn't, but just imagine! Neither apathy nor agnosticism are permitted when it comes to the issues over which the Zeitgeist obsesses. You’re either for us, or you’re against us, mate.

Even more confusing to the zealots is the idea that one can have an opinion and still not actually have any interest. But it’s self-evident to me. I can have an opinion, or can decide my opinion, on any topic whatsoever. But an opinion is not the same thing as a passion. Thus I find myself in the absurd position of being cast as an enemy of the progressives over the issue of gay marriage despite that fact that, if forced to find and give an opinion, it could only be that I agree with the idea.

Homosexuality does not bother or offend me. Never has done. I have no real comprehension of it, not in the trivial sense of never having had sexual feelings for my own gender, but in the deeper one of having no concept of what it must be like to allow my sexual preferences define me as a person in every aspect and regard, and to make my sexual preferences the most interesting and defining thing about me, when surely they are in reality the least interesting or defining.
But offend me, bother me, unnerve me? No, it does not.

I don’t have any problem with the use of the word ‘gay’ in this context either.
It seems to me that if people don’t like the word losing its lovely original meaning, as I do not myself, the thing to do is not moan about the new meaning but just keep using it in the old way too, which nobody except me ever seems to do.
It’s two different words, spelled and pronounced the same way, and far from unique in that: it doesn’t mean there is suddenly anything homosexual about the idea of brightness and vivacity any more than it means there is anything axiomatically delightful and cheering about homosexuality, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has ever been to an Elton John concert. Just keep using it the old way too, and let it have two meanings. No problem I can see.

I do have a problem with promiscuity, with sexual excess, senseless sex, sex as consumer choice, and with a popular culture that forces us to confront our sexual selves every second of the day, in everything we see and everything we hear, and as impetus and decider of every decision we make.
I like the idea of our sexual natures being private and mysterious, and something we seek to contain rather than exaggerate. It makes sex sexier, for one thing. And if the consequence of that is the old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon prudery we are told is not merely foolish but actually dangerous, well I can't say I have any great problem with that.
I like reticence and sobriety. I like to see the sexual arena governed by rules and rituals. And as for there being danger in repression, the evidence, it seems to me, points in the opposite direction.
I think it is reasonable to draw conclusions, and negative conclusions at that, of any society that progresses knowingly from a repressed attitude towards sex to an incontinently libertine one, and what's more that considers itself capable of defending the transition intellectually and morally.
I've heard all the arguments about personal freedom and the tragedy of lives lived in denial of the right to instantly chase each passing desire down the rabbit hole of sexual obsession. I find them dubious psychologically, and ludicrous in their pretence of rationalising an obvious Darwinian con trick.
There's nothing rational about sex. The sexual urge is the most potent and primitive animating force in our arsenal. What other instinct can outprioritise it when it's on the rampage? Personal safety? No. Hunger? No. The thirst for knowledge? Plainly no. The urge to create? Give me a break!
And yet we find ourselves in a society that has capitulated utterly to this most primal and least interesting of Darwinian imperatives, and yet lacks the honesty to say: yes, we caved. We gave in. We gave up.
The sexual revolution worked because the pursuit of sex, and the satisfaction of sexual craving, are pleasures more intense than any other on earth: drug-taking is a poor (but obvious) imitation. Strictly rationed they are beneficial; allowed to take possession of everyday consciousness they become not only too demanding but, subject to the law of diminishing returns, decayed and decaying.
All this talk about the liberty of the self and the freedom of the individual! Who cares about the freedom to watch internet gangbangs? What's that freedom worth, really? Don't know? I'll tell you then. It's not a rhetorical question. It's worth fuck all. Let me run that past you again. It's worth absolutely fuck all. If you thought otherwise, congratulations! You were wrong. Now get over it. Grow up. That particular freedom is worth fuck all.
And the benefits of denying that particular freedom to your fellow man are so obvious, so wide-reaching, so plainly a great thing for everybody, that there is no argument you can possibly mount to deny it. So don't try. I've heard them all anyway. I know the pseudo-right wing libertarian defence of pornography as well as the pseudo-left wing libertine defence of pornography. And they both add up to the same thing. Absolutely fuck all. If you disagree, I'm sorry you're an idiot but there it goes.

