And your point is?

5:58pm

I'll be returning to this at greater length, but a friend sat her British citizenship test this week. The questions were truly weird. Among the things she was asked was:

When do children get pocket money: daily, weekly or monthly?

Eh? What on earth is that about? And is there even any right answer?

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Random plug

5:52pm

A site I very much enjoy is Pooter Geek. It's difficult to pin it down, which is half the fun. The author has a lovely way with words, and is well worth reading.

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Explanation and apology

5:11pm

A couple of people have emailed to say that my mentions of Neil Clark are boring and unworthy of me. I should, they say, have bigger fish to fry.

And the thing is, they're right. But...

The reason I give his outpourings entirely unmerited and disproportionate coverage is that I find it both bizarre and wrong that a man who is a proud apologist for a genocidal butcher should be treated as having anything worthwhile to contribute to the mainstream media (I leave out the 'blogosphere', since no one can, or should, be able to control the content people choose to put on their own sites).

Reading Clark's opinions in the mainstream media is little different in spirit from reading David Irving's, both in their apologias for mass murderers and in their use of unreliable sources. Would Irving be commissioned by, say, the Guardian, to offer his thoughts on the appointment of a new French foreign minister? Merely to pose the question is to show the absurdity of it. Yet a man who eulogises another genocidal butcher - and, equally offensively in its way, who harks back with nostalgia to the tyranny of the Warsaw Pact - is. And so I think it is necessary to show just how wrong and stupid Clark is, lest anyone take him seriously on any matter of importance.

He has also sought - albeit with utter incompetence - to silence criticism of his methods through a libel writ against Oliver Kamm. Not that one should be surprised that a defender of Communist tyranny or Slobodan Milosevic does not believe in the right of others to criticise him or his views.

It is also, I have to confess, sometimes fun to shoot fish in a barrel.

I'm sorry if it's boring when I mention Clark. And I get the message - I'll do my best to resist the temptation to mention him, and try to make this a Clark-free zone.

But I hope you see why, trivial and stupid as he is, it's important that his idiocy is properly ridiculed.

 

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Keeping the oiks out

11:25am

Tim Worstall has an original explanation of Polly Toynbee's support for Harriet Harperson, rather than Hilary Benn:

[N]iece of a Countess supported by g-g grandaughter of an Earl.

Hilary Benn is, of course, merely the second son of a Viscount.

Further, the Harman connection is to a title from 1677, the Toynbee one to a title from 1322, revived in 1660.

The Viscountcy dates only from 1942.

Easy to see what's happening here, the ladies are simply ganging up on some unspeakable arriviste.

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The Idiotic One on Serbia

8:53am

I've resisted mentioning The Idiotic One for a while, but I can do so no longer. Here he is on his favourite topic:

[S]ince the US sponsored coup-d'etat against President Milosevic in 2000 and the decapitation of the Serbian Socialist Party, life has become much harder for the people of Serbia... But of course, the enforced changes of October 2000 were not about improving the life of the majority of Serbs. They were about installing a quisling government that would line up obediently to join the EU and NATO and sell of [sic] the nation's assets to foreign capital.

The Idiotic One (aka Neil Clark) wrote an article for the Guardian recently about Bernard Kouchner's position on the Iraq War without first troubling to read - or even being capable of reading* - such specialised, technical and obscure material as the previous Friday's edition of France's leading newspaper.

Yesterday's post displays similar perspicacity. Four years is clearly insufficient for facts to permeate his brain:

A controversial privatisation arranged by the sometime British foreign secretary Lord Hurd with Slobodan Milosevic unravelled yesterday when the Serbian government said it was buying back a hefty share of its national telecommunications network from Italy. The Serbian prime minister, Zoran Djindjic, said Belgrade was buying back the 29% stake in Telekom Serbia sold to Telecom Italia in 1997 in a deal mediated by Lord Hurd, then deputy chairman of NatWest Markets. Although there has never been any suggestion of impropriety on Lord Hurd's part, the deal attracted fierce criticism. It presented Mr Milosevic with a $1bn (£625m) windfall a year before his campaign to drive Kosovan Albanians from their homes and at a time when as Serbian leader he was facing down huge protest demonstrations in Belgrade.

The Guardian, 30 Deecmber 2002

How did he ever get to teach at Oxford Tutorial College?

