Dogwash

Interlude

2012-01-24T13:42:00.001Z

— Do you like Kipling?

— I don't know, I've never kippled.

— Hmm. Do you like Dickens?

— I don't know, I've never been invited to one.

The wisdom of the subtitling computer

2012-01-23T16:02:00.000Z

On BBC News 24 (as I persist in thinking of it for some reason),

There have been reared pigs throughout the UK.

or as the newsreader actually said

There have been outbreaks throughout the UK.

The oozlum bird visits Berlin

2012-01-23T10:01:00.005Z

You may have missed this, it taking place in foreign parts and all. The Schloßparktheater in Berlin is staging a translation into German of the play "I'm not Rappaport". The play explores the relationship between two elderly men who regularly run into one another on their daily constitutionals in their local park in New York.

So what's all the fuss about, then? Well, one of the characters is an elderly Jew, and the other is an elderly Black man, or African-American as we are now required to call them. To play the latter part, the director has selected a White actor who blacks up for the performance.

Outbreak of mass hysteria ensues. Indeed, this kraut bloggeuse dons her finest dungarees of dudgeon and really gets stuck in. (Good stuff, but if you do decide to follow the link I'd recommend you to stand well back from the screen and have a fire extinguisher handy.)

To be honest I can't work myself into too much of an impassioned hate about all of this. In the director's position, I would probably have cast a middle-aged or elderly Black actor as first choice but, given that he has been bullied into defending his position, his explanation of his reason for selecting a White actor in blackface seems perfectly sensible to me. Actor-director* Dieter Hallervorden explained that good elderly Black actors with a native command of German were not that easy to find. Blacking up a White actor who was already a member of his company was a more feasible solution. Not that he needed to explain his choice, in my view, but there you go.

I know nothing of the thespian scene in the fatherland but this seems entirely plausible. The main source of diversity™ in Germany has until relatively recently been of Turkish origin. I wonder, could the racehustlers and screamers perhaps have been satisfied by having a Turkish actor black up. I mean, they are yer pukka ethnics, innit, if a touch on the pale side. Or a young genuine-black® actor be made up to look older? No hold on, that's ageist. Or a Chinese female in drag? Hmm.

Oh I give up.

I'll leave you with two questions.

Firstly, what would the anonymous Black actor who complained on CiF that he was excluded from historical (more precisely described, pre-Windrush) roles by his colour have to say about this? He seemed quite keen on flexibility in casting.

Secondly, I note that the other lead role is played by the play's director, Dieter Hallervorden. The character portrayed is an elderly Jew, and yet I understand that Hallervorden himself is in fact a gentile. OK, I can understand that the supply of native-speaking elderly Jewish actors in Berlin may well be a bit scant for historical reasons, but where oh where are the outraged pieces at Harry's Place and the JC, I wonder.

This kind of brouhaha is apparently intended to protect and promote the life chances of Black people. It is more likely in my arrogant opinion to have the opposite effect. In Hallervorden's position I would not be repenting my evil racist ways and seeking to employ genuine Black actors for future Black roles. Dealing with the concomitant hustlers, the quotaists, the racecarders and the pervasive atmosphere of resentful entitlement is just too much hassle. Instead I would be quietly excising pieces with Black characters from my company's repertoire.

________
* I'm slightly confused here. The Deutsche Welle article linked above refers to Hallervorden as "director", while the poster displayed at Yo, Is this Racist? reads "Regie: Thomas Schendel". Perhaps Hallervordern is director, ie head honcho, of the theatre rather than the play itself. Whatever, I don't think it affects the substance of the above.

The oozlum bird...

2012-01-19T11:38:00.000Z

...has stuck its beak up its own arse.

Man charged over Newcastle racist abuse

Police have arrested — and are holding in custody — a 29-year-old man who posted a racist tweet following Newcastle United's signing of a permatanned chappie with the good old Geordie moniker of Papiss Demba Cissé.

The offending tweet has been taken down and I have been unable to find a screenshot. The precise wording used has not, as far as I know, been publicized. But the gist, apparently, was that the writer felt there were now too many Black players in the Newcastle squad. Presumably this opinion was expressed in fairly direct terms, but I see nothing wrong with it being expressed.

There's certainly an argument to be had about the identity conflict between football teams being anchored to a particular geographical location and the increasing tendency in the premiership to treat the club as a globalized business and to hire from the entire world. It would be interesting to know whether the now trivially criminalized tweeter has issues with Sammy Ameobi playing for Newcastle as well, or just with Cissé as a "proper foreigner".

Personally I think there are too many Diane Abbotts in the Commons. Go on then, arrest me.

Good this, innit.

A modest proposal

2012-01-18T12:54:00.002Z

(No, no, I'm not suggesting that we eat babies — spit-roast pickaninny with a slice of watermelon in its mouth — but there are no doubt many among the Righteous who would regard the following as equivalent.)

In very crude terms, the "debate" about asylum seekers in this country divides into the Righteous and Unrighteous camps.

The Righteous assert that every asylum seeker throwing himself on our mercy and charity is genuinely fleeing mortal persecution, and if he isn't, he's fleeing destitution, or is at the very least being denied the sort of free self-expression and/or lifestyle that we undeserving bastards in the West are accustomed to, or some such waffle — I mean, like, if a flamboyant fairy can't exercise his divoon right to flounce along the main drag of Qom in a pink tutu without being hanged from a crane at the behest of the local ayatollahs, then he should be allowed to come and do so on Old Compton Street, innit. Such people, we are lectured sententiously, should be welcomed with open arms, whatever their numbers, and our society should if necessary be entirely rebuilt around their claimed needs. In recognition of our generic Western colonial guilt, our rapacious exploitation and unspeakable cruelty towards, well, anyone non-European really, it is our duty to provide reparation from our infinite coffers.

The Unrighteous camp, however, firmly believes that damned near all of these bastards are lying through their teeth and are in fact welfare seekers and economic migrants, voluntarily leaving adequate and safe environments in order to leech off our welfare state, hoping to supplement their undeserved state handouts with work in what we now call the informal economy and sending remittances home while employing, at our expense, crooked immigration lawyers in the hope of achieving the Holy Grail of ILR and the eventual chance to bootstrap their entire extended clan into the UK.

Actually, having followed this particular "passing show" with some attention for the last decade, I recognize a third and probably very large category: those who are "plausibly genuine" asylum seekers, certainly according to the generous lights of the Righteous, but also at the same time are opportunistic seekers after economic advantage. These are folk who have indeed fled a threatening situation, or perhaps simply left behind a deeply unsatisfactory one, but instead of accepting readily available refuge nearby within their own or a similar land, conclude that they might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb and make their way to Europe, where the streets are paved with stolen gold and the State will provide.

Let me give typical examples of two such Aspirants to the Ovine Upgrade, from memory.

There was the Cameroonian woman who, persistently importuned by the local chief, took herself off in order to preserve her honour. Not to Douala or Yaoundé, say, where she might reasonably be able to lose herself safely among the crowd, but all the way to London. She came to media notice in the UK when, while being forcibly deported, she kicked up an almighty fuss on the plane, Mubenga-stylee, bruised herself slightly in the process and was taken off at Paris (or possibly Brussels) by the authorities who pouted sanctimoniously at Anglo-Saxon barbarity and sent her back to London.

A more successful freeloader was the Ugandan lady reported in the training supplement of the Evening Standard some years ago. Her husband was killed in some kind of very local political feud in some upcountry shithole and so, not unreasonably, she fled with her youngest child. Not to Kampala or some safe place elsewhere in Uganda or East Africa, but to London, where she was actually granted leave to remain and was now retraining as a medical technician. At the time of the article, her two older children had recently completed their secondary education at boarding school — in Uganda but away from her former hometown and evidently safely out of the reach of her late husband's political foes — and she was applying for them to join her in the UK. Which does rather beg questions.

Such tales are legion. And because, as with the party of blind men examining the elephant, each side of the "debate" can concentrate to those aspects which support his case while ignoring the rest of the picture, rather like Daniel Waweru below the line on CiF tenaciously maintaining his bite on the precise interpretation of a single word in someone else's post like an insane pitbull, that debate is heated but fruitless. People shouting over each other's shoulders until they get bored and go home.

So let me suggest a solution which might at least address the uncertainties.

The current refugee legislation and conventions adhered to by "the West" were, as I understand it in my historical ignorance, largely shaped by the horror and sense of guilt of the Allies when they were confronted with the full physical reality of the Endlösung der Judenfrage, their horror at their pre-war failure to provide adequate refuge to European Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. This outlook was subsequently compounded with the political desire to promise support to the trickle of successful escapees from behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War.

But then promises are easy to make when the uptake is negligible: the Jews we had failed were either already dead or already fled. And the Soviet dissidents were safely behind that nice big Iron Curtain.

What was not anticipated was a creeping commitment to supply European standards of governance and concomitantly European standards of living to every poor but hopeful Asian or African who is sitting there in the bush wondering whether the diesel in the generator will hold out until the end of the episode of Sex in the City or Dallas that he and his fellows are watching on the village telly.

"Do people in White countries really all live like that? I want some of that."

It doesn't work, however hard we try. The numbers are simply too great.

However many thieving bankers you expropriate or grasping rentiers you tax until the pips lose their squeak, you cannot afford to support 300 or 400 million poor Black and Brown people in the UK in the lotos-eating luxury to which they believe they are entitled. Nor can we support every last one of those fleeing simple poverty or intolerant, corrupt governance or even, ultimately, actual persecution.

The lifeboat metaphor has its place here. If you are in a crowded lifeboat and there are a couple of people floundering in the water nearby, you extend an oar to them and haul them aboard. If there are a thousand heads bobbing nearby, all desperate to get aboard and grasping for the gunwales, you use the oars to beat them off. That's the sad reality. Otherwise everybody drowns. While we're at it, let's run a bit further with the metaphor. As their bedraggled DJs and posh frocks make clear, the original passengers in the boat were first-class passengers at dinner when the ship sank; the new arrivals are all from steerage. And as more steerage passengers are helped aboard and begin to outnumber the toffs, the overloaded boat begins to founder. Who do you think is going to get chucked overboard to lighten the load?

I don't want some of that.

But we are decent folk, whatever the Righteous may think of us. If a man presents himself at our door and claims that he has run away from the threat of imminent death, mutilation or torture, and we find ourselves willing to believe him, then a decent person will still want to offer help. Despite rather than because of the pious wallowing righteous social masochism of the CiF post about the Congo that I linked to above, that decent instinct remains.

So how to separate the terrified sheep from the opportunistic goats? And how in due course do we persuade the sheep to return to their home pastures when the wolf has been killed?

Well, what are we actually undertaking to offer? We are offering protection from harm. Not the chance of "a better life". Not, for those fleeing — real or invented — persecution in the Third World, an upgrade to First World standards of living and opportunity as part of the bargain. Nor are we obliged to offer economic support to their countries of origin via remittances and the eventual opportunity for mass immigration of the refugee's extended family and clan. We are not even obliged to offer support and protection for the remainder of the refugee's life; just protection from harm for as long as the realistic threat persists.

That's the core of it. That is all that can fairly be expected of us and, in the face of the potentially huge numbers which are currently held back mainly by logistic barriers, all that we can afford to offer. Freedom from fear.

Which in practical terms means segregation. The accommodation of asylum seekers and accepted refugees in, yes, refugee camps. Camps offering decent basic international standards commensurate with those applicable in their home countries, and containment without imprisonment. Preferably located in suitable, safe non-Western locations but managed and possibly run by the sponsoring Western governments. And with the reasonably expectation of the contribution of productive work in exchange for their keep from those who are able to do it.

To square the circle, to at least separate the truthful sheep who seek protection from the lying goats who just seek to short-circuit the immigration process, we need to call the latter's bluff. You seek protection from mortal terror, you say? OK, we will give you that protection. We will offer you, in essence, the standard of living you enjoyed in the country you claim to have fled along with freedom from fear. And no more.

Of course we'd have to ditch the ECHR first and perhaps hang a few judges pour encourager les autres.

Now, Mr Asylum Seeker, are you still interested?

Kick a London pigeon week

2012-01-15T13:47:00.000Z

If you can overlook his incontinent sanitary practices — a big ask, I know, but hey it's part of his avian culture, innit — the London feral pigeon is a decent enough sort of chap. A very lower-middle class bird, like a humble Dickensian clerk who has, by dint of years spent assiduously watching for dead men's shoes, finally achieved his goal of becoming overseer. He quietly and uncomplainingly goes about his incomprehensible daily work of picking up invisible crumbs from London's pavements, a humdrum task enlivened only by the occasional discovery of a puddle of dried puke, whereupon he is wont to become uncharacteristically excited.

You can imagine him at the end of the working day, with his copy of the avian edition of the Daily Mail tucked neatly under his wing, stepping into his favorite watering hole for a swift half of wallop and a spot of decorously risqué banter with the Polish barmaid, before catching his train home to the wife and squabs in the suburbs.

Compare and contrast the Thames seagull, a vulgar lager lout of a bird, who spends his days lounging about on the river walls, never separated from his can of Stella, making rude remarks about human passers by until he gets bored and pops back to the river to look for ducks and moorhens to harass.