The problem with the sexual revolution is not the acceptance of gay sex but the wide acceptance of meaningless and promiscuous sex, and the subsequent dissolving of those bonds of commitment and continuity that enable society to function. That's a heterosexual problem just as much as a homosexual one.
If male homosexual relationships tend on average to be more promiscuous than heterosexual relationships or female homosexual relationships, on the sound Darwinian grounds that it’s two men, I can’t think of anything better than promoting stability and long-term commitment.
The normalisation and acceptance of homosexuality at all levels might even have the further happy consequence of relieving those thus inclined of the presumed obligation to bang on and on about it every second they’re awake, too.
It sounds like a good idea to me, and if my opinion is requested politely, I'd probably say let's give it a shot.

I just have five little objections to the idea, all negotiable, rooted in my innate regard for pedantry, caution, honesty, freedom and apathy.
Let's get the pedantry out of the way first.
The word marriage doesn’t just mean the joining of two entities. It means the joining of two different entities. Two entities defined by their difference from each other, with the aim of creating a third entity from the act of synthesis.
In the field of ideas, for instance, we might talk about some new scientific theory that marries one account of the universe with another partially contradictory account, to produce a third and better version. Darwinism was married to Mendelian genetics to create the Neo-Darwinian synthesis, because Darwin proposed a vague and unsatisfactory mechanics of heredity. Mendelism contradicted his suggestions, but Neo-Darwinism marries the two ideas to produce a synthesis that best reflects reality in a way that is preferable to each account taken individually, without denying the vital contribution of either.
In the sphere of human relationships marriage means uniting a man and a woman with the presumed end of producing children.
Why? Why should it?
Because that’s what the word means. I’m very sorry; I wish it were otherwise, if for no other reason than for putting this enormously tiresome argument to bed. But it ain't.
I’m all for every single legal right and responsibility being conferred on homosexual partnerships same as heterosexual ones. But ‘marriage’ in this context means joining a man to a woman. I’m not saying that’s what God wants, that the alternative is a sin, or that homosexuals should be ashamed of their true natures. None of those things I believe. I’m saying that’s what the actual word means. It’s pretty basic. You can join, unite, splice or combine two of anything, including two of the same thing. But you can only marry two different things. That’s why it’s a different word, to distinguish itself from the others.
Now, doubtless this is all very interesting to a linguist. In the field of equal rights, however, it doesn’t matter a damn. We have two different words for men and women, we even have different words for male and female homosexuals. It disadvantages none to have two different terms for heterosexual and homosexual partnerships. Not actually calling it 'marriage' is not some mean trick to deny gay couples one last vestige of equality. Marriage is not a unique right, it’s merely a unique word. And what it means is the union of a man and a woman. If, for whatever reason, a gay man married a lesbian, that would be a marriage. (It would also be one hell of a reception.)

Second, the note of caution, and this one I can probably be talked out of most easily. But I still resent the fact that it isn't heard more often, or taken seriously when it is, because I think it says something about our hubris as a culture more generally, which is an enormous problem: one that walks us into no end of trouble and may yet finish us off.
The fact that I personally have no problem with homosexual union being legally and socially recognised and not stigmatised, and the fact that many others are so keen on the idea that they are prepared to put little stickers on things that don’t belong to them saying ‘Some People Are Gay – Get Over It’, is not all you need to know to implement a course of action.
As a society we have, or should have, a much wider and more objective sense of responsibility than that, that extends far beyond our own wishes, comforts and prejudices and considers the effect of our ideas upon the community as a whole. Whatever the specific and limited aims of any wide-reaching change in how society is ordered and recognises itself, it is folly to believe that any such change will have no wider, unforeseen or possibly deleterious (no less so for being incidentally so) effects or consequences. And it suggests that the possibility of such consequences should be patiently explored, discussed and taken into consideration before any radical, potentially irreversible steps are taken.
It does not mean that there is anything iffy about the ideas themselves, merely recognises that ideas have consequences.
The complete normalisation of homosexual marriage will have a profound effect on how we see ourselves as a people, as a species. The one thrown stone of legalisation will ripple out endlessly, altering everything it touches. It’s a massive, fundamental change in how we understand ourselves, and always have understood ourselves, since the beginning of our existence.
Does that mean we should automatically rule it out of court? No.
Does it mean we should be cautious and incremental - and above all patient and non-hectoring – as we put it into practice? Yes.
So entrenched is the modern cult of selfishness that simply stating this basic and unquestionable appeal to reason, calm and consideration for all our futures will read to many as reactionary bone-headedness. So be it, for it is not.
As it happens, my cautious guess is that the effects of recognising homosexual marriage will not be injurious, and we will weather it with the relative ease with which we have weathered other changes, most comparatively, I would think, universal suffrage. But my cautious guess is not willingly shared with anyone incapable of grasping this basic point.