*Do read this from my old blog - I think it's very funny, if I say so myself:

I tried googling his nonsense-phrase "C'est ne pas France" in inverted commas to see if he might have got it from somewhere. It's difficult to believe, but there is literally not a single hit. This means that every single person who has ever written a word of French that has ended up on the internet is less stupid than Neil Clark.

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Stop the Boycott

5:53pm

A plea. If you're an academic, and you don't believe in discriminating against people on the basis of their nationality or religion, please get in touch with the Stop the Boycott campaign.

It's assembling a list of names of academics who oppose the proposed boycott of Israel, for a newspaper advert.

You can email them with your name via this site.

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That logo...

5:35pm

Daniel Finkelstein reveals the story behind the logo.

Another reading is also possible: 

 

   

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  

 (Apologies for the language, but, well, it is.)

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Messing about in Bratislava

8:11am

You'd have to be pretty hard hearted not to feel sorry for Stephen Mallone and his fiancee, Kerry Stokes. As the Mirror reports, Mr Mallon was arrested on his stag do in Bratislava for being drunk and disorderly and sentenced to two months in the clink, thus missing his wedding.

Here's how the Mirror reports what he got up to:

The self-employed builder had travelled to Slovak capital Bratislava with 13 mates for an alcohol-fuelled stag weekend. They spent Saturday drinking heavily before, egged on by friends, Stephen stripped and jumped into a fountain near the US Embassy.

 

But the hapless groom picked the wrong side of the former Iron Curtain for his high jinks. He was grabbed by two policemen and hauled off to the cells.  

Yet however sorry one feels for him now, it's illustrative of so much about modern Britain's booze culture. To Mr Mallone's fiancee, "He was just messing about". A friend on the trip confirmed that, as the report puts it, they were "just larking around and not harming anyone".

What to Mr Mallone, his fiancee and his friends was "just messing about" is the sort of drunken yobbery which characterises this country - and which Slovakia is mercifully free from.

It's not exactly rocket science to work out why in one country it's unpleasant, to say the least, to be out and about after chucking out time, and why in another one can wander around at any time of night and not feel in the least bit anxious. What's regarded as normal behaviour in Britain gets - at worst - a slapped wrist; in Bratislava, it carries a two month prison sentence. 

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More Yazzmonstering

12:22am

I hesitate to link to this, I really do. But this performance from the Yazzmonster, 'debating' Israel with John Torode, is so breathtakingly ignorant, so jaw-droppingly stupid, that even veteran observers (and former sparring partners such as myself) will be amazed. She even manages to deny - indeed, to rant at John Torode for daring to suggest it - that Syria has any relationship with Hezbollah.

Is there anyone who takes her seriously? I mean, really. Is there?

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Crass and ignorant

9:39am

I was going to have a go at the idea of a new Bank Holiday, whether it be Britain Day, Europe Day, or any other day. If the government feels that we need yet another day off work - paid for by employers - then fine; let's debate the merits of another day's statutory paid holiday.

But the whole notion of a day which the state decrees that we all take off from work is so archaic as to be ridiculous in the modern world. For one thing, with so many shops and businesses open on Bank Holidays, they aren't nationl holidays any more. They are arbitrary days off for one segment of the working population.

It surely makes much more sense to have a certain number of statutory days off guaranteed by law, which those of us who have an employer can then arrange to use as we see fit, rather than as the government decreees. And the rest of us, who get paid only when we chose to work - freelancers, in other words, and the self-employed - can carry on working as too see fit.

So, as I say, I was going to write about the broad issue when I saw this post by Sarah Standing on the Coffee House page, It's a perfectly inoffensive piece for the most part on the fatuity of a Britain Day. And then this:

We never needed a day to remind us of our worth and I suspect, should British Day be enforced on us, it will mainly celebrated by illegal immigrants living in our great country thrilled to have yet another day off.

Hello? What a crass remark. I've no idea of Ms Standing's domestic circumstances but I'd be amazed if, like most of us, she hasn't at some point employed an illegal immigrant to do something around her house because there wasn't a native-born Brit willing or able to do it for a fair price. And I wonder if she has the slightest idea  about illegal immigration in this country. All the evidence shows not only the extent to which the economy needs their work, but how much better off we'd all be if immigrants whom we categorise as illegal were allowed to work legitimately and thus to contribute to the tax system. Such ignorant, crass remarks about immigrants, legal or otherwise, are the bane of this country's racial harmony.    

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