It takes a man

12:09pm

There was a rather dull 'whither feminism' lot on the Today programme this morning. But they appear to have missed the big story:

Man Finally Put In Charge Of Struggling Feminist Movement.

WASHINGTON—After decades spent battling gender discrimination and inequality in the workplace, the feminist movement underwent a high-level shake-up last month, when 53-year-old management consultant Peter "Buck" McGowan took over as new chief of the worldwide initiative for women's rights.

..."All the feminist movement needed to do was bring on someone who had the balls to do something about this glass ceiling business," said McGowan, who quickly closed the 23.5 percent gender wage gap by "making a few calls to the big boys upstairs." "In the world of gender identity and empowered female sexuality, it's all about who you know."

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Pilger exposed

10:13pm

John Pilger is a standing affront to decent journalism, espousing some pretty vile causes under the guise of exposing the truth. Marko Attila Hoare, an expert on the Balkans, has a compelling account of how he exposed Pilger's lies at a meeting at Kingston University, which you can read here.

Rather than attempt to defend his record, Pilger tried to play the numbers game with me (people like Pilger are under the impression that if the total number of victims in a campaign of mass murder turns out to be lower than some of the earlier estimates, it vindicates the deniers and the apologists). He asked me what I thought the death-toll in the Kosovo conflict was. I replied that it was about ten thousand. He then countered that no, the number of bodies found, including both civilians and combatants and members of all ethnic groups was ‘only’ four thousand, according to members of forensic teams working in Kosovo. This, it should be pointed out, is something of an upward revision for Pilger, who as recently as a year and a half ago was claiming that the total death-toll in Kosovo was ‘only’ 2,788, and that therefore the justification for the NATO operation against Serbia was an ‘invention’.

I reminded Pilger that the Milosevic regime had systematically concealed and destroyed the bodies of its Kosovo Albanian victims; that more mass graves were being discovered as time went by; and that the body count was therefore likely to rise. He did not appear to have a counter-argument; his only response was to tell me ‘you clearly have an agenda’ and ‘you shouldn’t be teaching here’. Which, given that I was teaching at the invitation of, and in conjunction with, senior members of the same faculty and university as those who had invited him to speak, was something of an insult to his hosts. He then tried to shift the discussion away from the topic of the body-count (that he had himself introduced) and to claim that ‘the NATO war was to destroy the state called Yugoslavia’. I told him that was ‘nonsense’, and he decided that this was the time to move on to the next question. After the meeting and in the following days, several Kingston students and staff members approached me to tell me how shocked they had been at his reaction to my question and his inability to address it.

Unknown to either myself or Pilger, a forensic expert who had worked on-site in Kosovo examining the bodies was also present in the audience. After the meeting, she approached him, told him who she was, challenged his version of events and asked him to tell her who the alleged forensic experts he had cited were, because they were probably people she knew personally. Pilger’s response was ‘I have to go now’. Although when I passed him in the entrance to the auditorium, he was talking to someone else and did not appear in any great hurry to leave.

As I noted above, deniers such as Pilger are under the impression that if they can ‘win’ the numbers game - if the death-toll in Kosovo turns out ‘only’ to have been four thousand rather than ten thousand, for example - then they believe it will prove their case that genocide did not occur, the assumption presumably being that four thousand deaths are ‘too small’ to count as genocide.

Do read the whole thing. It's important that Pilger and his ilk are exposed for what they really are: peddlers of fiction and defenders of murderers. 

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Arts Council outrage

4:19pm

The Guardian today reports an outrageous decision by the Arts Council:

Nearly 200 arts organisations in England have been told that their funding will end from next April in the biggest and most bloody cull since the Arts Council was set up more than 50 years ago.

Pre-Christmas letters from Arts Council England have been dropping on the mats of groups across the arts, telling them they cannot expect to continue receiving public money.

This is wrong. Very wrong. As the report continues:

Many organisations will, however, have had good news. Of the 990 bodies which get funding, three-quarters have been told to expect inflation or above rises.

What kind of decision is that? Why are they only cutting the grant to 200 bodies, when the taxpayer is still being made to fund almost 700 more?

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The business end

11:43am

Peter Wilby has an interesting piece at Media Guardian on the rise of the business journalist:

Nothing better illustrates how the country and its press have changed in the past 25 years than the rise and rise of the business journalist. This month, James Harding, the Times business editor and formerly a Financial Times stalwart, became editor of the paper. In treading the path from business to the editor's chair, he follows Robert Thomson, his predecessor at the Times; Will Lewis, the Daily Telegraph editor; and Patience Wheatcroft, who was briefly and unhappily in charge at the Sunday Telegraph. Examples from further back include David Yelland (the Sun), Will Hutton (the Observer), and Andreas Whittam Smith, founder and first editor of the Independent.

...The change came about sometime in the 80s. I suggest two reasons. First, the country in general and the press in particular became more obsessed with money. Financial services are now so important to the economy that, to understand how Britain works, it is necessary to understand what hedge funds, derivatives, libor rates and sub-prime mortgages actually are.