Now, honesty. Or, as some may prefer, cynicism.
Let's settle on realism.
Human nature: like it or loathe it, it's here to stay. I don't know what kind of opinion you have of human beings, but I have my reservations, especially when they join together in groups and start shouting at people.
Mistrusting motives, seeing the worst in people... it's just what I do. I don't reserve it for some people and give others a free pass. I spread it around equally. And we live in an age that venerates selfishness, triviality and petty point scoring.
Any homosexual couple that truly feels they are in love and should have the right to have that love sanctified legally and religiously has my sympathy and, thus expressed, my vote.
But is that what we're seeing here? Thousands and thousands of couples who are devotedly in love, just longing for the chance to settle down in Surbiton and go to church every Sunday in the range rover, then back home for a spot of tea with that lovely Mr and Mrs Henderson from number thirty?
Surely not.
This is a campaign organised in large measure by people who despise the institution of heterosexual marriage, dismiss it as slavery and the family unit as a tyranny, and hate the church even more. They want not to join but to dismantle, and in recruiting the sincere and the sensitive to their campaign they are guilty of a far greater cynicism than I am for daring to make the point.
Noisy campaigns piss me off. I can’t help it. And they retard progress, because they alienate. So I will not be marched into this, only reasoned.

Which leads directly to the fourth objection: that nagging little matter of personal freedom.
I cannot take only my own wishes and beliefs into consideration. It's not enough. I could if I lived on an island and accepted no help from anybody else in any department of my existence, but sadly, such is not my lot.
The world is full of people who, for all kinds of reasons, disapprove of homosexual marriage. Whatever informs their conviction strikes no chord within me. But here's where I go a bit zany and hard to understand. Just do the best you can. Once I've said it there's no unsaying it, so let's just hope we get through this together. Here I go now.
I’m not sure why those people don’t have a right to be listened to respectfully, to be taken seriously and to feel their voice counts, same as anyone else!
Crazy, huh?
Please forgive me.
It's my burden and my curse to have been born in an  age when tolerance and freedom were observed rather than just shouted about, and when fairness meant more than the square root of zip, too. When dissent from fashionable consensus was not taken as a priori evidence of bigotry or hatred, and it might even have been deemed wicked as well as inaccurate to automatically characterise it thus.
Thank God those dark days are behind us now!
Did we ever live an age so uncivilised that pensioners on street corners couldn't be frog-marched off to jail for saying homosexuality is a sin, or life-long foster carers couldn't be banned from taking on new charges because they would not accept the obligation to actively promote homosexuality, even after agreeing not to speak against it?
Incredibly, we did.
Doubtless, those who really do hate homosexuals for whatever reason and would like to penalise and punish them still exist, as rotten people exist in every area of life. But to feel unease at the social normalisation of a previously outlawed lifestyle, especially if one is from an older generation that was taught to reject it as routinely as contemporary generations are told to embrace it, is not to be deserving of demonisation, invective and threats (official or otherwise).
Again, it is an amazing sign of the times that so basic a statement of common decency sounds like provocation to so many thick yet influential ears.
There is never any excuse for outlawing opinion, especially when offered temperately. The painting of any opposition as hateful, retarded and fit only for brutal mockery further alienates me from a cause of which I am, within myself, broadly in support.

And then, finally, the objection that brings me back where I started: apathy. Or, rather, the fundamental right to apathy.
Yes, if I choose to consider the matter, I will come up with an opinion. Yes, as it happens, I don’t mind letting you know what that opinion is. Yes, as it happens, on this occasion it's the one the progressivist bullies want from me.
But I am not obliged to have an opinion, still less to give one.
The fact that it is the most important issue in the world to you does not mean it must therefore be equally commanding to me, and if you feel you have the right to demonise and even criminalise the free expression of views contrary to your own then you cross the tracks entirely and become my enemy.

To be honest, I'm really not all that interested.