Or the suburban corvid, evilly intelligent beasts who wouldn't think twice about swooping down and pecking out your eyes before offering you a "good deal" on a white stick. And yet despite their formidability, they seem to be nervous of us. Many's the occasion I have stood on the railway platform contemplating a crow or magpie which has fled my approach and sits looking at me from a safely high perch, only to look down to find a pigeon at my feet, looking up as if to say, "What the bleedin' 'ells up with him then, soft bugger?"

But your humble pigeon has, in recent years I notice, been getting above himself. Even in the days when I still joined the gloomy throng shuffling off the platforms at London Bridge of a morning, the local pigeons had taken to flying low over the crowd, passing scant inches above people's heads.

Groups of birds gathered around discarded food increasingly expect people to walk round them. Some have even begun, perhaps unwisely, to get confrontational about it. I recall one such encounter when I was eating one of those extremely flaky hard bread rolls in the street, unavoidably generating a tempting little pile of crumbs at my feet. A local pigeon, refusing to wait his turn, began to get quite aggressive. If he'd had the weight I'm sure he would have been up for barging me out of the way. I stood my ground, until as I was about to pop the last chunk of cheese roll into my mouth, he gave up and started to stomp off in disgust. So instead of eating it, I bounced the final morsel off the back of his retreating head. Quite a good shot, as it happens. Shameless little bugger, once he'd got over his shock, turned round and ate it, of course.

But the final straw came when a pigeon slapped me in the face. Not as health-threatening an experience as it might have been, for this was not only a suburban pigeon but a barely fledged squab who hadn't had time to accumulate the filth and disease that many of his elders aspire to. Probably accounts for the clumsy flying skills that caused him to collide with me, as well.

Enough I say. The feral rock dove is forgetting who built the artificial urban cliffs he perches on, who scatters the plentiful benison of food on the pavements, to which he has become so accustomed that he regards it as an entitlement. He needs to be taught a bit of respect.

I therefore invite readers to join me in participating in London kick-a-pigeon week. This is not a set period in the calendar, but any period of seven days, not necessarily contiguous and chosen entirely to suit your personal convenience, when you will take the opportunity to launch an unprovoked kick at selected ambulant pigeons who happen to cross your path.

Encourage your small children to chase the little sods. Don't worry, pigeons are not as bird-brained as they look. They recognize the difference between a human adult and a human child and they know that small children may give chase. There's no chance your child will catch an alert pigeon.

Keep the little buggers nervous and guessing. Teach them their place and reclaim the streets for humanity!

And then?

2012-01-14T00:36:00.000Z

Just listening to the midnight news on the steam wireless. "13 Somali pirates", announces Kathy Clugston proudly, "have been captured by the Royal Navy" in the Indian Ocean.

Forgive me a certain eeyorish scepticism, but what happens next? Presumably they all claim asylum and end up living in Woolwich.

A missing word

2012-01-13T18:26:00.001Z

A report from The Bolton News (via)

‘Predator’ in sex case jailed

A couple of quotes:

A “predatory” man “saw no harm” in sexually assaulting a teenager from a different ethnic background, a court was told.

and

“She was not from your ethnic background.

I am quite sure you have a hypocritical view of sexual matters, and, while you would not be prepared to sexually assault someone from your own background, you saw no harm at all in sexually approaching this young girl because she was of a different background.”

Now there is word I would normally expect to see in such an news report. Begins with an R, I seem to recall.

Surely the following has nothing to do with that omission:

The judge also recommended that Mehri, of Tildsley Street, Daubhill, should be deported to Afghanistan, where he is originally from. He moved to this country in 2005.

The oozlum bird spins yet faster

2012-01-12T13:00:00.000Z

Sky Sports News:

Police are investigating chants aimed in the direction of Leicester City supporters by their East Midlands rivals Nottingham Forest.

They are treating the chants as a potential hate crime.

Nottinghamshire Police said it was investigating the "racist" chanting after a video-clip filmed during the club's FA Cup tie against Leicester was posted online.

The footage, thought to be from the early stages of last Saturday's 0-0 draw at The City Ground, shows Forest fans singing: "You used to be English, you're not any more."

This is getting surreal.

Commenting on the police inquiry on Twitter, some fans claimed the chant was a reference to Leicester's high ethnic minority population, while others suggested that it alluded to the Thai-led consortium which owns Leicester City.

Not that I know anything about futebol, but not being a race-hustler the latter explanation sounds more plausible to me. Dunno, who owns Notts Forest?

Hmm. The EDL are in Leicester in three weeks' time in support of Rhea Page. Just saying.

A dangerous device in the wrong hands

2012-01-11T12:22:00.003Z

The metaphor, that is.

A BBC News presenter is interviewing a vaguely relevant industry talking head about the Government's approval of the HS2 project.

"Do you think it could be derailed by protesters?"

Hmm.

In memoriam "Pickled Politics"

2012-01-10T12:11:00.002Z

Sunny has decided to pull the plug on the Pickled Politics blog. Probably just as well. The blog was held together by Rumbold, who was the only remotely sensible above-the-line poster. Rumbold now has other things to occupy his time. Sunny himself seems to have been absorbed by his heretofore mysterious software project to the extent that his presence above the line at PP and to a lesser extent at LC has consisted of quickie ill-considered and bad-tempered sideswipes and his interventions below-the-line have been little more than generic abuse. Which basically leaves Jai. Well, one doesn't wish to be unkind (omnes: "Oh go on, let yourself go!"), but Jai comes across as a saloon-bar bore with a thin skin. His ponderous dissertations on Indian history and culture have been interesting if a little one-sided, but his sallies into British "far-right" politics (BNP, EDL, Alan Lake, Breivik, ...) have been painful, his tiresome literalism like nothing so much as the desperate comma-wrangling of a defence brief whose client is 100% bang to rights. If Jai migrates to LC above the line without the admin rights to censor his critics below the line, he's going to be in a different and less-forgiving environment which may come as something of a reality-check to him.

All that said, PP has been an entertaining read. Given its largely Desi commentariat, it is a bit like watching a counterfactual "reverse Raj" at play. I find myself visualizing the Picklers as a motley crew of people in the Imperial Service of the Indian Empire in Europe, assembling socially at the Club in some kind of Cotswolds resort mirroring the real-world Ooty. Sipping their pink lassis as Col. Jai (retd) holds forth on the benefits of Indian rule in Europe, while they talk airily of the bloody natives — "Decent enough chaps in their way, doncha know, but essentially childlike. Apparently some of these English blightahs think themselves capable of ruling themselves. Ha! I say, another round here, Smithson, you lazy bugger. Jaldi jaldi!"

The undercurrent of ethnic arrogance is subtle but totally self-assured.

Pip! Pip!

Tales from the multiculture - a great inconvenience

2012-01-09T07:33:00.002Z

I was walking along one of the main shopping streets of central London; I forget which one. In the other direction there approached a Chinaman. He was dressed in what appeared to be waiter's garb, with one of those little black weskits they seem to favour.

Johnny Chinaman, however, was not walking but running, running as fast as his little legs would carry him. He ran as if his life — or somebody's life — depended on it.

So why the great hurry?

I don't know, but I did notice what he was carrying. In one hand he held a large clear polythene sack containing a dozen or so of those giant industrial-size bog rolls you sometimes encounter in the toilets of institutional or commercial premises.

I find myself thinking of the running Chinaman whenever I pass a Chinese restaurant. And for some reason I cannot quite fathom, I am never tempted to go in.

The oozlum bird is in flight

2012-01-08T12:14:00.001Z

And so it goes on.

From Friday's Daily Record, och aye the noo, geezer, innit.

A FAN who racially abused an SPL star on Twitter was yesterday being hunted by police.

The sick tweet about Inverness Caledonian Thistle striker Gregory Tade was allegedly posted in Fife by a student who claimed he was drunk at the time.

(My emphasis)

This is really becoming quite entertaining. Soon the resources of the police forces of the UK will be entirely consumed in hunting down and prosecuting naughty White people voicing counterrevolutionary thoughts. Normal life will grind to a halt as the entire White population is progressively imprisoned.

To maintain basic services, the Government will resort to emergency immigration: Congolese doctors, Nigerian financiers and Somali labourers will flood into the country to save us.

Ah. Never thought of that.

Hmm. It's a plot, isn't it? Has anybody seen Andrew Neather lately? I think he's co-ordinating all this from a secret bunker under Pudding Mill Lane. The Crossrail project was all a front to hide the building work. I see it all now.

Silly buggers.

Hold on, I hear a knocking at the door.

No comment?

2012-01-08T09:27:00.002Z

And in yet another CIF thread milking the Stephen Lawrence show trial,

Stephen Lawrence verdict does not end the debate on police racism

at 02:30 this morning we find

but by 09:20 we read

Oh dear. I wonder which "community standard" Laban broke, then. Answers on a postcard, please.

They're rattled, aren't they?

Update (21:00)

The Civitas report linked to in the deleted post is available for download at http://www.civitas.org.uk/pdf/cs05.pdf.

You might also find Institutional Racism and the Police: Fact or Fiction? of interest, from the same source.

Naughty fan makes footballer cry

2012-01-08T01:43:00.003Z

Apparently a footballer called Tom Adeyemi, who plays for Oldham Athletic, was racially abused and reduced to tears at a cup tie between Suárez United and t'Latics, when ... well let the Guardian explain.

A witness who gave evidence to Liverpool officials and the police said: "I was to the right of the Kop and the No11 turned to walk away after a tackle. I heard a single voice shout, 'You fucking black bastard.' He spun round with shock on his face and started pointing at the crowd, from where the shout had come."

Got that? Football supporter shouts something rude at a player for the opposing side.

A statement said: "Merseyside police can confirm that no one has been arrested this evening on suspicion of racially aggravated behaviour during tonight's FA Cup fixture at Anfield. However, the force and Liverpool Football Club are investigating following an incident that occurred during the second half of the game. The aim of the investigation is to establish the full circumstances surrounding the incident to ascertain if any action needs to be taken."

Liverpool launched an investigation into an incident that could not have come at a worse time for a club that has been widely condemned for its vehement support of Suárez, before and after his eight-match ban for racially abusing Evra in a match last October.

Riiight. Football supporter shouts something rude at a player for the opposing side and the police are called. The "incident" is reported in the media — including the BBC national radio news, no less.

...

And lo, it was reported on BBC 4 national radio news last evening that the police had arrested someone for this crime against humanity. Apparently someone has also been arrested for tweeting something racist at Stan Collymore.

This is getting silly. Soon most of the White population of the UK will be banged up. Either that or they will be keeping their traps well and truly sealed. I suspect I shall belong to the latter category. Or try to.

Not that, if I were to put my larynx into gear in the hearing of a ~~black person~~, er, ~~person of colour~~, er, non-IC1, I would be particularly likely to be going round racially abusing them. Such behaviour is apt to invite a smack on the nose, for one thing. But there's that awful feeling that you might just say something that might be misinterpreted, or indeed creatively re-interpreted, and you'd be up before the beak before you can call a spade a black bastard. Oops.

I mean, I used to work with this Black bloke many, many moons ago. He was a nice enough chap but he had a ginormous racial chip on his shoulder. Not only that but he seemed to think he personally owned the intellectual property rights on the word "black". I can't say I remember ever hearing him complain about the phrase "black coffee" itself, but he certainly treated most of the common collocations of "black" to detailed analysis. As I say, nice enough chap and I wish him well in his subsequent career, but I'm pleased he doesn't work for me any more. That, thankfully, was several yonks ago. Working with such a person these days would be positively dangerous.

My advice is, don't talk to Darkies. It only leads to trouble.

Actually, now I think of it, I did abuse a Black man yesterday. I say "Black", but it's difficult to pin down his ethnic make-up with any certainty. Let's settle for decidedly swarthy of complexion and definitely not "one of us", shall we? Joe the beggar will be familiar to anyone who knows beautiful downtown Greenwich at all well. As he stood there looking at me with an expression on his face like a vulture trying to decide which end of the carcass to start on first, I decided to open the conversation myself. "Fuck off, Joe!", I suggested politely. I might as well have saved my breath: he wished me a happy new year and launched into his pitch anyway.

The Old Bill will probably be round for me some time today, Sunday.

Trouble is, you do wonder where we go from here if the current round of arrests fails to encourager les autres. A new offence of looking at a Darkie quizzically, perhaps? Failing to smile nicely at a member of a privileged ethnic group, with intent to cause alarm and despondency? Failing to laugh sufficiently enthusiastically at Lenny Henry's jokes?

This will end in tears. Or worse.

In other news, Emma West (remember her?) has opted to go for jury trial. Good idea — I think.

Another 4oz of flesh, if you please

2012-01-06T12:42:00.002Z

You'd have thought that the ruling elite would be relieved at getting away with the show trial of Dobson and Norris, wouldn't you? Think of the consequences had the jury acquitted.

The White liberal elite and their grasping camp-followers in the racehustling industry have for the past 40-plus years been assiduously encouraging Black people in this country to view themselves as oppressed victims.

