Dogwash

I recently installed the MHTML add-on for Firefox (or in my case, Seamonkey). This not only saves a webpage into a single local file but also provides a "faithful save" option which concentrates on accurately reproducing the appearance of the page as rendered on-line rather than just downloading the files and hoping for the best, often losing most of the CSS in the process. It's not without its bugs but I can heartily recommended this add-on to Firefox users.

In consequence I have got into the habit of snapshotting aggressively moderated sites such as CiF. How often do you venture "below the line" to encounter a seemingly unending sequence of

This comment has been removed by a moderator. Replies may also be deleted.

and wonder what unspeakable offence the commenter committed to get, in the accepted CiF-speak, modded? Well, here's a for-instance from a current editorial on, gasp, immigration, which I was able to intercept before the moderators got at it.

CharleySays
24 November 2010 12:18AM

Immigration is, generally, a good thing.

Tell that to the indigenous people who have seen their friends and family become a minority due to immigration and consqeuently driven from their homes.

Tory voters one and all.

So what exactly is wrong with that, other than the fact that Claire might disagree with it?

Claire? I think of the CiF moderator as a young woman called Claire. Claire is in her gap year before going up to Oxford to read PPE. Claire hopes to become a political journalist and is currently doing an internship at the Guardian to gain experience for her CV. Claire has the sort of filtered and cosseted upper middle-class background that has come straight out of a Posy Simmonds strip. She is at the stage between the earnestness of the upper sixth and the exhilarating liberation of the first-time-away-from-home fresher. With no experience of life, she knows all the answers. Peace, love and plenty; it's really so straightforward.

Claire is shocked by what she reads in the comments queue. How can these disgusting bigots say these terrible things? They're just so ... so wrong.

Of course not all offending comments are explicitly "moderated" in this way. I visited the "David Coleman stole my identity, the racist eugenicist bastard" article on a number of occasions over the weekend, and at one stage the number of comments actually dropped. Explicitly moderated comments count towards the listed total, so clearly some comments were just silently removed. It may of course be simple housekeeping, like the removal of duplicated or incomplete posts. Then again it might not.

I have before and after snapshots. If I can be arsed, I'll look through them to try to locate the deleted comments. But don't hold your breath; 500-odd comments is a lot to work through and aproctosis may set in fairly quickly.

I was booted off Guardian Unlimited Talk, the predecessor to CiF, in 2003 for not toeing the party line. I don't think I'll be going to the bother of establishing a fresh Internet persona and trying to get back on anytime soon, to be honest. Comment is free, provided you agree with us, indeed. Spineless hypocrites.

A caller to Any Answers?, currently airing on Radio 4, is momentarily confused as to whether he is addressing Jonathan Dimbleby or David Dimbleby and seeks clarification. I don't think the Dimblebore is amused, though he covers it politely enough.

I mean fair do's to the caller. The Dimblebore brothers are pretty well interchangeable and one presents Question Time on the telly, while the other presents Any Questions? on the wireless, and both are equally smug. I can't tell them apart either.

The West Midlands counter-terrorism unit is apparently concerned that the activities of the EDL — or the "far-right EDL" as it uniformly called on the Today programme — are provoking radicalism among Muslim Yoof.

Really?

Or could it just perhaps be that the abusive and insulting behaviour of radicalized Muslims is provoking the White working class into active protest.

No, no, they're just higgerant siegheiling racist chav thugs out for bovver, innit.

I've just been listening to the ever-cringeworthy Forum programme on the BBC World Service, in which a sycophantic presenter invites three notables to discuss topics relevant to their respective specialisms. A bit like Radio 4's Start the Week and Midweek but overstructured and (thankfully) with a bit less prominence given to the book and gig plugging.

Anna Chen (of Madame Miaow blogging fame) and philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah have just concurred in asserting the moral equivalence of

• Foot binding in China
• Female genital mutilation in Africa (or "cutting" as they euphemistically refer to it)
• Breast enlargement in Europe and North America

The third guest, a Bulgarian astronomer, is not saying much. Perhaps wisely.

Discuss.

(NB. Do not attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once.)

Sajjad Karim, a Conservative MEP for the North West of England, writes on his EU blog about the European Commission's current proposals on food labelling.