I am personally very much concerned with speciesism. To me it’s of vital importance. I recognise that there are people who agree with me and people who disagree with me.
But there are also huge numbers of people, perhaps greater in number even than the sum of the first two groups combined, who have never given the matter much thought because it simply isn’t a priority for them. Other things take natural precedence, not because they have compared them and consciously ordered them, but because their natural inclinations point in some directions and not in others. Were they to consider it, they might just as easily fall into either of the first two categories. But they don’t.
My contention is that all three groups have a perfect right to their opinion – or lack of one.
If that is unfashionable now, then that is a terrifying reflection of how society is increasingly marching to the beat of a fourth group: those who not only hold a view but believe themselves possessed of the right to enforce it, to make it everyone’s priority, and to criminalise dissent, and are training the rest of us to pay most attention to those who are the loudest, most insistent and least willing to compromise.
Without compromise, patience, and respect for all views except the plainly (or consequentially) malevolent, civilisation would never have got off the ground. If we abandon them now, we are lost.

Yes, some people are gay, and if there really are people who need to get over that simple fact then yes, by all means let them get over it.
But some people still don’t like the fact that some people are gay: they’re humans as well and they have a right to hold any damned view they like, so get over that, too.

And some people just aren’t that bothered either way. Get over that, if you can.

The world is watching Colorado

The influence of single-issue pressure groups on democratic process has been a thorn in the arse of advanced western societies for some time.
But you may feel that a culmination of sorts has been reached by the recent case in Colorado of Coy Mathis, a six year old boy "who identifies as female" being stopped from using the girls' lavatories at school.
(Source)

You or I might patiently explain to our son that, however he 'identifies', he is anatomically male, and that alone is the deciding factor in which toilets he gets to use.
We might gently suggest that 'identifying' as female at the age of six is not any kind of certain indication of how his life will shape in adulthood, and that the best thing at this point might be to play things by ear and wait and see, without making any big hoo-hah in the short term because he can't take a leak with the girls.
Some of us - the hardliners - might even not have called him 'Coy' in the first place.
But Mr and Mrs Mathis (made of sterner, or perhaps just less imaginative, stuff) have filed a complaint with the Colorado Civil Rights Division, avenging his embarrassment in front of the entire school by embarrassing him in front of the entire world.

"This automatically singles her out and stigmatizes her", Kathryn Mathis said of her son. With a lack of insight that might perhaps be thought to go beyond that ever achieved by a human being before, she added: "It sets her up for future harassing and bullying."
The school idiotically attempted to explain that their decision had to take into account "not only Coy, but other students in the building, their parents and the future impact a boy, with male genitals, using a girls' bathroom would have as Coy grew older", apparently unaware that, to the single issue pressure group mentality, appeals to reason and the common good are about as effective as asking a crocodile not to eat you.

Despite the fact that the school already allows him to wear girls' clothes, be referred to as 'she' and to use the staff toilets or the school nurse's toilets, this most pressing example of injustice has received the financial and representational support of the Transgender Legal Defence & Education Fund.
The organisation's executive director, Michael Silverman, explained: "This is significant for both Colorado and nationally. For Colorado, it is the first test of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act as related to access to bathrooms by transgender students."

Yes, you heard him right.

Hard to believe, I know.
And you may want to pinch yourself to check that you really are living at this epochal moment, of which balladeers will one day sing.
But it's true, and you and I are here to actually see it, and to tell our children and grandchildren that we were there to see it.
The first ever test of the Colorado Anti-Discrimination Act as related to access to bathrooms by transgender students.

"On a national level," Mike continues, scarcely allowing us to draw breath, "people will be watching what happens in Colorado."

Oh yes, Mike, we're watching what happens in Colorado!

With the western economy in meltdown, Europe on the edge of collapse, the Middle East about to explode and the only thing delaying the Iranian nuclear bomb the last minute debates on what colour they should paint it, we're on absolute fucking tenterhooks waiting to hear the final decision on which toilet they're going to let this kid take a whizz in.

I just hope he's good at crossing his legs and holding himself.
However nail-biting it is for us, it must be sheer agony for him.

And the ‘John Lennon Peace Prize’ goes to ‘Pussy Riot’ ... surely my job here is done?

It's very hard to mock a world this stupid.

First of all, there is in this wonderful world such a thing as a 'John Lennon Peace Prize'.
Just that, to get you started. A 'Peace Prize', given in the name of a nasty piece of work who made a fortune whining pop songs.
And of all people's, it seems it's Yoko Ono's job (alongside her real one which is, apparently, an artist - who knew!) to hand them out.
And this year, the shining paragons of behaviour likely to promote or create peace, according to the old Ono brainbox, are, firstly, Rachel Corrie, who gave up her life to support fascists in their propaganda war against the race they want to wipe out, and 'Pussy Riot'.

