29 May, 2012

 

Let the good times roll -- again

The economy is on the upturn. The recession is over. How do I know this? Because I have just had a credit card offer through the door.

Dear Mr Greenwood,

You have been personally pre-selected to apply for our LiveNow PayNever Visa card.

I.M. Knott-à-Crouque
UK Welcome Team

Haven't had one of those for a while. During the magic years when the boom-bust cycle had, apparently, been abolished by Gordon and inexhaustible supplies of money grew in server farms, I came to expect several such offers a week. Came the Credit Crunch® and all of a sudden there was a blissful silence, and a unaccustomed emptiness in the paper recycling bin.

Does this mean we can now go back to borrowing money from ourselves, secured against magic circular IOUs that we don't need to worry about so long as they keep moving quickly enough between financial institutions that the small print cannot be read, and so long as nobody, ever, mentions actually redeeming them (other than against a new IOU)?

No, thanks all the same, Mr Knott-à-Crouque. I do have one credit card, which these days is used almost exclusively for on-line purchases and I settle the bill in full each month. You don't want to be dealing with the likes of me.

28 May, 2012

 

No comprende

Just heard on The World Tonight that the Government has supposedly "backed down" on the proposed pasty and caravan taxes. Apparently pasties and sausage rolls will not be subject to VAT "if they are not sold as hot food".

So how is that different from the original proposal and more to the point how does it work? When I pop into the breadshop and ask for a couple of Greggs dummies, will they be tax-free if
  1. They are already cold at the time of sale,
  2. I sign a declaration that I will not eat them until they are cold,
  3. I sign a declaration that I will not eat them until I am cold,
  4. I promise to eat them with my eyes closed,
  5. I promise not to eat them at all.
Answers on a postcard please.

26 May, 2012

 

Mr Shrdlu is in two minds

My colleague Etaoin, against his better judgement, is quietly impressed with this piece of literary goodness from our old friend the News Shopper,



He finds himself reflecting on the Zen-like profundity which seems to lurk beneath the surface of "the route of your problem is jealousy" and on its elegant superiority over its vernacular equivalent, "if you carry on that way, my lad, you'll come a right bleedin' cropper".

Then again it might just be the result of employing illiterate monkeys instead of journalists.

Repeat after me: a spellchecker is no substitute for an education.

Innit.

18 May, 2012

 

Clever boy, Fido

From the wonderful News Shopper, my local paper.


Bloody clever these police dogs. Not sure I'd trust one with a Glock, though.

This being the News Shopper of course, the article is illustrated with an image from the paper's inexhaustible library of gratuitously irrelevant images. In this case,

a random photograph of part of the side of a police patrol car. I wonder if these images are selected automatically by a text matching algorithm.

Oh, hold on. From the caption to the gratuitous photograph (why there?), we learn that

So maybe Fido wasn't so clever after all. He was supposed to bury the culprit, not Taser him.

I tell you straight, the country's going to the... Hmm, perhaps not.

15 May, 2012

 

Why is this news?

Apparently, during Manchester City's victory parade celebrating its accession to league champion status, that nice Mr Carlos Tevez briefly held aloft a banner reading

R.I.P
Fergie

Mildly distasteful, no doubt, but all part of the rough-and-tumble of football rivalry, surely.

And yet the Man City hierarchy has felt in necessary to issue an apology and, as I write, the "incident" is being reported in BBC World Service news bulletins.

Are we all becoming hypersensitive wimps, ever on the look-out for the opportunity to take umbrage? I suppose we ought to be thankful that Alec Ferguson is not a Black man, otherwise there would have been riots in Piccadilly Gardens, looting in St Ann's Square and questions in the House.

13 May, 2012

 

It's all our fault really, guvnor

On yestermorning's Today programme, a couple of Muslim talking heads are given the opportunity to mitigate the crimes of the Rochdale groomers.

The summary on the Today website reflects the tone nicely,

The barrister defending the man described as the ringleader of the nine men jailed for up to 19 years for a horrific series of sexual assaults against young girls, told the court in Rochdale that the man believed he was being prosecuted because of his faith and race - a Muslim of Pakistani origin.

Is it racist to focus on the fact that nine Asian men were grooming white girls from outside their community? Are their cultural influences at play behind a series of crimes that have caused a great deal of shock because of the systematic and brutal way the girls were treated?

Shiban Akbar, of Bangladeshi origin, speaks for the Muslim Council of Britain and Alyas Karmini, an imam in Bradford, examine the controversial issue.

[My emphasis]

I have to say that the waffle did rather wash over me, but the gist I distilled from all the therapeutic and cultural psychobabble was these poor "Asian" guys were just culturally confused and it's actually White people's fault.