Last August we saw the most recent example of the consequences of this when Mark Duggan, a violent armed petty criminal was shot dead by police. The circumstances and justification for that shooting remain under investigation, but that didn't satisfy the local "community". One of their own had been killed by the Babylon System and so they marched to the police station to demand ... well, what exactly? Whatever it was, they didn't get it, and days of rioting, arson and extreme shopping followed across the country. Yes, most of that was criminal opportunism but the trigger lay in the death and the popular reaction to it.

Now look at the Stephen Lawrence murder. This unfortunate young man was killed in what in the scheme of things was an ordinary street attack, devastating for his parents but, to be brutally frank, of minor ongoing consequence or interest to the wider community. He had already been elevated to the status of martyr by opportunist busybodies when the New Labour regime, through the agency of the Macpherson inquiry, turned him almost incidentally into a secular saint. Whether or not Jack Straw actually set out to cynically use Macpherson as a tool to further the party's diversity agenda is neither here nor there. The impact on British society, its expectations and institutions has been startling, and in my view almost totally counterproductive.

And so the show trial of his killers had to be pursued at all costs, financial and judicial. So imagine what might have happened if that naughty jury had acquitted Dobson and Norris of sancticide and that expectant population of Black people, two generations of whom have been raised into a mentality of simmering entitled resentment, had been denied their prize.

But no, having got away with their stunt and having had their pound of flesh they want more. I must admit I was only vaguely aware of the populist nonsense that allows members of the public to demand the review of a sentence, but apparently this is now in hand

Stephen Lawrence murder sentences to be reviewed by attorney general

The crime for which Dobson and Norris were convicted took place in 1993, when both men were juveniles of 16 or 17. Whether you agree with it or not, this typically reduces the sentence. The crime of racially-aggravated or -motivated murder, which would serve to increase the sentence, did not exist in 1993. The judge, himself a member of the sentencing guidelines body and an expert on these matters, sentenced on that basis, according to the rules.

So if in principle any Tom, Rajiv or Winston can write in and demand the review of the sentence for a serious crime then this stuff must be going on all the time. Yet I don't recall reading of an example in the media. Publicizing this is another populist stunt, isn't it?

At least I hope it is: just a bit of desperate cock-waving to please the baying mob. For if they follow through and this does go to the court of appeal, and the tariffs for Dobson and Norris are increased to the current 2012 standard of 25 years, then our lords and masters will have achieved another judicial and democratic breakthrough: selective retrospective legislation by administration.

Come on guys, you want a lynching, don't you? Stop messing about, just bind Dobson and Norris hand and foot, tie them to the back bumper of a police carrier and drag them through the streets of Catford, Lewisham and Peckham for the delectation and retribution of da people.

Stephen Lawrence

2012-01-05T10:18:00.001Z

I was going to write something here about the conviction of Gary Dobson and David Norris but Anna Raccoon has pretty well covered everything I would have said and with greater clarity and thoroughness than I would have managed.

There is also the Spectator commentary by Rod Liddle to which Treacy J took exception and forbade the jurors to read. The following text is from a third-party source so I cannot vouch for it.

Now, here's a good one. The judge in the Stephen Lawrence murder trial told potential jurors that they must approach the evidence 'with a clean slate'. That is, not be inclined to prejudge the issue as a consequence of having been assured, repeatedly, for the last twelve years, by the entire press, that the men accused are disgusting racist bastards and definitely guilty. Judge Treacy might as well have told the jurors that they must approach the case 'by eating fifteen Jacobs cream crackers, without any water or other emolument, inside one minute'. The case is a charade, and a vindictive charade at that.

A few years ago two of the men not now facing a retrial were sentenced to eighteen months in prison for having thrown an empty paper cup in the direction of a black policeman. Eighteen months! But of course they were not sentenced to eighteen months for having thrown an empty paper cup in the direction of a police officer, they were sentenced to eighteen months for the crime of having not been found guilty of the murder of Stephen Lawrence.

I don't think that they are very nice people. So I suppose it's ok that we invent a new system of justice to ensure they get banged up.

Stephen Lawrence the person was killed in a depressing but unremarkable attack by a bunch of overconfident young thugs. Was the attack racially-aggravated? Probably. Was the attack racially-motivated? Dunno, that's actually a different question.

More to the point, does it matter? If the group had attacked a pair of bespectacled posh young White toffs from Blackheath who had had the temerity to wander onto their territory, would that have been less heinous? Would the attackers have been charged with murder aggravated by class hatred and a commission of inquiry set up to investigate institutional dioptrophobia in the Met?

Anyway Dobson and Norris have not been convicted of killing Stephen Lawrence the person, they have been convicted of killing St Stephen the political symbol.

£50million spent, the legal system trashed, the police reduced to gibbering diversity-sensitive cowards scared to say boo to a golliwog. Good value, eh?

You tell me.

Is it because I is White?

2012-01-02T11:33:00.002Z

I was half-listening to Eddie Mair and Jennifer Tracey's iPM programme on the steam wireless the other day. iPM is very much a characteristic Mair vehicle, an irreverent light-touch spin-off from the mainstream afternoon news programme PM which pursues "human interest" anecdotes, largely suggested by listeners. The iPM programme has been collecting listener suggestions for its own "new year's honour award". One of the nominees was a chap who has started up an online social networking site for ex-servicemen.

As I say I was, as ever, only half-listening so I don't recall the chap's name or details. But my little pointed ears pricked up when he started going on about his experience with fending off the BNP and the EDL. He cited as an example a supposed "EDL" troll on his site who had been complaining about the lenient treatment of Muslims by the courts, comparing this with the case of two White men banged up for 12 months for spray-painting poppy images onto a mosque. This, asserted our candidate hero, was a totally made-up story. It had never happened. He had, he said, investigated it and could vouch for its fictitiositude.

Oh yes, I thought. I remember that story. It seemed real enough to me. So I did a bit of googling to reinvigorate the old neural pathways and came across, among others, the Hoax-Slayer site, which seems to be a sort of one-man Snopes run by an Australian busybody called Brett Christensen.

Mr Christensen attempts to deconstruct the odious comparison between the cases of Vasey and Smith (the poppy sprayers), who were sent down for 12 months with that of Tohseef Shah, who painted the slogan "Islam will dominate the world – Osama is on his way" on a war memorial and was made to pay approximately £600 in compensation and told not to be a naughty boy. Fair enough, Vasey and Smith had also committed vandalism against other "Asian" buildings, but the key distinction is that Vasey and Smith's crime was deemed to be racially aggravated, while that of Shah was not.

It is worth looking at the CPS's reasoning in the latter case,

“The CPS specialist unit was sent the pictures, as well as his mobile phone records, to see if there was a racially or religiously motivated connotation.

“It was decided there was not enough evidence to prove this, and they decided it was politically motivated."

Now there's subtle, look you. I shall have to remember that for next time I'm up before the beak for being rude to a wog. "I was not being racist, Your Exiguousness, I was merely employing Mr Khan as a proxy for the late Osama bin Laden, the latter gentleman being unavailable. My comments were therefore political in intent."

A spokesman for the CPS said: “While it was appreciated that what was sprayed on the memorial may have been perceived by some to be part of a racial or religious incident, no racial or religious group can be shown to have been targeted.”

Ah yes, the British, the people who don't exist, innit.

You do begin to wonder who's running the CPS and to what purpose. Well, not for me to cast nasturtiums, but here's an interesting post at Casuals United

We get an insight from an email we recieved from an ex employee of the CPS

“The new “Director of Diversity” decided she could earn brownie points by downgrading all the senior caseworker posts and making them junior posts. Ostensibly this was to cut the wage bill. It also had the effect of getting rid of all part-timers and anybody with a family friendly work pattern. The Family friendly policy was SO last year! She wasn’t the only one making cuts, nearly 1000 of us went in the department in the course of a year. But it had the secondary effect of ridding the department of experienced, mature staff, who were mostly white, because we had been there since the 80s and the junior replacements were recruited with ‘diversity’ criteria in mind. I had got used to not hearing English spoken around me on the tube – during this period I started to find the same thing in the office lift and canteen queue”

The above cases and this from an ex employee PROVE that the CPS has become a politically correct organisation who are clearly not interested in prosecuting anyone for racial offences other than white people. It should be scrapped. End of.

One law for all.

You may make what you will of that. I couldn't possibly comment.

Apologists for Rhea Page's assailants have argued in a comparable way to Mr Christensen, dredging up examples where groups of attackers have been spared jail due to perceived mitigating circumstances. (I had a link for this but in my cack-handed way I'm afraid I've mislaid it.)

I have no problem with the principle of mitigation as such, and I am wary of passing judgement on the basis of newspaper reports. Even the most conscientious report will necessarily be incomplete, never mind one in the Daily Mail. However, judging from their photographs and the CCTV footage, I am having some difficulty convincing myself that this particular coven of violent Somali painted jezebels were in reality the group of shy, chaste and naïve young muslimas temporarily led astray by bright lights, infidel temptations and unfamiliarity with the demon drink that we are asked to believe in.

But that's not really the point, is it? Despite their racially-charged language, including "Kill the white slag", no less, their offence was not deemed to be "racially aggravated". In my not particularly humble opinion, the concept of racially (or religiously, etc) aggravated offences would be fragile and socially divisive even it were applied with visibly scrupulous impartiality. In a situation where one "community", in this case the White British, has anecdotal but credible (or at the very least not convincingly discredited) reason to believe that it is being actively discriminated against, it is a recipe for disaster.

Oh, and one bonus point to finish with. Back briefly to Mr Christensen. In his efforts to demonstrate that White racists are not treated disproportionately badly, he cites the case of Ryan Austin,

For example, if the message had compared the Shah and Choudhury cases with another case in which Sunderland man Ryan Austin sprayed racist grafitti on a Mosque, its power would have been considerably curtailed. As with Shah and Choudhur, Austin was not sent to prison. He received only a fine for his crime.

Did you actually read your link, Brett? Mr Austin, full name Ryan Zahid Austin, is an Anglo-Pakistani half-caste, confused by his multicultural upbringing and largely rejected by his peer groups of both ethnicities, whose crime was motivated by revenge against his decamped Pakistani father. Hardly your average White chav, eh?

Must try harder.

A new year begins

2012-01-01T11:30:00.003Z

When I leave comments below the line at Righteous blogs and comment fora, appalled readers sometimes follow the link back to this blog. Many of them, it seems, are looking solely or mainly for something to feed their outrage, to imbue a comforting Ready Brek glow of self-righteous indignation and self-certainty. They light on the first thing they encounter which matches their criteria.

Usually, because it is always there at the top of the page, it's the crack in the "About me" sidebar on the left about being "prepared to call a spade a black bastard".

It's actually a call for equality of treatment between Black and White and a statement of intent: I will treat non-Whites on equal terms, and that, folks, includes openly attacking their negative behaviour rather than scrabbling for mealy-mouthed patronizing excuses for it.

But the Righteous don't think about any of this. They see the mild slang "spade" and throw their hands up in horror. And then they see "black bastard" and the delicious pleasure of easy, pious outrage is complete. A warm pre-orgasmic glow of self-satisfaction suffuses their being: they are the decent ones; they are better than me.

I wrote that potted biography after the Dogwash blog was started pretty well by accident seven years ago — I was actually trying to create a Blogger identity to facilitate leaving comments on other people's blogs rather than start one of my own.

Edwin Greenwood is the nom de souris of a Mancunian early baby-boomer, now living in London, who like so many of his cohort has made the transition from cuddly inclusive soft-left liberal into a grumpy old git who is quite prepared to call a spade a black bastard.

The spades and black bastards reference was little more than a rather neat pun that had been running round in my head for a while and I was a bit nervous about putting it in at first. But it epitomizes what this blog stands for, and I stand by it.

And while outrageous Black-on-White racist attacks continue to be mitigated on the grounds that "they are Muslims and unused to alcohol", I shall continue to offend you by complaining about the imbalance, sometimes in rather stark language.

Right, enough of this sententious tosh. As a special new year's service to the Righteous, here's something different for them to get upset about. Let's start 2012 as we mean to go on: with an entirely gratuitous and offensive racist joke.

Mr Wong, a senior Chinese business executive, is visiting his company's interests in Yorkshire. As the train pulls out of King's Cross, Wong settles into his first-class seat and takes out his laptop. In due course a steward makes his way along the carriage dispensing refreshments. Reaching Mr Wong's bay, he calls out jauntily,

— "You for coffee?"

Mr Wong is not going to stand for that sort of thing. Not looking up from his computer, he replies evenly,

— "No, you fuck offee. Me got first crass tickee."

A prosperous new year to you all.

John Terry in ghost sex saga shocker

2011-12-23T11:05:00.001Z

Little Nicky Lowles, the ~~opportunistic sanctimonious creep~~ stalwart anti-racist campaigner who heads up the newly independent Hate not Hope campaign, has blogged his view that John Terry should be relieved of his England captaincy immediately; we need not wait until a kangaroo court has convicted him of the dreadful crime of being jolly rude to ~~a Black man~~ ~~a person of colour~~, oh you know, one of those.