As everybody who keeps tabs on the brave victims of tyranny and injustice knows, 'Pussy Riot' is the collective name for a conglomerate of Russian din-makers and conceptual pranksters (in their own words: "part of the global anti-capitalist movement, which consists of anarchists, Trotskyists, feminists and autonomists"), who make a stand against the global hegemony by going into supermarkets with young children, grabbing chickens off the shelves and sticking them up their vaginas.
And this, of course, in Russia! A country where people having anything to eat at all is just something that occasionally happens in the brief lulls between periods of mass starvation. Nothing says Trotskyite anti-capitalism quite like denying your fellow people the food they need to survive, just so you can put it in your snatch.
To my mind that's enough to merit them a Peace Prize all by itself.

But as you probably know, they did something even more likely to make the whole world throw away its weapons, the lion lay down with the lamb, and Hamas supporters stop salivating while reading the Diary of Anne Frank.
As a creative break from speciesist idiocy and making punk music that even their most ardent supporters concede is a pile of shit, they filmed themselves as they barged into a beautiful Russian orthodox church in fluorescent balaclavas, made yelping noises, frightened a few old people and got kicked out.
Now I'm well aware that this site is read by a lot of squares, who are probably now thinking that they did this because they are pompous dullards with nothing better to do than cause juvenile outrage while flattering themselves that they are somehow contributing to any kind of serious political dialogue. I can see why you might think that, but the truth is that it was actually done as a last resort, the oppressive state having denied them the means to protest the church's links with Putin's government in any other imaginable way. A letter to the Times may be read by a few thousand people, but terrorise innocent old Christians and you'll go global in less time than it takes to say "Мы кучу общего чертовски дебилов".
This is how we promote peace today, my friends! Brothers and sisters, I have a dream!
Despite the fact that this could easily have landed them in chokey pretty much anywhere, and in uneven chunks in a car park if they did it in Saudi Arabia, their subsequent imprisonment became a human rights hot button, easily putting all those Iranian gay-culls into their proper perspective. Doughty moral support poured in, from the former human rights organisation Amnesty International, who designated them "prisoners of conscience", and from the elderly pop singer String, a favourite of all thinking peoples ever since he wrote the beautiful line "Giant steps are what you take", and then went on to rhyme it with the even more poignant "I hope my legs don't break" in the song 'Walking On The Moon'.
And now the John Lennon Peace Prize!
I just hope it doesn't go to their heads and make them start behaving obnoxiously.

But what is there left to say about this sort of thing, really?
Give the Nobel Peace Prize to Yasser Arafat and yes, there is a job to be done: there might be people out there genuinely unaware of how cynical the gesture, inclined therefore to believe that Yasser had made some kind of a contribution towards peace. This is a subtle kind of outrage that we can usefully highlight.
But when you get to the stage of a John Lennon Peace Prize being given to Pussy Riot, surely our job is done?
Who is left to listen, if there are only those who do not need telling it is insane, those who know it is insane but for whatever reason want to encourage that kind of thing, and the vast, compliant, docile carpet of humanity in the middle who do not care, and will never care, so long as they keep showing 'The Only Way Is Essex'?

That's what happens when you demonise the bourgeoisie.

Amazingly, there are still people out there - big, famous, admired people - sneering away at 'the middle classes', indeed even at the very idea of a middle class, like it's still 1979, and there still is any kind of perceptible middle class influence anywhere.
The middle class was, after morality and shoes, the most decisive impetus to western civilisation we ever invented. Also the most socially egalitarian, as well as innately civilised and thus cherishable on its own terms. Nothing did more to tackle injustice, inequality and immobility.
But it was the cultural influence of the middle class, especially its adoption by television as the benchmark for consensus normality, that was its greatest triumph. For thirty years or so, all of their programmes were broadly pitched at this demographic, and it likewise was the world depicted in popular drama programmes, comedies, and even advertisements.
And so this became reality, until we got too clever for it.

Now look at us.

