Hitchens - The Maily Dail
Readers will no doubt remember my 6th March post concerning Hitchens' position regarding the film The King's Speech (link; Hitchens, right, Daily Mail pic). Here he returns with his 14th March article 'A Hunk of Red Meat':
"From time to time I like to hurl a chunk of bleeding meat into the cave where the Atheist readers of this site lurk, waiting longingly for a chance for a good superior snarl at those stupid, unteachable believers - just so that I can hear the snapping of their jaws."
With no concept of irony, he then goes on to discuss how atheists have no moral basis to their conception of the world, or (if they claim to) that they've stolen them from Christians. That is, ethical justifications of murder, stealing and so on are Christian values (instead of human ones inherent to most societies). Without such a well-founded moral compass, he further argues that atheism can only lead to Siberian work-camps, "Somewhere near Mogadishu...Or Babylon". So we're ignoring the fate of Arians and Pelagians at the hands of Catholics, are we? And the Reconquista and resulting Spanish inquisition? And the German Christians of WW2? Oh, we are.
Toby Young - The Telegraph
Unfunny columnist Toby Young (picture right, The Telegraph), author of How To Lose Friends and Alienate People, has warned against 'Banker bashing', claiming that doing so will cost Britain £20 billion in business tax; they will leave if we bully them too much.
"Far from shaming members of the financial services industry into paying more in taxes, the only result is likely to be more bankers electing to live abroad where their enormous contribution to tax revenues is better appreciated."
All indications are that bankers will be paid extortionate amounts of bonuses in 2011, like they were in 2010, so I can hardly feel sorry. But anyway, I don't see why we need to be so unspeakably servile to such people. If they leave, good riddance -why welcome parasites? The government isn't even cracking down on tax dodgers anyway, according to the Private Eye, so I find comments like this pointless. Lacking in perspective, offensive, and utterly pointless.
Norman Tebbit - The Telegraph
Tebbit (pic right, Telegraph) was a cabinet member in two of Thatcher's governments. Too right-wing for the Conservative Party, he has accused Michael Foot of fascism, accused the unemployed of not trying hard enough to get unemployed, and even campaigned against homosexuals being allowed to hold high office.
A few weeks ago he wrote a reasonably rational article about getting the pubic and private sectors to compete. However, in responding to online comments, I noticed the following:
"As for Andy Patten who said that I “did not squeak” at the treatment of [Nick] Griffin of the BNP by the BBC, he is quite right. I did not squeak. I do not squeak. I spoke and I criticised the BBC for so badly treating Griffin that he became an object of sympathy rather than being held to account as just another socialist holding strong views on immigration and community relations."
A...socialist? I could understand the word if it was prefixed by 'national', but socialist? Really? That isn't a synonym for 'extremist'. A socialist is almost diametrically opposed to fascist principles, as any idiot knows, but Tebbit just lumps these two things together, expecting them to get along just fine. I don't know what he might cite as examples of their cooperation. Nazism was only a facade of a marriage between nationalism and socialism (no anti-capitalist scheme was introduced, and humans were definitely not treated equally), and Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact ended with a little something called the 'Eastern Front'. That's if you want to call the Soviet Union 'socialist', though. I don't.
Thomas Sowell - Capitalism Magazine
Thomas Sowell is a conservative economist (pic right, thecompetentconservative.com), and against Barack Obama. That's fair enough. I'm no supporter of Obama either, although I suspect for different reasons, and I don't see anything inherently wrong in opposing him -so long as it anti-Islamic, petty or racist (the PC Free Zone scores 2/3 on that test), and I don't even see what Islam has to do with it.Although his article is hardly new, dating from September 2008, Sowell's The Vision of The Left article left me in stitches.
"It is hardly surprising that young people prefer the political left. The only reason for rejecting the left's vision is that the real world in which we live is very different from the world that the left perceives today or envisions for tomorrow. Most of us learn that from experience-- but experience is precisely what the young are lacking. "Experience" is often just a fancy word for the mistakes that we belatedly realized we were making, only after the realities of the world made us pay a painful price for being wrong."
I've encountered such ageism before, and it's a pathetic scapegoat. It's a way to circumvent an argument by simply dismissing the arguer. There have been plenty of old leftists -George Orwell, Tony Benn and Arthur Scargill immediately leap to mind- who have gotten more leftist as they've gotten older, for a start. And it opens Sowell to the alternative argument: as you get older, you're corrupted by bad experience or over time become a hypocrite. I don't advocate either argument, and further to that don't even think Sowell has put his own experience to good use. See how he over simplifies and misconstrues history:
"For those who bother to study history, it was precisely the opposite policies in the 1980s-- pouring tons of money into military equipment-- which brought the Cold War and its threat of nuclear annihilation to an end. The left fought bitterly against that "arms race" which in fact lifted the burden of the Soviet threat, instead of leading to war as the elites claimed."
If you say so.
It's Sunday!
I recently came upon this song when watching the film Carlos the Jackel. I've been listening to it ever since, but have no idea why it is so addictive. Musically it is very similar to Joy Division, especially very late songs like Ceremony, but Peter Hook poorly replicates Ian Curtis' vocals. Somehow there's a mood in the song that really grips me, particularly in the rhythm guitar's bridge part. Maybe someone out there understands?
And anyone following my Adrian Borland obsession will understand my plugging of several new videos on YouTube, namely: Second Layer - Courts or Wars, White Rose Transmission - Love Is A Foreign Land, and an extremely rare interview with Borland from 1987.
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