On this morning's BH, Paddy O'Connell has been trying to bully CPS-wallah Nazir Afzal into agreeing that it's all the fault of social services. Where has this assumption come from that all of the victims were either "in care" or "on the run"? This seems to have been accepted as established fact by most "Leftish" commentators and is being used to mount one of the distractive critiques. Well, I can't be arsed combing through all the media reports again, but as I recall the girls were described as being all from "chaotic backgrounds" and rather quaintly in one report as from "council estate backgrounds". Chavs with inadequate parental supervision, in other words.

Parenting standards may well be open to criticism, but this is not a conveniently identifiable failure of "White" institutions that we can channel supposedly corrective effort into in order to divert attention from the criminality of the perpetrators and wider attitudinal and cultural problems within the "Pakistani community".

There was a comment on one of the CiF threads to the effect that many "Asian" and other immigrant "sub-communities" were so close-knit that you couldn't fart without everybody knowing about it. I have no doubt that most decent members of the "Pakistani community" are as appalled as the rest of us at what has gone on. Equally I have no doubt that many in that "community" had a pretty fair idea what was going on and acquiesced in it, out of solidarity, out of fear of ostracism or reprisal and out of a shared sense that the "White slags" were "asking for it".

Two can play at that game. Be warned.


The Righteous have invested so much in the concept of "racism", they have striven so hard for 40 or more years to turn it into a monster so toxic that for a White man, especially a White man in a "middle class" profession, it is a close call whether it is worse to be accused of being a racist, a nonce or a rapist. And now it's all come round to bite their pets, and indirectly them, so painfully on the bum, and they are struggling desperately to re-establish the status quo ante.

The squirming of the Righteous inadvertently exposes a useful truth: racism and cultural antagonism are overlapping concepts. Whether the contempt for their victims evinced by the "Rochdale Nine" represents racial disdain or cultural misunderstanding is a distinction of limited real importance, except perhaps to those liberals and race-baiters who are keen to retain "racism" as a crime solely of White people and "cultural difference" as a difficulty faced by "Coloured" people, a difficulty inadequately addressed by the White majority.

This is a dangerous game, a game which you've lost, guys. And an irresponsible one too. There are more, similar cases in the pipeline, in Rochdale, in Oxford and elsewhere. If you continue the business-as-usual approach, denying the existence of the problem, attempting to suppress reporting and discussion of it, and above all attempting to transfer the blame to the host community, then the reaction may go somewhat beyond the boycotting, picketing and occasional bricking of the odd "Asian" takeaway in flashpoint areas.


And personally, I have reached the stage where I no longer care whether it kicks off or not.




Before we end, let's have another quick look at that first quote from the BBC website from a quality perspective, shall we?

...told the court in Rochdale that the man believed...

The offences were centred in Rochdale, or more precisely in Heywood, a small town within the Metropolitan Borough of Rochdale. The trial was actually held at Liverpool Crown Court. Not a hanging offence, that, but indicatively sloppy.

Are their cultural influences at play behind a series of crimes that have caused a great deal of shock because of the systematic and brutal way the girls were treated?

I guess at a pinch we could interpret that as actually meaning "their cultural influences", ie the cultural background of the Pakistani criminals, rather than as a spelling error for "there". The resulting sentence would be a tad unidiomatic but, hey, I wouldn't want to jump to any conclusions.

Hmm. Let's get a second opinion here. My journalistic literacy correspondent Etaoin Shrdlu comments:

"Bollocks! A spellchecker's no substitute for a bleedin' education, mate."

11 May, 2012

 

Naughty Jim

On this morning's Today programme, I'm sure I heard that nice Mr Naughtie begin to refer to the ArcelorMittal Orbit — a sort of knotted thing in the Olympic Park, but very artistic I'm sure — as the "Arsehole Metal Orbit", before stopping and correcting himself.

Another Hulture Secretary moment, there Jim.  Careful, lad, or you'll be getting a reputation for yourself.

09 May, 2012

 

White men do it too, so that's alright then

I did draft a rant about the massive whataboutery operation mounted in response to yesterday's conviction of nine "Asian" men for what is now apparently known as on-street grooming. (Which is a good sign. If they've got a name for it, there's some chance they will begin to recognize its existence. Words are important.)

Apparently White men do it too and the "Asian" men weren't being racist anyway, it's just that the semi-naked young White sluts were out there asking for it and all the chaste young muslimas were safely locked up indoors, innit.

The desperate logic chopping of the liberal conspirators and others was both impressive in its fervor and frankly offensive.

But I was beginning to sound like a blend of Jai the Prolix from the old Pickled Politics blog with added expletives supplied by Obo. So I've ditched most of the puce prose and leave you instead with this thought:

There is one person who hasn't been namechecked by the commentators in the general desperation to sweep this under the carpet: Sir William Macpherson of Cluny.