The result was there for all to see a week or so ago, when the judge discharged the jury at the trial of Vicky Pryce, accused of perverting the course of justice after she accepted speeding points on behalf of her then husband Chris Huhne so he could wriggle out of a driving ban.
Despite the relative straightforwardness of the case, the jury presented him with a list of questions that, among other pearls, asked him to explain what 'beyond reasonable doubt' meant, whether the defendant's religious beliefs should be taken into consideration, and my personal favourite: "Can a juror come to a verdict based on a reason that was not presented in court and has no facts or evidence to support it?"
One for the legal scholars to chew over.
The judge's replies, in which you can almost hear him flailing in the wind of unreason, are priceless demonstrations of understatement in adversity.
To the enquiry as to what 'beyond reasonable doubt' means, he deadpans: "A reasonable doubt is a doubt that is reasonable. These are ordinary English words..." His response to the question about the relevance or otherwise of her spiritual convictions is a touchingly helpless: "This is not, with respect, a question about this case at all."
Twelve of your peers, and they are your peers: the most you can hope to stand between you and whatever the state wishes to make of you.

Really, what is there left to say now?

I used to feel about bedrock civilisation the way Philip Larkin felt about England in the first line of his poem Going, Going: "I thought it would last my time."
I knew that decline was inevitable, unstoppable, even accelerating. But still, I would be dead eventually, and it obviously wan't going to explode in my lifetime.
I think I knew things were moving in the direction of the crapper since childhood - the only mystery was why so many different types of people had so many different types of reasons for pretending otherwise, even as their denials manifestly added to the problems. The point of this blog was to document and share my more recent, uneasy realisation that suddenly, as Larkin writes in the middle of his poem: "it all seems to be happening so very fast."

Exponential decline is not a smooth curve but a series of plateaux. It feels deceptively steady until it gets to the end of one plateau and then there is a sudden drop on to the next level. I think we're about due another big drop.
They've all done their job: Institutionalised moral relativism. The irrational gall of idealist progressives. The promotion of incremental totalitarianism, moral cowardice and ideological enslavenment by popular culture. The creation and isolation of a resentful and inarticulate underclass. The unconditional celebration of a fragmented counter-culture defined by mutually conflicting minority grievances. Cowardice and acquiescence in the face of tyrants and tyrannies. The imminence of the Iranian bomb concurrent with the abandonment of Israel by Europe and now, at last, by America under the most ridiculous president in its history. The internet. And so on. I'm with Larkin: "I just think it is going to happen. Soon."

So all you'll have left will be memories and sunsets. Everything else: totally unrecognisable. And no, none of it has been accidental. And yes, we really have been here before. And all the never agains and the lest we forgets and the we shall remembers, all that hand-wringing and memorial-erecting, were all just the reflexive crocodile morality of people who assumed - as usual - that the principles they were claiming to cleave to would never actually be tested again.
Now they are being tested again, and we are failing on every count.
Going, going.
Gone.

Meanwhile ...

The BBC chews the fat with a child murderer
Sorry, not children, 'targets'. My mistake.

It's Harriet Harman for paedophilia!
Progressives look the other way while Nero fiddles.

Remembrance Day poppy sellers in Bradford to have minders for their own protection
From 'youths', apparently. Nothing more specific, I'm afraid.

Spot the difference

Two protesters, standing up for what they believe in. But look closely: one of them is a pathetic moron.

Binders or Blinders?

I don't envy the American people one little bit.

Talk about Hobson's Choice!
Who are they going to vote for? How can they possibly decide?

On the one hand, they have a man who makes a strange comment about 'binders full of women' (put that phrase in a Google search, and specifically a Google image search, if you are unsure as to how MASSIVELY important a political issue it is), threatens 'to kill Big Bird' (ditto), put his dog in an airtight kennel on the roof of his car just under thirty years ago, and is a bit vague about his five-point plan.

On the other, there is a man whose messianic narcissism and hubristic naivety threaten the immediate safety of the entire world, who enjoys the company of terrorists and bigots, whose foreign policy has already cost the avoidable ending of thousands of innocent lives while he makes excuses for the actual murderers, qualifying their culpability, lying about their motives to make them seem more sympathetic and downplaying the imminent danger they pose,  whose idea of gun control is to give thousands of deadly weapons free to Mexican gangsters and then do nothing while they slaughter each other, who spits on his friends and grovels to his enemies, and who is unquestionably the most clueless ass to have ever taken high office in his country's history.
I'm not much of an economist, but I understand he's a bit shaky there, too.

Well, as I say, I don't envy them.
Slightly gauche, slightly bluff, no-nonsense businessman with no media suck-up gene - or self-adoring but inept mass-murderer by proxy?
I'm just glad it's not my decision...