To support his claim that immediate action should be taken, he cites an earlier incident involving Mr Terry.

Extra-material affair, eh? Bloody 'ell, Nick. You're right, mate. If Terry's been shagging ghosts, he should deffo be banged up pronto and throw away the key, never mind wait for some poncy show-trial.

Innit.

Catch-22

2011-12-23T09:46:00.003Z

The racism-in-football hysteria gets better and better. According to last night's Een Stannat, Alan Hansen used the word

(*roll of drums*)

coloured

(*sharp intake of breath*)

on Match of the Day to refer to footballers of, er, ..., well what exactly can I say that doesn't give offence?

You can't say "Black" because apparently the word itself is inherently racist, unless spoken by a ~~bla~~, er, thingie person,er, you know, one of them. You can't even say non-White because apparently that implies that Whites are the norm (in a North European country) and because the prefix "non-" carries negative overtones.

You can't say, look they're all just footballers, what does it matter what, er, colour they are, because by including them you are discriminating against their distinctiveness, you are depriving them of their special victim status. But by recognizing them as, er, being of that category which we cannot name, you are stigmatizing them and not treating them equally.

A ... well for conciseness and pending the establishment of an agreed terminology acceptable to all participants, let's call them a half-caste and a nig-nog ... offered their opinions,

Ex-Liverpool player Stan Collymore led the protests against his choice of language, saying: "What colour would that be? Blue? Green? Orange?" Former Tottenham player Rohan Ricketts tweeted: "Is this Alan Hansen guy taking the f****** p***?? I'm not coloured??? He is part of the problem when using that word."

Alright lads, you tell us. Given that, let's call them Uncoloured, commentators on the telly are being asked to discuss the issue of racism in ze futebol, what terminology is acceptable to you?

You know, when this was just business as usual, just the priesthood of antiracism trawling for anathema and counterrevolution and extracting penances, it was mildly irritating. But now it's all becoming delightfully surreal, and I look forward to future developments. As Julia is wont to say,

*gets popcorn*

One of us, eh?

2011-12-20T12:20:00.000Z

Posts here are likely to be a bit sparse over the next few weeks as matters on "the home front" demand most of my attention, but I cannot let this fine upstanding chap pass without comment.

‘I laugh when a soldier is killed’

Mr Hussain was apparently born in Oxford and is therefore, according to the received wisdom on fora like CiF, British. As British as I am.

So that's alright, then.

Coo-er, Missus!

2011-12-17T11:14:00.000Z

From a Daily Mail sidebar:

And today on Celebrity Make-a-Baby, Konnie Huq and Charlie Brooker "do it" on the carpet.

Or did I misunderstand again?

Just a touch more dignitas, pretty please

2011-12-14T06:35:00.000Z

I don't mind a modicum of informality in business communications. You don't need to write like a 19th century solicitor all the time to demonstrate your earnest professionalism. And I'm in no position to complain, as one who uses jarring shifts of linguistic register frequently as a rhetorical device on this blog.

But there are limits. And this message from the mail server at Yahoo, after I mistyped the domain name in an email address, is too chirpy by a damned sight more than half. Reads like wot it was wrote by coders at the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation.

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at yahoo.com.
I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.
This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

<spoof@oaypal.com>:

Sorry, I wasn't able to establish an SMTP connection. (#4.4.1)
I'm not going to try again; this message has been in the queue too long.

Have I won a week's holiday for two in ~~Fuckit~~ Phuket, or did my email not get through? Hard to tell, really.

FFS.

Well, parse me!

2011-12-13T16:30:00.003Z

Richard got a bit more than he bargained for the other day when he ventured a passing observation about bad spelling and we pedants gathered like expectant vultures surrounding a dying elephant.

Mind you it's a tricky business, yer grammar. Orthography is a morceau de gâteau compared with your syntax. It's all around us, pressing in, demanding constant vigilance and alertitude. This paragraph in the ever wonderful News Shopper had me flummoxed for a while.

Sikh TV owner? Eh? Was that the unfortunate victim's most salient characteristic? That he was a Sikh who owned a TV set? Poor bugger, can't have had much of a life if that was the pinnacle of his life's achievement.

A little further delving reveals that the late Mr Singh was in fact one of the owners of an organization known as "Sikh TV", so

( ( Sikh TV ) owner )

and not

( Sikh ( TV owner ) )

as I had thought.

Good stuff, this English language, innit? I mean, where would yer cryptic crossword setters be without this sort of ambiguity? Up the boozer crying into their double whisky, that's what.

Sentence of the week

2011-12-13T11:14:00.002Z

No, this is not a Court News UK post.

Remember those stereotypical Victorian phrase books containing translations into foreign of everyday sentences like

"My postilion has been struck by lightning."
"My camel has been eaten by wolves."
"Desist from your unwelcome attentions, knave; I warn you that I am a personal friend of the Khedive."

Well, I plan to revive the tradition, and the following splendid sentence by Anna Raccoon (comment No 23) will be the first item in my new work to be entitled

Handy phrases for the lone traveller in Northern Canada,
rendered into Inuit and 30 other languages
you have never heard of

"I believe the Beaver population was depilated, but the Raccoons escaped unscathed."

Keep 'em coming.

Hamleys goes unisex

2011-12-13T08:41:00.004Z

Following, it is claimed, a searingly vital and relevant campaign by equality harridan Laura Nelson, Hamley's have removed gender-differentiating references from some of their in-shop signage.

Well, all I can say is

(Available here.)

According to LibCon, our Laura "has a background in neuroscience". Presumably she boycotted the lectures where they taught you how little boys and little girls' brains are wired differently.

Pathetic.

Update (16:15)

It's just occurred to me that in Emma West's blockbuster video, Emma's little boy, who despite the bleating of the Righteous doesn't really seem to be absolutely totally traumatized by what is going on around him, is holding some kind of action man doll. At one stage he aims it, in the manner of a gun, at the Black woman with whom Emma is having a shouting match.

Boys will be boys, eh? Good lad!

Anecdotes

2011-12-12T11:39:00.002Z

I have remarked before on the repetitiveness of below-the-line commentary on fora like CiF. Many recurrent topics have long since degenerated into ritual and predictable jousts between the Righteous and the Unrighteous, to the extent that some regular readers make bets with themselves as to, say, how soon the first "Godwin" will be posted.

On the race / asylum / immigration threads, which do indeed seem to glide seamlessly from one into the next, so that they become episodes in a single ongoing thread, I keep an eye out for the first "anyone born here is British" and the first "nation of immigrants", with a bonus point for any post which mentions the Huguenots. Any thread on lax border controls will soon be host to a number of irritated (and totally irrelevant) posts about how difficult it is to settle here legally, usually written by people who tell us about the expensive and time-consuming hoops they had to jump through for their foreign-born spouse to join them here. What that has to do with folk overstaying tourist or study visas I don't know, but these people seem to think they are making some kind of point. On a good day, BeautifulBurnout (an immigration lawyer) will pop up and lose her temper. And if things seem to be going the way of the Unrighteous, expect timewaster KenBarlow to chip in with irrelevant literalist flippancies in an attempt to to trivialize the thread and generally divert attention.

So why do I continue to read this guff?

To be sure there is a certain destructive addiction to it all, in the same proverbially negative sense as banging your head against a brick wall: it's nice when you leave off.

But mainly because of the anecdotes. In among the predictable Yah-boo-sucks, there is the occasional anecdote from personal experience which supplies real data to further the argument and to further understanding. Long-established commenter haardvark for example, whom I remember from Guardian Unlimited Talk days, is always worth a read. I think it was he who offered us interesting insights into the employment of cheap East European labour, displacing wholesale willing local English workers in what remains of our manufacturing industry. And ilovemisty is a regular sparring partner of BB, who as a former immigration caseworker herself knows her stuff.

I keep meaning to collect valuable anecdotes, kidding myself that I will be able to find them again through the magic of the search engine. CiF, unfortunately, doesn't seem to be indexed, at least below the line, so I may have to resort to collecting them into a file as I encounter them.

But in the meantime, as a small public service, I offer an example from Harry's Place. HP, of course, has the infuriating habit of deleting its below-the-line comments after a couple of weeks, so the source for the following quote is unhelpfully bare. The OP, by the redoubtable Sarah Annes Brown, is about honour killings, but the discussion soon wanders onto adjacent topics.

Sarka (or probably more precisely Šárka) is a British woman now settled in the Czech republic. ("Czecho" as I tend to think of it: the left half of "Czechoslovakia".) She comments frequently below-the-line at CiF and also offered this interesting anecdote at HP.

Sarka
5 December 2011, 9:30 pm

Hi Trespassers Will

Just a personal note on this – which may seem at odds with previous posts but God, I don’t know what to think…

A very good friend from Lancashire told me this:

His sister (whom I don’t know personally, but I know him well and he wouldn’t lie and is no BNP type) is a middle-aged English woman living by herself in semi-rural small but poshish area on the edge of a Lancashire town with large Asian immigrant area between her and the centre.

A few years ago she was woken in the middle of the night by someone (female) battering on her door and screaming for help. She went and opened it. A very young teenage white girl dashed in past her, frightened out of her wits and incoherent – looking both bruised and drugged up. In the road a quite expensive car that had been crawling stopped and two Asian guys got out meeting one that had been running down the road and they all started running for her door. She slammed it and locked it . The girl was cowering in the hall. She didn’t have time to try and ask the girl what was going on, because the men had come up to the door and were yelling threateningly, banging…one evidently now by the frontroom window and rattling it, trying to get it open.

My friend’s sister grabbed the telephone in the hall and dialled 999 – advertising this tactically by talking very loudly so the assailants could here. Having called the police, she ran to the back of the house, just in time to see the girl, who had opened the back door, scrambling over the garden fence and disappearing…My friend’s sister rushed upstairs (the attack was continuing), and saw a couple of neighbours had come out because of the noise…more lights went on in the street, and the Asian guys retreated to their car and drove off.

Talking to the neighbours the woman learned that one had looked out and seen the girl vainly banging on three or four doors before getting to hers…with the car in pursuit.

The police arrived: they were very laid back. They took notes of my friend’s sister’s account, made some remarks about how the girl was obviously one of the Asian’s “white tarts” and it was a bad business but little to be done immediately. A neighbour had taken the car number, which was duly noted.

My friend’s sister is a pushy middle-class type. She wasn’t terribly satisfied with the demeanour of the police and so a couple of days later she went to the police station and demanded to know if any progress had been made in the investigation (they had the number after all) and if the girl, whom she had described, had been identified, because she was very worried about her. Basically, though all her remarks were recorded, she had the impression of being fobbed off – this made her all the more militant, and she started to complain, and suggest strongly that she would be coming back, contacting her MP etc…

Off she went, crossly. And if the story stopped at this point you might think it subject to any number of interpretations – for after all, many people (self included) have experienced the police not exactly jumping to it in various situations…especially in situations that have been dramatic but in which no one has actually been injured or property seriously destroyed.

But the really bad thing came later. A couple of days later, The phone rang and my friend’s sister heard a male voice that did not identify itself – The caller said he was a police officer but calling off the record, and asking her for her own safety not to start making a fuss about the case…He explained that if she made a fuss the people in the racket concerned would identify her and she and her property would be at risk, and that there was nothing the police could do because in the community concerned they had no influence – everything had to be through the “elders”, and on matters like this they wouldn’t co-operate. He tried to stress that the social services had been given her description of the girl and would do the best they could, but she shouldn’t hope for too much – but mainly he was warning her off for her own good, given where she lived…

I would have had a slight scepticism problem with this story (even from an impeccable source) had I not myself, some years before, received a similar “warning off” call from a self-unidentified member of the police when I was helping a Bangladeshi friend in Brighton with a case against a very well-known local gangster (my only brush with the mean streets – I’m no hero). So alas, I believe this report, and its implications are very unpleasant.

followed by

Sarka
5 December 2011, 9:34 pm

P.S. My friend’s sister didn’t take things any further. She was indeed scared. A few months later she moved out of the area right into the country and said she was relieved…

This is the real power of the internet. Not the blustering of the blowhards and the propaganda of the elite machine, but the like-minded discovering that they are not alone and sharing their experiences. That's what has made blogging worthwhile and what encourages me to keep returning to it.

We'll have the bastards yet.

Emma West and Rhea Page

2011-12-11T12:58:00.002Z

Given that this blog chooses to focus on race relations and immigration in the UK, you might have expected me to have quite a lot to say about the Emma West incident. I have largely held my peace so far for two reasons.

The first is that even a retired old duffer like me with too much time on his hands has to keep at least half a foot in the real world, so that he can continue to leech his inflated final salary pension from your pockets (or, depending how you look at these things, from his own accumulated and collectively invested savings — but that's a row for another occasion) in order to sustain the meat entity a corner of whose brain hosts Edwin. The real world (domestic division) has been demanding the meat entity's largely undivided attention over the past few weeks, leaving little time or extended concentration for blogging.

The second is more pertinent. I don't think I'm deluding myself if I say I'm very much a "water off a duck's arse" sort of person. I have, as you may have noticed, opinions, and there are aspects of our society which I greatly dislike, nay despair of, but I don't work myself up into a permanent conniption fit about it all.