Bankers and business people carry weight in the highest circles of even a Labour government, as trade-union leaders did 30 years ago. Because such people sit on government committees and chair inquiries, a business journalist will have contacts as well-placed as those of the political staff. Moreover, most Britons are now, as Margaret Thatcher intended, not just consumers (rather than citizens, workers or professionals) but also investors. Even if they do not directly own shares, most newspaper readers have an interest in pension schemes that depend on stock-market movements, in house prices and, as borrowers or savers, in interest rates.

Second, newspapers are themselves money-making businesses, in a sense they were not 30 years ago.

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Brown's reward

11:00am

(Warning: this post is appallingly self-referential.) 

One poll does not an election make. But with the Conservatives now at 45 per cent, even the dullest of Labour dunderheads must now recognise the disaster that is Paul Martin, sorry, Gordon Brown as leader.

In truth, even back in the spring when the time came to challenge him and no serious candidate emerged, it was obvious even to many who acquiesced in his 'election' as leader knew they were heading for trouble. But for some bizarre form of fatalism they nonetheless seemed to behave as if there was no other option. There was: someone else.

It's annoying to read people saying 'I told you so' but I did tell you so, as did many others. I was especially pleased to be dismissed in the summer as an idiot for predicting it would all end in tears, when Brown was riding high in the polls. 

(This blog is now looking rather amusing:

With Labour 11% ahead in the polls (albeit a conference special) it is interesting to hear the thoughts of political commenters and bloggers on Gordon Brown.

Stephen Pollard (and Oliver Kamm) have described him as:

Mr Unelectable
Robert Harris, in the Times, argues:

[Gordon Brown] has shown the most appalling political ineptitude and has reduced the Labour government to a farcical grotesquerie without precedent in living memory. So much so that, as the reality sinks in, I would put Brown’s chances of succeeding Blair at not much more than 50-50 and his hopes of winning the next general election at substantially less than that. 
Ah, apparently those comments were made last September. "Has reduced the Labour government to a farcical grotesquerie without precedent in living memory" - good grief, surely analysis of that standard should disqualify Robert Harris from ever being taken seriously again?

Er, maybe not, eh, matey?)

I've been reading a piece I wrote for the Spectator in January on the year ahead:

We already know what the political event of 2007 will be. Even if David Cameron is run over by the proverbial bus or Sir Menzies Campbell wakes from his political slumber, nothing else will stand comparison with the departure of the most brilliant politician of the modern age (a description which has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with strategy and tactics) and his replacement by the most overrated politician of the modern age.

As is usually the way with these things, it is only after he is gone that Labour will miss Tony Blair. Even at the height of his political powers, his party would have preferred it if he had stuck to the Bar and the adjective New had never been associated with the word Labour. When Gordon Brown takes over, the astonishing political skills of Tony Blair will come sharply into focus — but with hindsight.

It is one thing to have as Chancellor a man who speaks as if words are merely a formula for conveying policy and who will only answer the question he has been programmed to answer — we are sort of reassured by the idea of the books being looked after by someone with a chip missing. Being Prime Minister, however, requires a very different personality. 

The public mood apparently demands a break from spin and from the smoothness of Mr Blair. Yeah, right. Have those who think that not noticed the rise of David Cameron? In any event, Mr Brown is hardly the man to ditch spin. Mr Brown was responsible for the manoeuvre which first gave the government the reputation for spin: passing off modest spending increases in 1998 as a spending bonanza by triple-counting them. As for the supposed contrast with Mr Blair of Mr Brown’s lack of smoothness, if there is one thing more cringe-making than the genuinely smooth Prime Minister, it is the attempts by Mr Brown — such as the rictus grin now attached to his face — to come across as a smoothie.

If I say so myself, not too bad a prediction.

Gordon Brown has built an entire career on the six months he enjoyed as a stand in for John Smith as Shadow Chancellor, after tthe latter's heart attack. He was indeed impressive. But he is almost comically over-rated, taking over an economy which had been put right by Ken Clarke and then proceeding to over burden it with taxes and regulations. And now we are about to reap the consequences of his time as Chancellor. 

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The real Inayat Bunglawala

10:33am

The Guardian's Comment is Free site is running a none-too-serious awards post, in which commenters are asked to nominate their winners.

I rarely link to the site because most of the pieces, let alone the comments, are oh-so-predictable - that is when they are not downright offensive. (I have made an exception when I have highlighted the regular anti-Semitic posts which the moderators appear not to take exception to.) 

Oliver Kamm and David T have, however, pointed out the use of CiF in one particular respect: exposing the mindset of the Muslim Council of Britain's Inayat Bunglawala. Blogging is especially useful in this respect: the immediacy of it sometimes exposes thoughts which a writer might, on reflection, realise were best kept to him or herself.

Bunglawala nominates Oliver Kamm for his own award: 

Worst: That warmongering bastard Oliver Kamm (sorry - I added that category myself).

As Oliver notes:

"Inayat" is Inayat Bunglawala of the Muslim Council of Britain, a sinecurist whose talents were neatly encapsulated by Christopher Hitchens in Vanity Fair a few months ago: "A preposterous and sinister individual named Inayat Bunglawala, assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain and a man with a public record of support for Osama bin Laden, was made a convener of Blair's task force on extremism despite his stated belief that the BBC and the rest of the media are 'Zionist controlled.'"