Amendment #205 calls for the labelling of all meat and meat products derived from animals that have not been stunned prior to slaughter (i.e. have been ritually slaughtered by religious methods) to be labelled as "meat from slaughter without stunning".

This has caused great concern amongst the UK's religious communities, particularly Jewish and Muslim, who feel that if compulsory labelling were to go ahead then the supply of Kosher and Halal meats would stagnate as much of the meat slaughtered through these methods relies heavily on sales in the wider market. It is believed this market would dry-up as a result of such labelling making the supply economically unviable.

(My emphasis.)

Cheeky bastard. So as well as tolerating these alien food processing practices in our land, we are also expected to cross-subsidize them, are we?

It's the blatancy of this, as much as anything else, which grabs you warmly by the throat. According to Sajjad, halal meat sales in the UK are dependent on economies of scale which can only be achieved — at least until the ongoing Muslim breeding and importation programme reaches critical mass — by getting the kaffir communities to buy halal meat. And this can only be achieved by conning them, for if they knew what they were buying they would assuredly reject it.

And dear old Sajjad is so confident of his righteousness he says all this quite openly.

(Incidentally, Sajjad tries to rope shechita into this bleat. Well I'm happy to be set right on this, but frankly I'm not convinced that stealth kosher is all that prevalent.)

Hmm. Lying to the kaffirs and getting them to pay financial tribute to the Umma? We know the words for that, don't we, children?



While I'm on the subject of halal, perhaps I can offer a comment on the current wave of opposition to halal in the UK, as evidenced by recent reports in the Mail and elsewhere and in the activities of the EDL in demonstrating outside KFC's experimental halal outlets.

It seems to me that people are placing too much emphasis on the animal welfare aspects of this argument. I can understand why. It's a specific, concrete and essentially technical objection which avoids getting bogged down in cultural and religious issues with the concomitant danger of accusations of intolerance and, heaven forfend, racism. And we have all been thoroughly trained to do absolutely anything to avoid the remotest danger of breaching the taboo of racism, haven't we, children? (Well, not quite all of us. I was born in 1948. The State Religion of Antiracism didn't really get properly underway until the mid-to-late 1960s, when I was already a young adult and well beyond the Xavier threshold.)

Unfortunately, this circumspect timidity leaves us open to counterarguments about the levels of cruelty actually practised in the mainstream slaughtering process. A useful distraction technique, that, like chucking a handful of Huguenots into an immigration debate.

Remember the brouhaha about stealth halal in Harrow school canteens?

Quoth one local spokesmuzzie thusly...

But chief co-ordinator of the Harrow Pakistani Society, Mohammad Rizvi, thinks the issue has been blown out of proportion.

He said: “For Muslim children the only option they have is to eat is Halal, it is part of their religion.

“Whereas it isn't a problem for children of other faiths to eat Halal.

“This isn't about Islamification or pandering to Muslim's it's just common sense.

“If you go into any restaurant you will find that a lot of the meat is Halal anyway, it doesn't taste any different or better it is just part of our religion.”

I'm sure you mean well, Mo my old China, but passing that through a taurocoprolytic filter I end up with

What's the problem? We're Muslims, it's important to us. But you worthless subhuman kuffars will eat any old shit.

Well, I'm sorry, Tosh, I'm not buying that. I dislike halal on animal-welfare grounds, but I also expect meat to be offered by default in this country which has been slaughtered according to the dominant and indigenous secular Christian traditions practised here. Yes, I'd quite like to see the banning of halal and kosher slaughterhouse practices that do not render the meat animal humanely unconscious before slaughter. But even if you can adjust your practices accordingly, why should I blithely accept meat slaughtered by some bearded loon chanting Bismillah, Allahu Akbar! or whatever it is as he cuts the beast's throat?

I might do that, and if I choose to patronize an Indian (sc. Bangladeshi) restaurant or a kebab shop that are clearly marked as حلال, then I knowingly elect to do so. But you have no right to assume that acquiescence in your alien practices unasked. That is cultural arrogance of a kind we have, regrettably, come to know all too well.

Islamic terrorists tried to down a US cargo plane using exploding BULLDOGS, it emerged yesterday

except perhaps to wonder to what extent we have, thus far, been protected by the monumental inbred incompetence of these people.