The Emma West incident however, exacerbated by the exquisitely timed counterexample of the Rhea Page trial outrage, has left me uncharacteristically incandescent with anger. Bitter experience teaches that rage and self-expression are not a wise combination, so I have avoided committing myself to "print" over these topics.

I am no longer incandescent, though I do still glow in the dark a bit. Pretty well everything that needs to be said has already been said elsewhere, so rather than risk reigniting myself, I will confine this post to throwing a couple of personal anecdotes onto the pyre. For now, anyway.

You don't see him so much these days, the neatherization of South East London and the consequent negrification of the train ridership having reduced his potential audience, but there used to be a middle-aged West Indian chap who rode the Greenwich and Woolwich line trains. As the train approached his stop, he would stand in the vestibule and, in a penetrating basso profundo which would make Willard White himself envious, would apostrophize the carriage at large about our oppressive White colonial sins and how Whitey was responsible for all evil — he was a sort of downmarket Daniel Waweru. It was an outburst every bit as racist as that of Emma West. Or for that matter of her Black antagonist in the video.

Did we attack him? Did we video him? Did we report him to the police? Was he taken into police custody for his own protection and subsequently charged with being publicly unpleasant to White people? No, we ignored him and he eventually "ran down" and buggered off.

I have had an Emma West experience myself, as it happens, albeit at a somewhat quieter level. I recall the Nigerian invasion of Greater Woolwich in the noughties very well. I was still working full-time for a living and commuting to central London, and while waiting on the station in the mornings I would frequently see Africans arriving on the other platform, dragging their wheeled suitcases behind them. OK, I can't be certain they were arriving off the night flight from Lagos; they could just have been migrating from Peckham. But whatever.

So it was that, coming home one evening, I was sitting in a train carriage already filled to the gunwales with Africans when a middle-aged Black couple boarded at London Bridge. They were hauling wheeled suitcases with Lagos baggage tags. I wasn't best pleased and thought "Nigerians!" in a less than friendly tone of voice. Actually, I hadn't just thought it, I had inadvertently muttered it, and obviously not sotto enough voce either, for a young man nearby introduced himself as being a Nigerian and, er, what did I have against Nigerians anyway.

He looked more mixed-race West Indian to me, and his English was accentless British or international, but what the hell, he wanted to stand up for his fellow Black men. I explained that I had no automatic animus against Nigerians as individuals, but that their numbers in my country were too great — by dint of numbers they had ceased to be welcome guests and had become colonizing invaders. A couple of well-behaved nignog families in the district, who obeyed our laws and accepted that they were foreigners was one thing. Most of Nigeria moving in to South London, dancing naked in the streets, opening voodoo clinics and setting up bush-meat takeaway stalls in the bleedin' station car park was a different matter, guvnor.

That was the gist of it. He didn't disagree as such. He simply didn't understand. I might as well have been talking in Martian. He muttered something about globalization and the inevitability of international migration. Our discourse was pointless and was concluded politely but unsatisfactorily.

Oh yes I well understand the reaction of Emma West and others like her. These days I have largely learned to "grey out" non-Europeans in my environment. It still gets through, though, and I have to admit that sometimes when I get off the train I have been known to vocalize one or two choice phrases that wouldn't go down too well on CiF.

And it all gets progressively stranger. The other day I travelled by bus from Greenwich to Charlton. In addition to the usual mob of pushy endomorphic Afrian women and their baby buggies, there was an old man and babushka, dressed in deepest Russian peasant style and with a battered squeezebox. They paid their fares in very small change. She had clearly been shopping while he busked in Greenwich. They'll be setting up fucking yurts in Greenwich Park next.

I have not yet seen anyone attempt to board a bus in London with a goat in tow or carrying a crate of live chickens. But it's only a matter of time.

Enough.

Conspiracy news

2011-12-08T11:35:00.003Z

According to the subtitling computer on Sky News, Bashar al-Assad is a member of the "Anna White" sect.

Strange-looking cove, Bashar. Looks like a startled anorexic shoe salesman rather than your standard A-rab dictator. And those rectangular ears are particularly disconcerting. He's not part-Vulcan by any chance, is he?

Mossad is behind this, I tell you. I think we should be told.

Simpler times

2011-12-04T13:48:00.002Z

I've just been listening to a CD of The China Story, a Goon Show episode originally recorded in 1956. Against a general background of high-pitched yabba-yabba supposedly characteristic of spoken Chinese,

Seagoon (replying to a taunt from Grytpype Thynne): Lies! I have my dark secrets.

Ellington (interjecting, in exaggerated "Darkie" accent): Man, so do I!

Seagoon: Silence, Ellington. Or I'll have the whitewash brush to you.

I was an impressionable eight years old when this incendiary stuff was first broadcast. To be honest I don't remember actually hearing this specific episode at the time but I was an avid Goons fan and recall much in this general vein.

But me and my mates did not, incited by this sort of vile racism freely broadcast by the B-B-C, wander the streets of Moston looking for Darkies to whitewash or Chinamen to mock.

Would have been a waste of time anyway. As far as I recall there were no Blacks in Moston at that time. None at all. I'm not so sure about the Chinese; I don't think there were any but your Wily Oriental has over the centuries developed the devious skill of being simultaneously both ubiquitous and invisible; they might have been lurking furtively in laundry baskets and coming out at night to eat White children and stray dogs for all I know. Or some such dastardly native practice.

Actually, the first time I saw non-White people in the flesh was on my first visit to Moss Side in 1959. On the busy pavements of Moss Lane East in what was otherwise a typical slightly run-down Manchester inner suburb, perhaps 5% of the pedestrians were West Indians. And did the 11-year-old Edwin need to be sternly reprimanded by the bus guard for screaming foul abuse and coating the windows of the bus with angry spittle? Well not as such, Lord Copper. It was, to be fair, a new and memorable experience which I still recall clearly. But I'm sorry to disappoint any Righteous readers, for a fairly accurate verbalization of my reaction to this unfamiliar sight would be "Oh, those are Black people, are they? OK then."

If it helps any, I do remember feeling slightly hostile to a Black lady who got on the bus later that year and sat next to me. She was, like many women of recent West African heritage, of, shall we say, an extravagantly endomorphic somatotype and took up an awful lot of our shared seat, squashing my small frame up against the side of the bus. I would have minded less if the confined space hadn't made it difficult to hold my copy of Kennedy's Latin Primer comfortably; I was trying to revise my amo, amas, amat at the time.

Things have changed in the succeeding 50-odd years. Whether or not for the better I leave to the reader to judge.

Probability and possibility

2011-11-22T23:30:00.002Z

Reacting to the recent spate of incidents where householders have returned from some brief trip to find their home occupied, typically or at least stereotypically by extended families of East European Gypsies, the Government is proposing to bring the law in England and Wales into line with the existing law in Scotland, so that squatting domestic properties becomes a criminal rather than a civil offence.

Which is fine by me in principle, though my own recent experience does give me pause to reflect that things are not always as straightforward as they seem.

Let me tell you a story. To slightly misquote the title sequence of White Hunter*, a true story that actually happened.

Earlier this year two women knocked on my front door. I was perhaps a little slow in answering and I arrived at the door just as a key was turning in the lock and the door began to open. They had lost patience and decided to try out a key they had with them.

Once order had been restored, with my unorthodox visitors confined peremptorily to the doorstep, they explained themselves. They were, they told me, respectively the sister and niece of a gentleman who had formerly lived more or less here. I say "more or less here" because they were not absolutely sure of the correct address. My house was one of a range of adjacent possible addresses which they had.

It was never made precisely clear what had happened to this gentleman — for the sake of argument let's call him Mr Pendleton — but the gist of it seemed to be that

He had been a tenant of a house in the immediate vicinity, who had left a few months before.

He was either dead or otherwise no longer able to manage his own affairs, or at least to visit himself.

This pair, his relatives, were here to check out his former home for important personal items or documents and generally bring his presence here to an orderly close.

The name "Pendleton" was teasingly familiar but I couldn't quite pin it down. We talked some more, on the doorstep, and they went away.

A few days later they were back. Although they didn't say so directly, they had clearly been to the police in the interim, who had obviously not been particularly helpful. Although their accents were native English, they actually lived abroad and only had a couple of days further in London. And they had run out of options. The two things they did have were an approximate match with my address and a key which fitted my door.

The copper they had spoken to had told them that a co-incidental match of someone else's key with my lock was "a million to one against". The copper was talking off the top of his head. I was, unsurprisingly, interested in that probability as well and had been doing some research. A wonderful tool, the web. Not perfect by any means but it has its moments. My front door lock is a of a very common design from a major brand. My best estimate is that there are actually no more than 1000 to 2000 different keys for that brand and design of lock in actual circulation. In practice, if you think about it, that is perfectly adequate.

This information cut no ice, of course. That the key fitted was proof positive that they had found their target. I showed my visitors letters addressed to me at this address along with photo-ID which matched my name to my image.

This did not satisfy them. I could understand why. They were under pressure: if my house wasn't the one they sought, then their mission had failed and they would have to go home — a long and expensive way away — empty handed. And the prima facie evidence of the matching key was very strong, too strong, despite the rational truth of the fact that improbability is not the same thing as impossibility. But we were going nowhere. I knew I wasn't squatting in Mr Pendleton's former home. They were in effect convinced, emotionally at least, that I was. Impasse. I refused further co-operation and referred them back to the police.

As it happened there was a happy ending. People don't think straight under stress. As my visitors fumed on my doorstep, thinking through their next step, it occurred to me ask the obvious question, the one that should been asked at our first meeting: what did this Pendleton geezer look like. The sister described him and I recognized him at once: a shy, slightly confused, uncommunicative middle-aged man who had been a near neighbour until a few months previously. I pointed out where he had lived. Their key fitted and letters addressed to him were found behind the door.

My awkward visitors departed. They were embarrassed by the confrontational incident to the extent that a month or so later I received a written apology through the post. On balance, had the authorities actually become involved, I believe this particular matter would have been resolved correctly and quickly. But it makes you wonder. Circumstantial evidence has a powerful momentum and co-incidence has low credibility as a witness. Improbable may well not be the same as impossible, but if the odds are reasonably long, it's a very attractive first approximation.

________________
* White Hunter was a TV serial made in the late 1950s and broadcast late at night on ITV. As well as giving us the catchphrase "true stories that actually happened" which actually did occur, breathlessly, in the titles voice-over, this splendidly hammy show was generally referred to in our house as "Throw another stuffed lion in". In the titles, the eponymous white hunter raises his rifle and fires. We then cut to a shot of what is either a loose-stuffed lion skin or quite possibly, in those less fastidious days, an actual freshly dead male lion, which is hurled into camera. Innocent days.

Gordon Bennett!

2011-11-22T10:04:00.003Z

A wee while ago I wrote of my frustrating experience of having to use Windows Media Center to access the TV tuner plugged into my laptop. It's got no less frustrating. It still behaves like a Dixon's (Curry's) sales assistant trying to bully you into buying an "extended warranty" on the perfectly reliable piece of Chinese electro-tat that you are in the process of buying. (I notice the bastards craftily broach the subject after they've got your credit card in their sweaty little mitt.)

But on the whole I have reached a sort of armed truce in the battle of wills with the Beast of Redmond's bossyware.

Then today it gave me a very nasty shock. I was changing channels. A fairly basic operation you might think, but on Windows Media Center the precise sequence of events seems to vary; I think it's dependent on the weather and cosmic rays. It might help if I spin widdershins in my chair before clicking the mouse — I may give that a try.

And there on the screen, underneath the waffle which informed me why it was unwilling to comply with my request at this time, there was a box which read

You've been scammed

Ah. I stared at this frightful apparition gloomily, contemplating hours, days of decontamination of the computer and was beginning to reflect on the possibility of endless phone calls and letters to unravel an identity fraud when I actually got round to reading the text of the message properly. Do you read error messages? Properly? Or, like me, do you get to the stage where you click automatically on the "Are you sure (Y/N)?" message box which asks you to confirm that you really do want to delete the whole of your C: drive?

"You've been scammed", it turns out, was the name of the programme currently showing on the channel (BBC1) I was switching away from. Perhaps the computer wanted to carry on watching it.

Or something. Who knows?

I'm going for a lie down. After that I shall eschew these dubious high tech pleasures and join a morris dancing team. Or possibly a monastery.

Austerity news

2011-11-21T07:17:00.000Z

The Mayor of Greater Woolwich, the Jolly Worshipful Thomas Crapper, WC, AICMFP, today opened a new public convenience in the Lagos North district. In his speech, Mr Crapper explained that due to current severe financial constraints significant savings in design and construction costs have proved necessary, but expressed the hope that the facility would nonetheless provide much needed relief for commuters at the nearby railway station.

