But it gets worse: In today's Guardian Harry Phibbs attempts to make the case (and this is a taste of things to come) against the minimum wage. Feeling confident with a future Tory government, Phibbs and friends are now feeling increasingly confident to drop the 'I feel your pain' nonsense and show their true colours. The only encouraging aspect to Phibbs' article were the savage comments that followed. Sadly, many of them were deleted (on the grounds that they were offensive, ironically unlike the article), but some of them have been saved here.
Worse still: David Starkey made an appearance on Question Time tonight. The odious little man imaginable. Pompous, opinionated, and full of vindictive, personal abuse. A vile man, who's appreciation of police history was weak; weaker still when considering this man is a professional historian.
It's been a right-wing fest and it looks like it's going to continue.
11 comments:
I had exactly the same reaction to David Starkey, Olching.
Hi Phil, David Starkey was awful; one of the worst panelist. Currently enjoying Leanne Wood on QT. She's good value.
Starkey is, as you rightly point out, an odious little shit.
Spiteful and petty, he combines unimaginative snobbery with chippyness: ever willing to fawn over his percieved 'betters' (i.e. some chinless titled twerp whose ancestor pimped for Charles II) and to condescend to his 'inferiors'.
If someone he thinks a gentleman kicks his bottom, you may be sure he'll bounce most obligingly.
He's less a hisorian than a necrophiliac social climber, imposing on dead royalty. After all, they can hardly show him the door, more's the pity.
I agree about Leanne Wood. The look of perpetual amazement on her face as Benn spouted the latest good news from the tractor factory and saluted Brown's vision and courage was priceless.
You know what I find uterly inexplicable? Brown's youtube horror show. How could something so cringingly, bollock-achingly awful been allowed to be released?
Doesn't the man have a single advisor with the sense of a 12 year-old? What in God's name were they thinking? Watching it made me seriously entertain the thought that Brown is truly-all hyperbole aside- insane.
He'll never live it down. From here on in, all Cameron and his smoothie-chops gang of petulant lightweights, oafish chancers and sanctimonious dimbulbs have to do is (a.) not be Brown, and (b.) compress that youtube horrorshow into 15 to 30 second spots and give them lots of play.
The best we can hope for, I think, is a Tory-Lib coalition, who'll spend their 5 years bickering and back-stabbing, thereby minimizing the damage.
5 years out of office and a complete purge of all the New Labour creeps, drones and toadys is what's desperately needed if the party I've voted for all my life (until Iraq) is to survive.
As things stand, I want them gone and gone now and they can take their ID cards, 42-day detention, central databases, compliance with torture, intense relaxation about riches, contempt for international law, their greed, their dishonesty and their utter shamelessness with them. Bastards. Good riddance.
Sorry, but I'm far angrier with Labour than any Tory voter could possibly be. I've been betrayed.
When I think of all the opportunities this shower wasted, what they could have done when they had the mandate and the votes...I could scream with vexation and fury.
Good rant, Misha. Hope you did scream with vexation and fury and feel better.
By the way people. Someone, is reporting our sites as phishing sites and MCafee anti virus software blocks them. So Olching. Your Thread that Never Ends is blocked and so is Heresycorner.
I think reports are also made to Google which drop articles from sight. I wrote one on Nick Cohen and it is there but has never appeared.
This is a brand protection strategy, probably. Pretty unscrupulous and underhand. You would think that people who tout themselves as defenders of free speech wouldn't stoop so low.
My site was blocked and it was only unblocked after three months and five reports to Mcafee and fo a while none of my posts were appearing.
To the question how are we going to deal with these anarchistic little bloggers they have probably actually sat down around a table and had a discussion about it.
I think they have decided to set a moderator onto monitoring what is said and building up cases for defamation or whatever.
That they have decided to get their technical guys on to finding "legitimate" ways of pulling the plug on these sites.
I think they think that we don't have stamina, because we have such different agendas. They are hoping we will go away.
They also probably trawl for ideas. I didn't like the Woollymindedliberal persona at all. It was oafish. But WML was the leader of the New Atheist pack and should have got some credit for the Bus campaign. The person who thought of it was inspired by WML.
But instead of WML there we saw Grayling, Toynbee and some other mug there at the launch.
More to say later...
And by the way I think they have decided to get rid of these unsympathetic bloggers who post because if the stay on CiF they represent a constant carping presence and their critical attention is still focused on the them and that is very problematic for them.
On the other hand it means we are being taken seriously. Perhaps its time to make a SPLASH with another flash blog.
Expressly invite all posters and bloggers to meet up on a single thread. A new one. Where everyone discusses cif and anyone who ever googles cif in future will get THAT thread at the top of any Google ranking.
Just a thought.
Olching.
Just call it CIF Guardian
What say thee?
Time to break out the old Sun Tzu
Hi Mish,
I agree entirely. New Labour need a huge and bloody purge, but will it happen? Already it looks like one D. Miliband is set to become the new leader, which would be hugely regressive (what on earth would his father think of both him and Ed as the biggest sellouts?).
New Labour will probably be annihilated at the next election, though the Tories are so loathsome that they may not sweep to power (why anyone would vote for them is beyond me). So, yes, a Tory-Lib coalition would probably be the healthiest outcome.
The YouTube fiasco is incredible. The most bizarre part was the fake grinning he employed throughout. It didn't fit at all with the content. It was one of the most bizarre things I think I've ever seen.
Phil, I don't quite understand what you are talking about (because I'm quite Luddite when it comes to the web...beyond simply posting stuff). Who's reporting these sites? Are the reporting your site or the refugee site? Who? Where to? What can be done?
We are currently discussing moving to a threaded site at the moment at http://cifthreadrefugee.blogspot.com/2009/05/should-we-reconsider-moving.html (are you sure it doesn't work?)...let me know if you can access it.
Olching.
Your site is being blocked by an antivirus programme because it has been reported as a phishing site. That means anyone with the antivirus will have trouble contacting your site.
Who reported it to MCafee?
A group of us split off from the Guardian some time ago and conducted a flash blog experiment. To get up to speed go here:
http://xuitlacoche.blogspot.com/2009/02/guardian-books-blog-fringe-norman.html
We (@Wordy)called it:
FLASHING THE GUARDIAN -- A BOOKS BLOGGERS' REBELLION: The unheroic censor with a death wish
Part 1: In which Norman Mailer stars in an experiment in search engine optimisation
I'll be very clear. With persistance and constancy you can get pretty high rankings on Google. This means that when anyone wants to learn about some event or person they Google them. By "cross blogging" and flash blogging we raise the ranking of our sites so that we come up alongside the Guardian or anyone else.
This gives you a strong voice.
What to do with this voice?
Well Wordy thought about it and realised it was unlikely that there was any real money- sustainability in it.
So we are waiting for this medium to evolve a little more.
Perhaps with the new cif refugees we can reach some sort of critical mass - and I use the words advisedly.
The too cool for school mob hang out at Politely Suicidal
http://misharialadwani.wordpress.com/
The quality, considered reflective and POLITE action is at acciaccature:
http://acacciatura.wordpress.com/
And the high art and poetry is on the links you will find on those two blogs and my own.
Phil, the flash blog looked quite good. I'll have to await the outcome of the poll at the refugee thread (whether or not we will move) and then perhaps suggest something like it.
Apparently, so I was told at the refuge, "[y]ou can allow a particular URL by adding it to your "Allowed" list (buried somewhere within your anti-virus s/ware of choice)".
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