The Lunatic Wing
HP and the lunatic wing at the DSTs hate his [Osama Saeed's] guts ...
Flying Rodent in comments here yesterday. Look, this is Aaronovitch Watch not 'crazies with internet access' watch, but do keep up. H'sP and the DSTs are no longer friendly.
See here. I *think* what has happened in the comments is that they've all be deleted and replaced with comments on the comments, ie "[this fucker is just straight-up fucking strange]" and all commenter's site links have been replaced with links to this post which may or may not explain the split.
They don't like Marko or Norman Geras either. These differences may be superficial - both the DSTs and Norman Geras link to the Hitchens piece discussed on Monday. Approvingly. (A theory re that article I should have posted at the time: Hitchens is the sort of writer who plagiarizes himself. He wrote the 'good bits' years ago, found they didn't fit in whatever he was working on at the time and left them in a drawer. He then wrapped the McCain thing around old, and sane, observations.)
posted by Chardonnay Chap at 9/03/2008 05:28:00 AM
25 Comments:
Hitchens is the sort of writer who plagiarizes himself.
I thought you liked TS Eliot?
Nick's back in The Standard. He's writing about economics and house prices. It doesn't really make any sense,
http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23550553-details/Slump+or+not%2C+young+people+still+cannot+afford+a+home/article.do
He says 'brown could have done so much more' and then doesn't tell us what, apart from a vague mention of building firms.
He's posted this column on his website, too, where you get the bonus of his "thoughts" about Sarah Palin. Apparently "well-heeled Democrats" are laughing at her because she's a working-class woman with a son "fighting in Iraq and a husband who is a union man".
They should be careful. They come from a political class where sex is safe and lives orderly. Most Americans don’t
Aaronovitch Watch wholly condemns and disassociates itself from this mindless anti-Americanism on the part of Nick Cohen. The vast majority of Americans have orderly lives and practice safe sex. While the USA does have one of the highest teenage pregnancy rates in the developed world, it is only 53/1000 women and in any case, the UK is not far behind.
Why it is right to be anti-American.
What's he mean when he says her husband is a union man? Just that he's a member of a union? There's nothing more to it than that, is there?
Who knows? Likewise, why does he ignore two of her kids when he describes her offspring as "one unmarried child pregnant, another child, a third fighting in Iraq"?
_Norman Tebbitt_ is a union man.
Chris W
You say that as if Nick wouldn't be swooning over his candidature...
...do keep up. H'sP and the DSTs are no longer friendly.
Oh, I'm aware of that - in fact, it's quite endeared the Trots to me, although not that much. Shuggy I have a lot of time for, but the rest of them? I've never been as angry about anything as they are about everything.
OTOH, you can at least rely on the DSTs to spot self-serving emoting* and nasty racist bullshit, which puts them several notches above HP in my book, and they spend a lot of time putting the boot into some people who really, genuinely deserve it. I'm looking at you, "Libertarians", Brendan O'Neill and Oliver Kamm.
*Unless it's coming from Hitchens. Big blind spot there.
Justin - I do; that was actually intended as a compliment.
Re Nick; there are a few grammatical differences between the NC site version and the Standard: "the union’s striking" (the Standard omits the apostrophe because the single "is" in the whole sentence seems to do duty in every other clause and because one would then have to ask, "which union?") and "the cost housing" into which the Standard pedantically inserts the word " of. I say pedantically, because it would work the way Nick wrote it - in Welsh.
The Sarah Palin thing is weird. The missing kid bit seems to be waiting for an informative clause to follow "another child". I'll guess that he was thinking something "another child - her fifth - was born when she was 44 [I can't find Trig's date of birth, but it was after her 44th birthday on February 11 this year]". Could happen to anyone ... who remembered to regenerate before they underwent the menopause, or if you believe the scurrilous Daily Kos had a pregnant unmarried and underage daughter. That story will stand or fall according to what regular journalism - ie checking records - turns up rather than innuendo by blog - here are photos of SP looking slim at 5 months and her daughter looking 'expectant' in the same pic, etc. And Kos seems to have removed some posts on that.
The "Palin has more experience than Obama" thing is a straight Republican talking point. She does live in an oil-producing region that's quite close to Russia, so I'm sure she's fit to be Vice President.