But if you are unlucky enough to be American, this may go some way towards helping you sort out the really important issues from the irrelevant ones.
It's Policymic's Top Ten Reasons Not to Vote for Romney.

At number ten: He "does believe in global warming, but is not too sure how much humans are responsible."
Still thinking of voting for him now? I doubt it! Go for the party of certainty, the party of scientific consensus! The party of Al Gore, a man whose mendacious drivel, though still taught as fact in British schools, has been proved as hogwash in a British court of law.

At number five: He "discusses things at inappropriate times", such as his shameful calling of attention to the fact that the President was whooping it up at a Las Vegas fundraiser after the slaying of the first US ambassador murdered on foreign soil in 35 years, a crime of which he was forewarned and about which he repeatedly lied in the days following so as to minimise the scale of the outrage and his own uselessness in dealing with it.
The 'inappropriate time' here was 'when it happened'. He should have waited a decade or three until it was really important, like that business with the dog on his car.

At number two: "He's rich, old, white and a male".
Yes, this is the clincher. As the site goes on to explain (lest you thought that was a somewhat bizarre objection to anyone doing anything anywhere at any time under any circumstances whatsoever): "He's like the stereotypical president that America had tried to stray away from when electing President Obama" (a rich, slightly younger, half-white male, last time I checked).
Remember what little cross-patches they became whenever anyone suggested that there may have been cosmetic motives for voting Obama last time? Seems they're okay with it now.

And in at the number one spot: he "lacks the personality that Obama certainly has with the general public".
Shame on you, Romney! Yes, you might just have the guts to stop Israel disappearing in a cloud of neutron activation isotopes with the other civilised nations of the world falling like dominoes thereafter, rather than seeming to be actively pursuing that end in the interests of not offending fascist maniacs, but for God's sake man, can't you find a bit of charisma while you're at it?
Better dead than uncool!

"We must be free to insult each other"

What is there to say about Rowan Atkinson?

Well, he's one of the defining examples of the fake-anarchic sell-out, who made his name in sneery anti-establishment comedy and then, when he had amassed enough money from a second career as a children's slapstick caperer, spent every waking moment following Prince Charles about.
In between, he achieved critical success in a situation comedy series that remains one of the key milestones of the decline of British comedy.
On a more immediate, physical level, he looks a bit like a shaved pug.

But he's a great man, all the same.

And why?
Because he is sticking his neck out to defend my right to say all that.

We must be free to insult each other: Rowan Atkinson attacks new rules that outlaw 'insulting words and behaviour'

And meanwhile, where are the supposedly brave men of British comedy?
You know: the risk-takers, the envelope-pushers, the darey and the sweary? Stewart Lee and pillocks like that?
Who knows? Off being edgy somewhere probably, bravely laying into Richard Littlejohn before an audience that agrees with them about everything.

Not for the first time, it is Atkinson, and Atkinson alone, who has put his head above the parapet.
Well done that cartoon monkey-faced, Royal Family-toadying hero!

Thought crime update

Do I know what is and is not morally reprehensible?
Yes, I do. Thanks for asking.
Do I have the right to dictate what is and is not morally reprehensible?
No, of course I don't.
And any society that presumes otherwise, and sanctions the right to criminalise thought, opinion or speech, is a society descending into totalitarian tyranny.
No ifs, no buts, no special circumstances.

In the past two weeks, nineteen year old Matthew Woods has been sentenced to three months imprisonment for putting tasteless jokes and comments about abducted child April Jones on his Facebook page, and 39 year old Barry Thew has been given eight months for wearing a t-shirt on which he had written 'One Less Pig - Perfect Justice' after the murders of WPCs Fiona Bone and Nicola Hughes.

According to The Independent, on the former case:

Chairman of the bench, Bill Hudson, said Woods's comments were so serious and "abhorrent" that it deserved the longest sentence they could pass ... Mr Hudson said: "We have listened to the evidence in what can only be described as a disgusting and despicable crime and the bench finds was completely abhorrent." ... He said only a custodial term in a young offender institute was appropriate, which was greeted by applause from around 30 people sitting in the public gallery. Mr Hudson concluded: "The reason for the sentence is the seriousness of the offence, the public outrage that has been caused and we felt there was no other sentence this court could have passed which conveys to you the abhorrence that many in society feel this crime should receive." 