The fragile sensibilities of the Righteous

2011-11-20T09:25:00.002Z

I was kicked off Guardian Unlimited Talk, a predecessor forum to CiF, in early 2003 for ... well I'm not sure really. Official policy was that you would receive one warning about unacceptable behaviour, and if you misbehaved again you would be banned. I received my first warning email early one evening. The banning email followed one minute later, which I suppose was technically within the letter of the law. The emails had an oracular format, which seemed to be typical of "moderator" communications at the time. An excerpt from your offending post would be quoted. The nature of the offence would not be specifically explained; instead at least two of the forum rules would be listed. You then had to guess which of the rules you had broken and in what manner. It was like one of those structured punishments you get at school.

The comment text quoted in the reprimanding emails consisted of links to sites of which the Grauniad did not approve. That my comments had in fact expressed disapproval of these sites did not cut any ice. Actually I suspect that these links were just a pretext; I was really being banned for general Unrighteousness. I had upset Clare.

Clare? I always think of the Guardian moderator as Clare. Clare is a bright young school leaver. Clare hopes to go into politics or political journalism and is spending part of her gap year doing an internship at her favorite newspaper before going up to Oxford to read PPE. To keep her out of harm's way she has been put in charge of the reader forums. Clare is going through the transition from constrained sixth-former to independent adult, a phase during which many of us feel suddenly empowered, idealistic and keen to change the world for the better, rectifying our parents' mistakes with a simplistic optimism untempered by the hard experience of real life. Clare, it has to be said, is shocked, nay appalled, by some of what she reads on GUT.

I made a token effort to rejoin under different details, but I was spotted and blocked. Some GUT commenters were repeatedly banned and re-registered under new identities a dozen or more times. Identifying and outing them was a much-enjoyed GUT sport. The now rehabilitated Frank Fisher was one such. But for me it wasn't worth the hassle. Poking the Righteous with pointed sticks was fun but not that much fun.

Earlier this year I found myself undertaking the CiF registration procedure. Mainly, I was curious to know what details they were asking for these days, in particular did they still ask for your home postcode. In the process I seem to have successfully registered myself. I didn't bother attempting to start posting at CiF, knowing that I would soon be speaking out of turn and getting myself banned again.

But this week I had a go, commenting on a particularly sanctimonious Guardian editorial about Sepp Blatter's "denial" of football racism. And well, well, well, the comment was, as they say on CiF, moderated. OK, it contained two ethnic slurs and an obscenity, but all in the best possible taste and — and this is the point — entirely germane to the discussion which was, if you remember, about racist language in football.

Which does beg the question, how do you discuss "sensitive" subjects if you are not allowed to use the relevant language or link to relevant websites? I criticized the Telegraph for bowdlerizing John Terry's alleged "racist" remark as "you — black —", rendering it impenetrable. To give the Guardian its due, it didn't shirk from quoting the insult properly as "you fucking black cunt". So why can't I do the same in their fora?

I am reminded of an exchange on Pickled Politics between Jai the Prolix and the excruciatingly even-handed Sarah Annes Brown. Jai had linked to a screenshot of some supposedly deeply incriminating Faceache post which was supposedly the ex cathedra position of the EDL. Sarah asked why a screenshot and not a direct link to the original source. In the event its a bit complicated in that the original source had been since deleted, but Jai's reply is interesting,

I used a screenshot because PP editorial policy is that we do not link directly to extreme Far-Right websites. However, the comments thread via the “screenshot” link includes a direct URL link to the EDL’s official Facebook page where the statement was issued.

Given that much of what is written at PP consists of whingeing about the "Far Right", a prohibition on linking to source information seems just a touch self-contradictory.

But it's Sarah herself who gets the Dogwash special prize of a presentation box of biscuits for her ingenious solution to this knotty problemette. Sarah AB seems a decent enough woman whose meticulous all-things-to-all-persons-itude succeeds in making her welcome below the line at Pickled Politics while contributing both above and below the line at Harry's Place. In April, she wrote a piece at HP about some public meeting in London involving, among others, HP hate figure Gilad Atzmon. Atzmon is an anti-Zionist Jew who is not only of interest as an object of hatred to the Harryites, who increasingly seem to treat the slightest criticism of Israel as tantamount to a threat to rebuild the gas chambers, tedious Shoah-waving at its worst, but is also of interest to the Stormfronters, who of course see the hand of ZOG behind everything down to the very dog crap on the pavement.

Sarah wanted to link to a Stormfront post about the meeting. But linking to Stormfront itself was out of the question. Whether due to Harry's Place policy or Sarah's personal squeam I don't know. Her solution? She linked to the Google cache of the Stormfront article.

Dix points for ingenuity, love. Nul points for intellectual honesty.

Interlude

2011-11-19T07:55:00.000Z

— Do you know the Battersea Dogs Home?

— Really? I didn't know he'd been away.

No comment!

2011-11-18T10:55:00.000Z

As I touched upon earlier, Jai the Prolix is continuing his "forensic analysis and exposure" of the EDL over at Pickled Politics. The method consists largely of pouncing on imprecisely formulated comments and statements and mis- or over-interpreting them. So I won't bother commenting on his content per se.

What draws my attention is his handling of reader comments "below the line". In Jai's first forays into the subject, comments were opened automatically according to usual Pickled Politics practice. The comments thread on all PP articles is eventually closed, though at least Sunny-ji doesn't follow the insane Harry's Place practice of deleting old below-the-line threads completely. At least with PP the old threads are preserved in aspic for the entertainment, enlightenment and titillation of future readers. I assume the PP threads are closed automatically on a time-out.

What happened with Jai was that he became exasperated with people disagreeing with him below the line, deleted those comments he took particular exception to and closed the comment thread prematurely to preclude further aggravation.

In the next couple of posts he took no chances and closed comments at the time of original posting, debarring local reader input completely. There were complaints from the regular readers and obviously someone has had a word, for the most recent two posts have gone back to the standard commenting arrangements.

Well, up to a point, Lord Copper, as I noticed earlier this week. A commenter called J to the T had said

but when I revisited the article the following day his comment was nowhere to be seen; disappeared without trace; gone, gone and never called me 'Mother'.

(Stop press: revisiting that article as I draft the present post I see that Jai has returned in the meantime, had a quick strop, and closed comments. Poor little flower! Really, Jai, if you want to blog but can't brook reasonable argument without having a conniption fit and taking your ball home, stay away from the controversial stuff. Seriously, mate, stick to the long-winded essays on Indian history that us White racist scum can't really be arsed reading.)

Obviously there are going to be times when any blogger or other "web publisher" who allows readers' comments is going to have to take action. Stuff which is actually illegal or is in breach of the host's terms and conditions, for example. Grossly offensive material, irrelevance, spam and so on. I'm sure we all know it when we see it, though of course we have different thresholds according to our own tastes and our consideration of our target audiences.

But to delete comments merely because they disagree with the blogger is childish. The deleted comment screen-capped above is a prime example. J to the T's few posts at PP have been fairly aggressive in tone, but offer reasoned argument. There is no justification for deleting them out of hand.

This sort of nonsense is of course regrettably common. At PP, LibCon and Socialist Unity, silent deletion has an added entertainment feature, of course. The comment software at these sites dynamically numbers the comments, and commenters get into the habit of referring to earlier posts by number. When the admin comes along and silently deletes some crimethink from the middle of the comment thread the numbering goes all to cock making a nonsense of reader's local links. I recall Sunny-ji being taken to task over this at PP. It was suggested that he should instead edit offending comments, replacing the text with "[deleted]" or some such. His response was classic Sunny. He didn't have the time or patience to devote so much effort and attention to racists and scumbags; pressing the delete button would have to do. (I paraphrase from memory, but that was the sense.) Pompous little fuck.

So chaps, if you want a cozy little pow-wow with your bosom buddies, all sitting round admiring each other's turbans, set up a closed user group and authorize new commenting members individually. Otherwise, be prepared to take the rough with the smooth. You never know, you might learn something.

Abject failure

2011-11-12T10:50:00.004Z

I can't even succeed at being a proper bastard, or so it would seem.

The fine example of Miesian tedium pictured below looks like a typical London office block.

Which is fair enough because that is exactly what it used to be. Then it was gutted and made over and became

The St Martin's Lane Hotel

As you can see from their jolly swish website, indoors it's a well-flash 5-star hotel for the nobs and slebs. Now from my own fairly limited experience of staying — at other people's expense — in 5-star gaffs of more conventional but comparably sumptuous disposition, I have to say I'm not on the whole all that keen on this sort of thing. These places make you feel all the time as if you are failing to live up to their exacting standards. A bit like hiring a cleaning lady and then tidying up before she arrives. Your milage may vary of course, but I don't feel comfortable in the sort of place where you find yourself casting round nervously when visiting the gents' urinal and wondering, "When I have finished and shaken off the drops, will a flunky rush out from a discreet cubby hole and offer to dry, talc and perfume my knob?" That sort of bolleaux makes an honest working-class lad just a wee bit edgy, tha knows.

But enough of my plebeian prejudices. The striking design extends to the admittedly unpromising exterior,

where there is absolutely no signage to identify the building. If you go round the back to the tradesmen's entrance you might find some or other tiny statutory notice which gives a clue to the building's purpose, but its public face is totally blank.

Obviously the management is making a statement. This place is exclusive. The expected and regular clientele will of course know it and will in any case arrive by chauffeured car or, at a pinch, black cab. The servant classes will of course know where it is through their own mysterious networks. Just as the UK has, quite naturally, the privilege of being the only member of the UPU which is not required to put its country name on its postage stamps, so the St Martin's is the kind of establishment which does not demean itself with vulgar public signage like some backstreet kebab house or workmen's canteen.

And so it was that I resolved not to co-operate with this arrogant nonsense. If they weren't prepared to advertise their presence in the conventional manner then I, despite my familiarity with the area, would affect not to know of it.

And then yesterday I was put to the test. An agitated middle-aged gentleman, displaying the beginnings of distress, asked me for directions. Upper middle class in accent and manner and exuding a relaxed patrician confidence that shone through his slightly dowdy dress, he was clearly a natural St Martin's Lane customer.

I have to admit that I laughed sardonically, almost evilly, at his predicament. Which did indeed disconcert him somewhat. But then my underlying all-round decency got the better of me and I pointed out to him the anonymous structure he sought.

Sigh.

As the great philosopher Snoopy once put it, "Yesterday I was a dog. Today I'm a dog. Tomorrow I'll still be a dog. There's so little hope for advancement".

170 EDL arrests to "prevent a breach of the peace"

2011-11-12T00:50:00.001Z

The midnight news on Radio 4 reports this within its item on yesterday's commemoration of Armistice Day in central London in approximately the following terms (from memory, gist only): "170 people believed to be members of the EDL were arrested by Police in order to prevent a possible breach of the peace".

This sparse statement, given its context, makes it sound as if the EDLers were planning to violently disrupt the commemoration itself; a disgraceful slur. Various other reports point to a supposed Facebook threat or even simply a suggestion that, since the MAC "Hell for Heroes" stunt was no longer in play, EDLers visiting London to oppose MAC should turn their attention onto the OccupyLSX mob instead.

Whatever. Doubtless more will emerge. In the meantime, the interested reader might find this report from Esmerelda, who was there, illuminating if not indeed frightening.

Things are getting nasty.

What the papers say

2011-11-11T22:10:00.001Z

Half of all water-damaged mobile phones in the UK have been dropped in the toilet, study finds

or so the Daily Mail tells us.

Are we remotely surprised?
Do we care?
I'd be more interested to know why anybody would bother conducting this "study".
And why a "newspaper, not a snoozepaper" (remember that?) would bother to report it.

No, scrub #4. It's the Mail, that's answer enough.

The article is helpfully illustrated. Here is a picture of a mobile phone and of some water. Or possibly some other "fluid".

Oh and just in case you are still confused, a pair of photographs comparing a mobile telephone with a water closet is provided. Regrettably, however, it is not made unambiguously clear which is which. This may cause readers unnecessary embarrassment and, er, inconvenience.

But it's that casual and unspecific "... or fluid" which is the most worrying part of the whole piece. I shall be fretting about that all night. My mind will be boggling gently.

Picture editing at its best. It certainly flushes away the News Shopper's feeble efforts with random images of parts of fire engines.

If you can't stand the heat...

2011-11-09T09:50:00.000Z

Jai the Prolix has posted yet another piece about the EDL at Pickled Politics, consisting largely of nitpicking but irrelevant semantic analysis of Tommy's and the EDL in general's statements and speeches.

I say "irrelevant" because Jai approaches his subject in the manner of a lawyer minutely examining a commercial contract, looking for exploitable ambiguities and inexactitudes, whereas what he is actually dealing with is ordinary loose linguistic usage and, in the case of Tommy's speech at Tower Hamlets, angry rhetoric. The post is in the great tradition of the likes of Lancaster Unity, Everything EDL and Nothing British, which devote huge amounts of time and effort into searching the web for injudiciously expressed views from people who might or might not be BNP or EDL or whatever supporters and hyping these up into security threats. The modus operandi amounts to finding some loudmouthed BNP official or EDL notable on Faceache or Twatter saying something along the lines of "When the revolution comes, Weyman Bennett and Martin Smith will be the first ones up against the wall" and then pretending that this statement represents a realistically intended death threat that the police should prosecute.