Could happen to anyone ... who remembered to regenerate before they underwent the menopause
Or was fertile at 44. It happens; my younger sister was born three months before my mother's 45th birthday.
The "Palin has more experience than Obama" thing is a straight Republican talking point.
Now that did shock me - that and the 'creationism? what about Reverend Wright?' line. If anything that's even worse, as it's specifically a White Liberals For McCain talking-point.
OK Phil; yes, it could happen; and Kos seem to have changed their minds over that issue.
I don't get the Reverend Wright thing. To me, he's a bit like the Clash; I appreciate the righteous anger, but I wouldn't take mortgage advice from him. Obama: closet atheist? [YouTube]. I don't think Obama does prayer any more than I do; I'm not even sure Wright does. I certainly don't see any problem with Wright's church. Wright is almost a walking racist-identifier. He should patent himself.
I thought ethnic vote bank politics was supposed to be a bad thing? Has Nick not noticed the Republicans making a blatant pitch for the strategically important Inuit vote?
BTW, anyone notice Eve Garrard's latest on Prof Normblog? Not only is the UCU a nest of antisemitism, so too apparently is the Green Party. I sense an attempt to expand the Engagenik remit.
Rud eile: I notice the DST's (must read these guys more often) picking up this gem of Marko's:
The difference between a blogger who is entertaining and provocative, and one who is an embarrassment and/or disgusting, is both huge and painfully obvious to anyone who reads them. And a stench will linger…
Do you know, I thought Marko was having a go at yours truly. But perhaps the DST's were in his mind. Isn't life grandy and dandy?
John Cole has Stephen Colbert on Sarah Palin's experience ("more executive experience than Obama, Biden, and McCain put together"). Splendid. "Alaska is not only closer to Russia than any other part of the United States, it also has Mount McKinley, so it's closer to space than any other part of the United States." I think the words "Moose attack" will cause me to giggle for the next week.
Not only is the UCU a nest of antisemitism, so too apparently is the Green Party.
There was discussion here the other day of someone producing a dossier on Decent blogs and Racism. Someone ought to compile something on Decentism and its relationship to the environmental movement because its very weird.
Just read that Eve Garrard piece. Its a masterpiece of innuendo and guilt by association. We learn that Green party members 'are increasingly disturbed about what they see as its failure to take anti-Semitism'. One of the disturbing instances pointing to anti-semitism is Caroline Lucas's support for an economic and cultural boycott. You can read her reasoning here
and decide how honest it is cite it as an instance of anti-semitism.
"There was discussion here the other day of someone producing a dossier on Decent blogs and Racism."
That's very interesting. Is it the thesis that those of us who read "Decent" blogs are irredeemably racist? That's quite exciting. As well as utterly - and demonstrably - cretinous.
At least know your supposed "enemy" you stupid twats. Don't get carried away with flights of fancy, hmmm? I think it's perfectly possible you might *want* people you think of as "Decents" to actually be racists, but you ought to pay some attention to the tiresomely prosaic real world. I would have thought. You filthy communist space lizzards.
If it's to work even slightly, yr beginner's strawmannery needs to be a bit more subtle than that, Ben. HTH.
Chris W
Quite right Chris. I always find faux world-weary condescension works wonders when someone you agree with has fucked up. Do carry on, my good man.
I read this rarely - but it's always quite refreshing when I do. I occasionally worry I fritter my life away on blogs a little too much, but it's most reassuring to see your collective obsession verging on monomania rather makes my own worries pale into insignificance.
(Yes, that's a nasty personalisation of the argument. I think that's what you expect of my sort, hmmm? We're not very good at yer atcheral political argument, you see. It's an example of the reason we need you lot to psychoanalyse our base motives. I regard your efforts as free psychological counselling. Worth a fortune.)
Is it the thesis that those of us who read "Decent" blogs are irredeemably racist?
No. Guess you'll just have to keep reading Aaronovitch Watch (Incorporating "World of Decency") in order to find out what the thesis actually is.
By the way, I don't think AW (i"WoD") has ever had very much to say about people who read Decent blogs; it's the buggers who write them that are our main subject.
Is it the thesis that those of us who read "Decent" blogs are irredeemably racist?
For entertaiment value, if nothing else - would you be able to illustrate with textual references how you derived this suggestion from the discussion that preceded it?
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