Yesterday, Assistant Chief Constable Steve Heywood of the GMP was bleating, in response to media questioning about the police's extraordinarily slow response to the grooming problem, that, "It was something we hadn't encountered before; we didn't recognize the nature of the crime." (I paraphrase from memory.)

Possibly, Steve, possibly. ex-DS Mick Gradwell, commenting a year ago, offers a different perspective.

Former Det Supt Mick Gradwell said it was an issue that had been clear for many years and needed to be addressed.

He said investigations into the sexual exploitation of children had suffered because of political sensitivity.

"I know that police officers know what they're saying is true, but they're not coming out and saying it because you can't feel comfortable, because of allegations of institutional racism, that you can come out and say that a culture or a race is suspected of this sort of crime.

"If there were people who frequented a particular public house, who were going out and doing things, you would target that particular trend," he said.

"There is without doubt a trend, as Mr Straw says, in a small number of men of Pakistani origin, who regard young, white girls as easy meat."

[My emphasis]

The Macpherson report into the murder of Stephen Lawrence introduced the amorphous sin of institutional racism into British working life, both in the public and private sectors. Actually that's not entirely accurate. Nervousness at the danger of being perceived as racist has infested the institutional and corporate environments for all of the 40 years of my working life. It's nothing new, but Macpherson refined it and gave it its particular power by turning it into a named but unconscious crime: counterrevolutionary thought, the malign outcome of erroneous cultural conditioning, creeping unbidden into the citizen's mind and to be diligently challenged at all times.

So deep has the new regime penetrated that the police have exchanged their earlier rough-and-ready but essentially honest approach for an absolute terror of causing offence to members of protected groups, above all to ethnic minorities. Faced with evidence of what pragmatically we must recognize as racist behaviour by Browns against Whites, the police have fought shy of acknowledging and acting upon it.

Macpherson, in my view, bears considerable responsibility for that state of affairs. I know you were only obeying orders, Billy boy, but ever thought of acknowledging your shame and at the very least handing back your K?




And finally, to savour with your cheese, biscuits and coffee, here's an interesting if slightly off-topic little titbit. In the CiF article linked to above, there was this exchange. I can't entirely vouch for it because the origal comment from Richietude and the reply from PaulJB have long since been "moderated"; they survive only in the further replies of others. Nonetheless,

PaulJB, 8 May 2012 7:13PM

Response to Richietude, 8 May 2012 7:07PM who wrote:
The true cost of multiculturalism.

Without the often sweated labour of the decent majority of Black and Asian people where the fuck do you think this country would be right now ? If you think it would be better then you're an idiot as well as a bigot.

Hmm. I leave you to reflect not just on the whataboutery potential of that, but also on the attitude of PaulJB and those like him towards White people. "Is this Wog annoying you, madam?" "Yes, officer, as it happens, but no matter — they deserve it because they work so hard."

06 May, 2012

 

Solidarność, innit?

There used to be a hardware and fancy goods shop on the Greenwich High Road. Well, not so much fancy goods as bizarre remaindered or second-hand toot. It was called, rather curiously, Benefactors. It and its companion outlet in Woolwich closed down a few years ago and the Greenwich shop was taken over by Turkish barbers. Nothing unusual in that, not in South London anyway, where the Turkish immigrants seem to specialize in selling kebabs and haircuts, though usually on separate premises. (A medium doner please, Mehmet, and a bit less hair in it this time, thanks very much.) I recall the shop being converted and refurbished for its new role, a lengthy operation. The builders, as I remember, were all Turkish.

One of the two Chinese chippies on the local shopping parade here in my corner of Greater Woolwich felt flush enough to go for a refurb. All of the shopfitters were Chinese.

Last week, back in Greenwich, I noticed that the big Chinese noodle restaurant near the DLR was getting a lick of paint. Guess where all the painters were from.

Good this integration, innit?

Mind you, I suppose it's sauce, goose and gander. For a variety of reasons which I shall probably bore you with on another occasion, I have got out of the way of patronizing "ethnic" small businesses over the past few years, to the extent that I now effectively "grey them out". I honestly can't say I've been particularly inconvenienced by that.

04 May, 2012

 

By 'eck that were close

Boris beats Ken by 60,000 votes.

01 May, 2012

 

What the papers say

From the Hull Daily Mail. Now here's a sentence you don't see very often.

The men, all from Kuwait, had paid up to £4,400 each to be smuggled into Hull.

*Boggles gently.*



And from a different Daily Mail

Race row after Afro washing up sponges go on sale


The Unite Against Fascism general secretary Weyman Bennett said: ‘What are we going to have next, toilet brushes like that?

*Finishes snack-size Melton Mowbray pork pie and looks for popcorn.*

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