I won't bother trying to interpret and fisk Jai's tortuous prose here; life's too short thanks all the same. But what fascinates me about this particular piece is that reader comments have been blocked from the outset. In Jai's two previous diatribes on the EDL (here and here) he took exception to comments below the line, deleting some of them and eventually closing the thread prematurely. This time he has pre-empted the situation.

Look, Jai me old china — am I allowed to say that to a Punjabi? — I don't want to get all ad hominem or anything, but if you expect your pronouncements to be treated as ex cathedra and can't take intelligent criticism, then can I suggest that you go back to penning your usual fare of rambling Indian-supremacist historical pieces. Your Desi posse audience will probably like them while stroppy gora scum like me won't bother reading them and taking the piss "below the line".

Awright?

Journalistic units of measurement

2011-11-09T07:50:00.001Z

Asteroid 2005 YU55 has, we are told, passed the Earth at a reassuringly safe-sounding distance of 1.6 megafurlongs. The object is approximately 1 aircraft carrier in diameter. Regrettably I can find no estimate of the object's mass in megafirkins, or even for that matter in African elephants.

The next encounter with a comparably dangerous planetesimal is not expected for another 420 fortnights.

That is all.

Droit de l'Assange

2011-11-03T07:54:00.001Z

Apparently that jolly creepy Mr Assange has lost his appeal against being extradited to Sweden for questioning about the curiously Swedish alleged crime of sexuellt ofredande, which as far as I can make any sense of it means shagging two women in fairly quick succession who subsequently each got the hump about the other woman and retrospectively withdrew consent. Or whatever. In plain terms he's being fitted up for annoying the authorities.

As an amateur historian of language, I was struck by the unusual surname Assange and have been doing a little bit of research in ancient castles and dusty archives on your behalf. And believe me I've got the bruises and the spider bites to prove it. It turns out that Assange is an Anglo-Norman word. You will have heard of the ancient feudal rights of Socage (screwing the tenants), Pillage (nicking stuff you fancy) and of course Droit du Seigneur (screwing the tenants' daughters). To this must be added the right of Droit de l'Assange (fitting up tenants who say inconvenient things).

Ah, the great British traditions.

Just eat the banana and get on with the game

2011-11-02T12:55:00.004Z

As I have intimated before, my knowledge of futebol is on the level of the learned judge who interrupted counsel's peroration to interject, "And who precisely is this Stanley Matthews person?" but when did higgerance stop anybody confidently posting random guff on the interweb?

The Terry-Ferdinand nonsense, as helpfully laid out in this Telegraph piece, becomes less creditable the more you examine it. Apparently Mr Terry mouthed the remark, which the Telegraph daintily and pointlessly transcribes as "... you —— black —— ...", actually "... you fucking black cunt ...". Mr Ferdinand was, it would seem, unaware of this cordial remark until an unidentifed member of the public, or self-righteous fucking lip-reading cunting busybody, to use the correct legal expression, painstakingly reviewed the match video and made a formal complaint.

And then the process had no option but to swing into action. Although Anton seems to be dong his best to be suitably enraged, it is essentially out of his hands.

I have long thought that the elite preoccupation with "racism" and "racist language" is a major barrier to good relations between ethnic groups in this country. (I originally wrote "the single biggest barrier" in the last sentence, but on reflection that's nonsense. It pales into the proverbial insignificance compared with the perpetual year-zero mythologizing about the nation of immigrants and how our verdant terra nullius is equally open to all comers, but hey that's a rant for another time.)

Anyway, it encourages and constantly reinforces a sense of victimhood, if not indeed victimism, among "people of colour". And instead of inculcating, or perhaps more accurately beating, a warm and dare I say vibrant joy of diversity into us pallid types, each such incident merely stokes our sullen resentment and our nervousness, nay actual fear, of the consequences of attempting to interact with yer Darkie folk in anything approaching a normal, relaxed and equal manner.

The correct response from John Terry should be as follows:

— Kay Burley (~~mysteriously shaggable~~ flame-haired ~~tyrant~~ siren of the airwaves): And now over to the lovely Jon Desborough for an important update on the Blackcuntgate saga.

— Jon Desborough (ever cheerful voice of sport): So then, John Terry, did you in fact refer to Anton as "you fucking black cunt"?

— John Terry (for it is he, innit?): Yes, I did, cock, guvnor me ol' mucker, gorblimey, awright.

— JD: And how do you claim to justify that disgraceful racist language?

— JT: 'Cos he is a fucking black cunt, in't he? (Exits stage left, whistling nonchalantly.)

(Fade to advertisement showing happy young Black couple bouncing up and down on hideous sofa available on special buy now, regret later terms.)

I bother to revisit this because some chappie called Sam the Amoeba, a young player with Sponge Bob United, has had a racist tweet from an unsupporter. Say what you like about the Guardian (and I'm sure you will), at least it doesn't bowdlerize:

Police are making inquiries into racist abuse directed at the Newcastle United striker Sammy Ameobi on Twitter. A tweet posted by a user called @JonnnnyPhipps on Sunday said: "@Sammy_Ameobi your hand is nearly the same colour. #nigger".

As St Bob of the Ethiopes said in quite another context, ""Was that it?"

It has to be said that this remark is a trifle opaque. Perhaps this provides some context.

Dunno, you tell me. I don't really understand Twitter and don't especially want to.

But Ameobi's rather mild response seems to be all that's needed to counter this rather rude remark. Instead it's been elevated into yet another racism "crisis", wasting police time and titillating the tabloids.

Rant ends.

Bringt mir meine Judenschere!

2011-11-01T11:00:00.002Z

John Terry, a professional association football player, has been accused, in the wake of what he apparently considered to have been a highly unsatisfactory interaction with Anton Ferdinand, another professional association football player, of using "racist" language. The precise phrase used is, as far as I can tell, not yet in the public domain, but if speculation is correct it will be some variant of "fucking black cunt". (Insert asterisks to taste.)

So what? Or, if you prefer, so fucking what? If Terry had lost his rag with Wayne Rooney and called him a "stupid short-arsed granny-fucker", would we all be wringing our hands over it?

Now the regrettably deteriorating Harry's Place is getting in on the act, cross-posting a piece on the phrase "Jew goal" from the po-faced indignation-mongers of the CST. New one on me, but then I no spikka da futebol. Apparently it's a particular kind of manœuvre designed to deceive the goalkeeper.

Gordon Ben Et, the Israeli Minister for Offence-taking, should be alerted at once, so that Mossad agents can be despatched to kidnap Arsène Wenger and bring him to trial for permitting anti-Semitic playing tactics.

Back in the days before the computer was king, us office wallahs used to keep groups of related paper documents together using treasury tags. (I'd better not call them India tags or I'll get into even more trouble.)

One of these little beasties was threaded through a hole in the top left-hand corner of each document, binding the group together. They were more effective than paper clips, which could only group together a handful of thin documents and which slid off too easily: not what you want when you have a two-inch thick pile of papers carefully sorted into order.

When the document lacked a suitable hole, you used one of these

to create one. It is known officially as a one-hole punch or single-hole punch. But to me, for reasons I have never quite fathomed, it was always a "pair of Jewish scissors". And people understood what I meant when I used the phrase. It was a mildly jokey ethnic stereotype turned into an everyday term, like French letter or Spanish custom. It didn't mean that I was planning to set up a gas-chamber on Hampstead Heath.

In any case, I'm reliably informed that the French horn responds well to antibiotics.

Grow up.

So just how many people are there already in the UK?

2011-10-27T10:15:00.005+01:00

Not to be outdone by the UN's "celebration" of the world population hitting the 7 billion mark, the ONS has been busy telling us that here in this small, damp, foggy archipelago off the north-western coast of Eurasia, we are well on the way to 70 million — by 2027. Oh really? So soon?

What is surprising is how little information there is on so important a subject. There is this article from four years ago of course, which claimed that an unnamed supermarket chain and an unnamed "agricultural organization" had separately estimated the country's then population at 77 to 80 million. In 2007, not 2027. As the piece was published in an "interesting facts about our wonderful world" corner in the Independent it has been generally ignored. And it's a staggering figure: if true, the population has been undercounted by 25% (or to put it another way the actual population is 33% higher than we think it is — tricky johnnies these percentages).

More recently, the ineffable Polly had a piece about a year ago on CiF about population undercounting. Polly was concerned about the proposed redrawing of parliamentary constituencies and its impact on the balance of the parties. But I find the population figures themselves rather more interesting. The estimates quoted by the Indy were based on food consumption. The figures quoted by Polly come, how can I put it, from the other end of the alimentary canal. The local water and sewage company has used its coprometric skills to estimate that there are 30,000 people in Slough over and above the official figure of about 130,000. Which is broadly in line with the Indy's numbers.

And just recently we have had the Mail's aerial photos of "garden developments" in darkest Southall.

For my own little corner of Greater Woolwich, I can offer only anecdotal observations. Simply living here and going about my business each day allows me to gather non-quantitative but nonetheless valid observations. Numerous one-bedroomed flats in the district, for example, which used to accommodate retired singletons or as-yet childless young couples are now occupied by African families with two or three small children.

And what reminded me to write this post: on my way from the station yesterday I passed a terraced property which is lived in by a floating population of East European workers. I see a bunk bed has been newly installed in one of the downstairs rooms. Could have just been moved out of the way into a "spare room", of course...

I could bore you with other examples, but the picture is clear enough. The question is, who are all these people who are not keen to be counted? Let me put it this way. A few years ago, the then Government estimated that there were about 350,000 illegals present in the country. This figure was so ludicrous that they were compelled to up it twice over a period of a couple of days. The official figure is now, I believe from memory, about 700,000 to 1,000,000. I rather suspect the actual count is very considerably higher than that.

Fœtal alcohol syndrome?

2011-10-25T08:40:00.000+01:00

The BBC News subtitling computer strikes again.

As part of the BBC's current drive to reassure us just how wonderful the world will be with 7,000,000,000 naked apes living on it, a random beebwallah is pictured standing outside a house in the middle of Nowhere, or Zambia as it is officially known. A woman has, we are told, just given birth. The subtitles relay his words about the newly arrived girl child,

... she is so drunk she does not yet have a name ...

Well, OK, I was watching this in the pub (hence the subtitles) but even so. So young perhaps?

Personally I suspect that renegade slaves of the Purple Lizards are trying to communicate with us by hacking into the news media's subtitling computers. And personally I don't think they're making a very good job of it.

Dennis Ritchie

2011-10-23T21:07:00.002+01:00

There is an irony in the fact that while the death of Steve Jobs made national television news on the day of his death, the death a week later of Dennis Ritchie went largely unnoticed. I found out about it by accident when I got home and switched on the wireless on Friday evening just in time to hear Radio 4's Last Word programme.

Ritchie devised the C programming language which made portable operating systems economically practicable, building on and generalizing Martin Richards' earlier BCPL. Ritchie and Ken Thompson created the Unix operating system. C and Unix drive the Internet. It is Unix (OS/X) that powers current versions of the Apple Mac. It is also Unix that is the basis of Google's Android.

Two very different men contributing in their very different ways. Although Ritchie never sought the limelight in life, that shouldn't prevent us from commemorating him just a little bit better than we have been doing now that he has gone.

Below the line

2011-10-20T09:55:00.003+01:00

The readers' comments sections of blogs and on-line newspapers are often a more useful source of information than the posts and articles themselves. This is particularly true of local newspapers, where below an article ritually vilifying the EDL or being studiously coy about the latest outbreak of MONA vibrancy you will find a right old ding-dong between readers of different factions. Before the comment thread eventually fizzles out in mutual accusations of illiteracy you will often get a clearer insight into what actually went on than the reporter was willing, or allowed, to provide.

And go on, admit it, when you visit CiF, you read the title, the strapline, note which of the resident team of idiots wrote the piece, and then proceed straight to the comments, only reluctantly returning to read the actual article later, if at all.

At our own dear Harry's Place, resident Nazi-hunter Edmund Standing takes a break from publishing photographs of groups of overweight middle-aged men with stiff right arms or of rough working-class types posing with air rifles while trying to persuade us that these revelations are both significant and important. This week Edmund fixes his sights on the music press, with a sideswipe at the merchandizing operation of the Times, finding Nazi collaborators hiding under every desk.

But it's this comment below the line which catches my eye,

Mark Ramsden
19 October 2011, 6:57 am

I did loads of Rock against Racism gigs. Then Red Wedge. Up north, the Tom Robinson Band played to a white audience at a festival. Then we buggered off, a Banghra band came on, the white audience left and there was suddenly a sea of Asian faces. This was not untypical.

Now if it isn't a wind-up, that insight is a damned sight more interesting than the OP itself.

Next week, Edmund tells us how he has ruthlessly purged his CD collection of Bowie, Ferry and Clapton, and of how he has agonized over the underlying if well-concealed righteousness of Morrissey. Stick with the Bard of Burton Bradstock, laddie: boring, cacophonous but ideologically safe.

And why oh why does Harry's Place persist in deleting (or at least hiding) its comment threads after a week or two? Come on David, or Alec, or whoever is leading the admin at HP these days, you know perfectly well we don't visit for the outbursts of abstruse Zionist indignation in the OPs, we come for the punch-ups and the quality vituperation below the line. There's nothing sadder on the wild wild interweb than a link to an old Harry's Place post which has been shorn of its comment thread.