You can see where Bunglawala made this clear here. His exact words were:

The chairman of Carlton Communications is Michael Green of the Tribe of Judah. He has joined an elite club whose members include fellow Jews Michael Grade and Alan Yentob...[They are] close friends… so that's what they mean by a 'free media'.

There are plenty more examples of how this man who puts up the facade of moderation has a very different agenda. As the Telegraph has reported:

In January 1993, Mr Bunglawala wrote a letter to Private Eye, the satirical magazine, in which he called the blind Sheikh Omar Abdul Rahman "courageous" - just a month before he bombed the World Trade Center in New York. After Rahman's arrest in July that year, Mr Bunglawala said that it was probably only because of his "calling on Muslims to fulfil their duty to Allah and to fight against oppression and oppressors everywhere".

Five months before 9/11, Mr Bunglawala also circulated writings of Osama bin Laden, who he regarded as a "freedom fighter", to hundreds of Muslims in Britain.

David T highlights another giveaway of the real Bunglawala:

When he puts finger to keyboard, he gives himself away. It is telling that one of the bloggers who he nominates for an award is a particularly zany character who calls himself "GiyusandTrolls". You will be hard pressed to find postings by "giyusandtrolls9" (who also posts as "falseflagmedia" and sometimes posts as "RetroDeletionPolice") on CiF. That is because s/he is a racist conspiracy nut, who posts stuff on links between zionism and freemasonry, and similar topics of appeal to those on the Islamist far right.

Remember that next time you hear him coming over all moderate, or the MCB claiming to represent mainstream moderate Muslim opinion.

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Yawn

9:56am

Here's a surprise (I was long ago told that irony and sarcasm don't work in print but what the hell, I'm still using it):

Former socialist MSP Tommy Sheridan has vowed to clear his name after being charged with perjury.

The charges against Mr Sheridan relate to a police inquiry into his defamation case against the News of the World. 

You can already write the identikit response. So I'm waiting with baited breath for the first blog to write that no socialist is ever allowed to take on the establishment and win, and this is simply revenge.

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Why do gentiles give so little?

2:30pm

David Aaronovitch has a must-read column in this week's Jewish Chronicle. Unfortunately it's not on line. Here's his main, provocative but wise, point:

How does it come about that Lord Levy was succeeded by Mr Mendelsohn, that Sir Ronald Cohen has been such a big supporter of Gordon Brown's and that British political parties would go to the wall if it weren't for the fundtaising skills of members of the [Jewish] community?

...If the Jewish presence in charitable work and fundraising is disproportionately large, then someone else's contribution must - logically - be disproportionately small. If Jews give a lot, isn't this a way of saying that some people give very little?

...So here's my reworking of the big question: not, why are Jews always involved in donating money, but rather, why are gentiles so mean?

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More turkey!

11:41am

Continuing the turkey theme...

Click on the destinations.

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Stockhausen the fraud

4:57pm

Oliver Kamm has an excellent piece on Comment Is Free about Stockhausen. I don't think it's possible convincingly to disagree with his key point:

An impressionable writer in the Daily Telegraph last week quoted one of Stockhausen's acolytes: "Stockhausen gave us the courage to think anything was possible in music." But not everything is possible in music, any more than it is in poetry. If you read a poem you need, at a minimum, to be able to understand the language in which it is written, the conventions of the genre and the tradition of the art form. Musical appreciation does not depend on the ability to read a score, but it does require the ability to hear sounds in relation to those that precede them.

The dominance of western music reflects its ability to combine melody and harmony, and thereby produce a discourse. A musical composition is above all an argument that appeals to the emotions. The work of Stockhausen is not like that. It is not music so much as a series of sonic events, which at its worst feels both pretentiously mystical and interminable (though his opera cycle Licht in fact lasts only for 30 hours). It evinces - in the phrase of the critic Robin Holloway - "neo-Wagnerian ambitions unmatched by the necessary talent."

I once heard Maurizio Pollini play Stockhausen's Klavierstück X, which is one note played repeatedly for about 10 minutes at different lengths. It wasn’t music, it was sound. But it was utterly mesmerising, and was one of the most awesome pieces of pianism I have ever heard (although I am not usually a fan of Pollini).  

But I have heard a fair bit of other Stockhausen and he was, I would suggest, one of the great cultural frauds of the twentieth century.  This judgement has nothing to do with the somewhat tedious tonal v atonal debate or adherence to the pentatonic scale - plenty of other composers whose music I don't properly appreciate, such as Boulez, for instance, do not write music in the traditional classical idiom but are clearly worthy of study and a hearing - but is based on the simple fact that Stockhausen had no discernible talent even on his own (spurious) terms; nor did he evince any rigour in the composition of his pieces. 

I actually think Oliver is being too kind in his assesment that

His was not a movement but a cultural moment. What Stockhausen bequeaths to modern music comprises largely misconceived ideas and sounds of surpassing ugliness.

They were not ideas. They were cons.
  

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