Nul Points or The Thursday After The Friday Before
Crickey, compared to the various Aaro Watchers and our loyal commenters, even the England Cricket team look sharp. I (BD) said that Aaro would go for Michael Grade and Nick would do Borat, white flight, and Gordon Brown. The other BB thought Nick would say something about muggers, and Aaro would speculate about Russian poisoners. Others went for Islamofascist polonium, Robin Hood, etc. And we got - Dave on Iraq and Nick on religion (I think). Like the dog returning to its vomit (is that the Bible?) or something.
I think DA is going through a particularly lucid phase, while Nick moves closer to the madness of Mel. I have one complaint about both - they should stop trying to write jokes. Both have been competently funny in the past and both seem to me to have mislaid their sense of taste. DA:
Nick
I'm close to understanding the Eve Garrard position (on "Bush = Hitler") here. These jokes may work for less ostensibly heavy writers, but given that Dave has (I think) written about Nazism, and Nick thinks that Balkan warlords are a serious matter the flippancy seems pretty gross to me.
I don't really agree with Aaro, but it would take me quite a long time to explain why not (and much hair-splitting); while I sort of a agree with Nick, but I think he either doesn't know what he's talking about or he's loading the argument so much, that he's not worth bothering with. (Lots of Christians opposed slavery - and hence promoted liberty and equality - for example.) Nick seems to believe that inequality and slavery are religious values - in a politics good, religion bad way.
I think DA is going through a particularly lucid phase, while Nick moves closer to the madness of Mel. I have one complaint about both - they should stop trying to write jokes. Both have been competently funny in the past and both seem to me to have mislaid their sense of taste. DA:
And hadn’t Stalinism mobilised the necessary resistance to Hitler, without which we in the over-scrupulous West would all now be dead or wearing lederhosen?
Nick
The ferocity of the Church of England's internal conflicts could make a Balkan warlord blanch.
I'm close to understanding the Eve Garrard position (on "Bush = Hitler") here. These jokes may work for less ostensibly heavy writers, but given that Dave has (I think) written about Nazism, and Nick thinks that Balkan warlords are a serious matter the flippancy seems pretty gross to me.
I don't really agree with Aaro, but it would take me quite a long time to explain why not (and much hair-splitting); while I sort of a agree with Nick, but I think he either doesn't know what he's talking about or he's loading the argument so much, that he's not worth bothering with. (Lots of Christians opposed slavery - and hence promoted liberty and equality - for example.) Nick seems to believe that inequality and slavery are religious values - in a politics good, religion bad way.
posted by The Rioja Kid at 12/07/2006 07:36:00 PM
4 Comments:
"As academic critics of the English census pointed out, militant Islam was on the march in 2001 and anger about asylum-seekers was at its highest."
But the English census was taken on 29 April 2001, with respondents asked to respond as soon as possible after that date. I'm not sure when the absolute final deadline for returning one's census form was, but it was presumably some time before 11 September. So that's a 'no' to declared Christianity as a way of fending off the IslamoHordes, then. Asylum-seekers - maybe, maybe not, but the 'academic critics' have clearly been pulled out of Nick's arse.
Cohen has 'Winterval' wrong, too. Sentamu was talking about the 'public erosion of Christianity', and referring to Birmingham City Council's rebranding of Christmas as 'Winterval' in 1998 as the first symptom of this. But they haven't been 'burbling about it since 1998' at all; they abandoned the term the following year after an outcry from various Birmingham clerics and haven't used it since. Sentamu does actually acknowledge this in his speech, which Cohen either failed to read properly or failed to read at all.
Have you noticed Nick is quite commonly saying things like 'As I noticed at the time' or 'As I thought at the time'? I suspect soon he'll be telling us that the things he 'thought' at the time weren't related to the ones he published in the Observer and New Statesman - "why it's right to be Anti-American" etc.
A bit of fringe Cohen watching. Nick is an "advisory editor" of Democratiya (Decent-iya, it is). The latest issue contains a horrible apology for torture. Weird how the "moral compass moral relativism moral this and that" brigade have so quickly got into torture
Some time since I had a good long read here. I think Brusch has got a pash for Aero. It's like the Benedict Beatrice thing in 'Much Ado'. You said you didn't like him so much and so often that all that rage has seeped into your gonads and now you want him all for yourself. I'm worried. I come here hoping for a compass and all I get is love letters. What's going on? Where's the bile? Has the world gone reasonable?
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