On the Thew case, Huffington Post reports:

Judge Peter Lakin said Thew's T-shirt was "disgusting." 
"This, on any view, is a shocking case. Your response to the shocking events was to parade around in a T-shirt in the centre of Radcliffe which had on it the most disgusting of slogans," he told the court. “In my judgement, it is utterly depressing that you felt able to stoop so low as to behave in that way. Your mindless behaviour has added to the pain of everyone touched by the death of these young officers. You have shown no remorse.” ... Greater Manchester Police's Inspector Bryn Williams said that mocking the deaths of two police officers was "morally reprehensible... To mock or joke about the tragic events of that morning is morally reprehensible and Thew has rightly been convicted and sentenced for his actions."

Note the almost identical language in both summations, in which moral reprehensibility and the causing of offence are in each case blithely and confidently presumed synonymous with criminality.
I agree that Woods's behaviour was abhorrent, and Thew's reprehensible. Further, if I saw either of them being led down a dark alley and given the kind of moral realignment that leaves them carrying their nuts in a paper bag, I'd probably look the other way and keep my counsel.
But I cannot agree that Woods's actions "can only be described as a disgusting and despicable crime", nor share the Greater Manchester Police's conviction that Thew has been "rightly convicted and sentenced."
Disgusting and despicable, yes, but not a crime of any sort. No truly free society could even consider such a claim.

Just a few years ago, easily within my living memory and yours, not only would such behaviour have been inconceivable but so too would the suggestion that it might constitute a criminal offence. And the latter is by far the more worrying change.
Yes, it is terrifying that a fifty year experiment in undermining consensus morality has resulted in sewage like Woods and Thew, bewildered and directionless fools without empathy, restraint or imagination, but it is no less terrifying - it is more terrifying, in fact - that we should happily countenance the use of criminal law to deal with them.

The original outrages and the official response are two sides of the same decline: there is nothing to choose between them. Both are gestures of moral decay. Both are to be condemned. But the the latter must concern us more.

And who is safer as a result of these convictions?
No child is less at risk this week from perverts emboldened by the state religion of self-interest; no WPCs less likely to be slaughtered by a generation of criminals that know they have nothing to fear whatever they do.
But the state's power to silence dissenting and inconvenient speech is massively increased, and cunningly, by the prosecution of obnoxious idiots whose activities none decent could defend. But the law, once put in place, can be applied in a million ways and directions.
You already know this. You've read about it in your history books.
And now, you are one more eroded safeguard nearer finding out what it actually feels like.

Go on, then ...

You deserve a laugh.

The dark at the end of the tunnel

In Pakistan, 14 year-old Malala Yousafzai is shot in the head for the crime of advocating that females should have the same access to education as males. She survives, and is now flying to Britain for treatment. The Taliban has vowed to kill her when she returns.

Meanwhile, in the free world, 'Madonna', a bizarrely talentless pop singer massively popular several decades ago, dedicates a striptease to her during a concert.

Just imagine Yousafzai being informed of this.
Would she even be able to comprehend it? Imagine her utter bewilderment, possibly even discouragement, at this demonstration of complete human freedom.
How stupid would she think we must be?

Almost certainly, nowhere near as stupid as we are.

Witless for the Prosecution

In lieu of having arguments, the American Left like to pass around little cartoons and funny, thought-provoking pictures on their blogs and Facebook pages.
They are rarely funny - these are, after all, people who find Stephen Colbert funny - but they are often enormously revealing and interesting.

Here's two of my recent favourites.

This incredibly nasty one ties in with the Left's suggestion that it was somehow wrong of Romney to "make political capital" out of the fact that the President of the United States failed to adequately guard an American amassador, who was therefore slaughtered in his embassy by fanatics, despite being forewarned, and then went to a Vegas fundraiser, said he'd had a bad day and got greeted by whoops and cheers.
To suggest that an explanation might be in order, Romney was, apparently, despicably exploiting a tragedy.
The worst part is that this probably does not reflect their usual desperation to paint any Republican objection to Obama's insane behaviour as belligerence - it really is what they think about this sort of thing.

This one's just a hoot, again because it says so much more about the mindsets of the kind of people who create and share it than it does about its nominal target.
First, we have the certainty that to cause offence is the ultimate crime, and while Obama's actions may have resulted in countless injustices and innocent deaths, at least he isn't hurting anyone's feelings.
Then, look at the actual list of offendees!
Surely any American president or presidential hopeful who doesn't offend the Russians, the Chinese or the 'Palestinians' - or better still all three - is simply not doing their job properly?