Say what?

2011-10-17T13:45:00.003+01:00

"Africa, birthplace of civilization"

Laurie Taylor speaking on the repeat of the Thinking Allowed programme this morning on the steam wireless while introducing an interview with Ian Goldin, co-author of this celebrationist crap.

As relics from the Sixties go, I generally find the ever enthusiastic and amiable Laurie quite endearing and his sociology magazine programme predictable but listenable, but this tiresome and unthinking celebrationist sycophancy — basically a more articulate variant of Jai the Prolix's thesis (Pickled Politics passim) that the British were aggressive cave-dwelling primitives who spent their days gnawing on woolly-mammoth bones and holding woad-daubing parties until those nice foreigners kindly turned up and brought us civilization, technology and curry — was pretty damned cringe-making. This Goldin character sounded like Philippe LeGrain on speed.

No fair!

2011-10-15T12:38:00.001+01:00

In 2003 I was booted off the old Guardian Unlimited Talk forum for gross unrighteousness. A couple of years later I decided to rejoin under a different identity. As you do. I proposed the perfectly innocent screen name NorfolkEnchants. Unaccountably this was rejected as being too rude. Can't understand it myself.

Now what do I find below the line of a CiF article telling us we are all racists for refusing to eat Chinese stir-fried dog, or some such?

Hah!

And this, I take it, is the foodie equivalent of "British culture is nothing but binge drinking and hooliganism",

lundiel
15 October 2011 10:42AM

Dear Lijia Zhang
Of course it is populist racism. Those who rush to deny it are all well known on cif for their extremist political views accompanied by bucket loads of denials over the issue of racism and an illogical hatred of immigrants and foreign culture.
I on the other hand welcome foreign food and culture......I was brought up on fat, gristle, boiled turnips and cabbage.

Good game, eh?

Kicking that can along the road to nowhere

2011-10-14T11:05:00.002+01:00

Forgive me if I do not welcome the news that

Rise of child sex gangs prompts major study

with the requisite level of enthusiasm. That there is a clear separation of the "grooming" of pubescent girls for prostitution from the more general issue of organized pædophilia is, I suppose, some kind of advance. The desperate need of the Righteous to obfuscate the former — a calculated and frequently racist but essentially cruelly rational criminality — by conflating it with the latter — a dangerous pathology amplified by organization and commercialization — has done huge harm. Organized pædophile "rings" are a problem, but they are a distinct problem from "street grooming" and need to be tackled separately.

If the Righteous still so desperately need the fig-leaf of claiming, as was repeatedly emphasized in the radio news reports this morning, that street grooming is a problem which involves "all ethnicities", and they can find a few dodgy Moldovan and Albanian thugs to technically substantiate that claim, well I suppose we have to make do with that.

But maybe one day, when it affects somebody sufficiently important, we might be able to simply recognize that the street grooming issue is primarily, perhaps overwhelmingly, an issue involving interethnic victimization of mostly (but not exclusively) White teenaged girls by Pakistani gangs for the purposes of both profit and intertribal humiliation. It is a Brown problem. Acknowledge that and deal with it.

But the most worrying aspect of today's announcement is that it establishes a long-term study, targeted for completion in 24 months. Which means that whenever the issue of street grooming is raised, the response will be "this is in hand, wait until the results of the study are published".

We know where the main problem lies. Face up to it. Deal with it. And if, as you are so keen to remind us, "White men do it too", we'll get round to sorting them out afterwards.

Tales from the Multiculture: tickets please

2011-10-14T09:50:00.002+01:00

Railway Enforcement Officers (REOs) have been saturating the Greenwich line over the last couple of weeks. Even if you're not actually checked on the train, it seems that on every journey you will pass at least one station where a group of REOs is surrounding one or more delinquent passengers on the platform and taking down extensive particulars. If it gets to that stage it's usually fairly serious.

The "multiculture" link here is that in every last one of the dozen or so such incidents I have seen, the fare-evading passengers were always Black.

Who knows, maybe like the young Black girl I overheard being interviewed by REOs on the train the other day, these folk believe that merely topping up your PAYG Oyster card with credit is sufficient. Touching in to register and pay for the actual journey is, apparently, optional. Perhaps it's all understood to be handled magically through a sort of high-tech equivalent of vodou or muti. Who knows?

(For readers outside London, "touching in" refers to the procedure of touching your Oyster prepayment card to the yellow RFID pad at the station gateline or on the bus to record the start of your journey. On train journeys you also have to "touch out" when leaving your destination station so that the correct interzonal fare can be calculated and debited. Touching in or out also opens the gate as well, but outside the peaks the gatelines at many suburban stations are unstaffed and are therefore locked open, leaving it up to the passenger to remember to touch in and out to pay his fare. None of this is rocket science.)

This young woman seemed to be adamant that, as she had gone to the trouble of topping up the credit on her card earlier on, that counted as showing willing so she should be let off the fare for this journey. Interesting viewpoint. An address check confirmed that she had "previous" and so the REOs decided to make an issue of it. Even so the young woman seemed to be planning to tough it out until the train reached her destination station and then do a runner. Surprisingly, the REOs showed a bit of bottle for once and actually held the train back at an intermediate station until she caved in and got off there with them to continue the interview.

All fascinating stuff, but pretty much business as usual until an incident this afternoon bumped this stuff up to being just about marginally interesting enough to post about.

Among the repertoire of pre-recorded announcements available to suburban train drivers on the South Eastern is one which announces that a ticket check is about to take place. Now if you give this a brief coat of thinking about, such an announcement doesn't make a lot of sense. If a team of REOs boards a suburban train, they don't want to be giving out advance warning to fare evaders further down the train so they can prepare their escape. Whatever the office wallah who added this announcement to the repertoire may have intended, I have heard this announcement on a number of occasions and it has never heralded the arrival of ticket inspectors. I suspect it is used as a feint, a ruse deployed by the train driver in an attempt to put the frighteners on boarding scrotes he suspects of not having tickets.

I've never had much faith in this, assuming that your average travelling scrote would either be wise to it or, to put it in the vernacular, wouldn't give a fuck anyway: most scrotes seem to have a touching faith in their ability to deny their way out of trouble simply by vehemently protesting their innocence. I recall my first bout of jury service, trying a young man who was so bang to rights the jury might as well have spent the two weeks of the trial asleep, only bothering to wake up on the 11th day to return the guilty verdict. If you're going to rape and murder someone during the course of a drug-fuelled armed robbery, the DNA evidence of your semen is damning enough, but discarding the murder weapon in your back garden and then stuffing the victim's credit cards down the cracks between the floorboards of your bedroom is, shall we say, less than wise if you hope to remain undetected. And yet this youth actually seemed to believe he could get away with it by steadfast "Who, me gov?" denial. This sort of startlingly misplaced optimism seems to be quite common among the scrote community.

So then it was curious to see the announcement ploy actually working today as an Indian geezer actually got back off the train and remained rather shiftily on the platform, clearly intending to wait for the next train. Which was not a great burden as the trains are every ten minutes on that line. But imposing at least a modicum of inconvenience and disruption on the blighters is, I suppose, a small win for the forces of virtue.

Ah, it's a man's life in the Regular Ticket Inspectorate.

Wear your dirty mac with pride

2011-10-13T10:36:00.002+01:00

No, not another Steve Jobs story.

The iDave's latest bit of desperate crowdpleasing, namely getting ISPs to filter out "objectionable" material at the exchange, offers plenty of opportunity for all manner of incremental slipperyslopism. Getting a system established and accepted is the hard part. After that, gradually extending its reach, firstly through "just this once / exceptional circumstances / emergency" additions is relatively straightforward. After a while unannounced extensions to the coverage of the system become business as usual until your perfectly reasonable filtering scheme that "no decent upstanding person" could possibly disagree with does a damned sight more than it says on the tin.

I'm not 100% sure whether the proposed system for new users is "opt in to filtering" or "opt in to p0rn". That doesn't matter because it will rapidly become "opt in to porn" irrespective of the initial arrangements — we don't want the kiddiewinkies being exposed to corrupting filth as the result of an oversight, do we?

One thing I am fairly sure of, though, is that the "shame barrier" which some are speaking of is a bit of a red herring. Having to phone some disapproving lady in Bangalore and, having given your name, address and penis size — no, no; that will not be necessarily — shamefacedly say, "Er, I am a Wanker and I would be grateful if you would turn on the porn access, please."

As it happens, I have been through this process. Let me quickly move on to explain that statement. I buy my domestic internet access from T-Mobile. As T-Mobile's devices, particularly the pay-as-you-go ones, are likely to be bought or at least used unsupervised by children under the age of 18, the Internet access is filtered by default. This applies both to ordinary smartphones and to "mobile broadband sticks" for plugging into laptops. Of which I have both.

The filtering goes a lot wider than your basic flesh porn. It extends to anything which might be considered "harmful" to children, including for example "hate sites" like Stormfront and the BNP. As I recall from the brief period I was subject to these restrictions a number of perfectly innocuous blogs were blocked; unfortunately I didn't keep a record. If I find myself having to replace my dongle again — if you'll pardon the expression — I might explore the range of blocked sites more systematically before I arrange for the filtering to be turned off. Which is quite straightforward, involving a "dummy" credit card payment to confirm your age.

So where in practice will BT, Virgin, TalkTalk and whoever the other one was get their lists of sites to block? They will get them from the established source they use for their own in-house firewalling: the large American netnanny companies. The stoplists used by these companies seem to be compiled by crack teams of prodnoses from the Peoria Baptist Mothers' Union and the Southern Poverty Law Center, to which will be added the censorious pronouncements of our own dear Internet Watch Foundation.

The reliability and judgment of such stoplists and their providers is of course legendary. Remember the Australian pornblocker which barred access to a Dutch driving school? How soon before little Wayne's homework research on the reproduction of flatworms for his GCSE biology gets picked up by the "sex" filters.

And of course if the filtering takes place at the ISP then mummy and daddy are going to be filtered too, innit? Dad's going to be well pleased if he can't get on to the Millwall supporters' chat forum (celebrity contributor Rod Liddle) 'cos it's classified as a hate site. Or Mum can't vote for acts at the X-factor website because Mrs Bluenose in Peoria thinks some of the lady artistes' costumes as shown in the on-line videos are not decent.

If this nonsense actually manages to get off the ground, it won't even manage to clear the perimeter fence at the end of the runway.

Fear not. While it lasts you will still be able to view your favorite Abyssinian goat porn website without censure, even if you have to pretend to be a Hope Not Hate/Searchlight investigator researching the Far Right when requesting removal of the filters.

Business as usual

2011-10-12T09:40:00.001+01:00

Julia brings us word of the downfall of one Benjamin Orororo, an employee of the UK Border Agency at the world-famous Lunatic House. A quick Google lends weight to my immediate suspicion that Our Benny is of the Nigerian persuasion.

A creatively entrepreneurial race, your Nigerians, and Benny's contribution was in using his position to facilitate the stay of prospective settlers, or asylum seekers as they are known in the trade, whose rampant porkies had been unaccountably rejected by the Home Office. For this he charged a modest handling fee, simply to cover his costs, you understand.

Well, dog bites man!

James Thurber's memoir of his time as a code clerk in the US diplomatic service comes to mind. He was posted, I think, to Paris where he was responsible for encrypting and decrypting the diplomatic cables which passed between the Paris Embassy and the State Department via the public telegram service.

Thurber was of course security-vetted before taking up such a sensitive post. This consisted of a friendly chat with a Government agent to whom Thurber was able to confirm that both his parents and all of his grandparents had been born in the United States. That was it, the total extent of the security check: how deep did Thurber's roots in the USA go?

There is a lesson to be learned there. UKBA has serious form for employing people whose loyalty to this country and its interests is at least unproven and frequently questionable. Whether they employ such folk for diversity-quota reasons or, perhaps more defensibly because of their specialist knowledge, or indeed because no sensible indigene is willing to work in Croydon*, I don't know. But as repeated experience has shown, it's not only a dangerous practice in principle, but a total failure in practice. In their eagerness and incompetence, UKBA has even employed illegal immigrants as immigration officers.

I don't know what Mr Orororo's status is, but clearly his roots in the UK do not go deep enough to amount to cultural and "tribal" assimilation to the extent that his loyalties are reliably to our communal interests.

This is part of what I was trying to get at in my earlier post about British identity.

Why are we employing people like Mr Orororo in a job where his loyalty to British interests, such as it may be, is in potential conflict with his tribal loyalty to people from his homeland or his projected "tribal" loyalty to immigrants in general? Why are we employing someone in a role like this where his cultural background is not exactly up to basic North European standards of probity — or to put it less pompously, from somewhere where backhanders are the norm?

To be honest I am wary of employing unassimilated tribals in the police and the armed forces just because they've wangled themselves a British passport. But in the immigration service — madness on stilts.

________
* When my then employer, Megacorp Inc, was looking to reduce its office footprint in central London, as firms do from time to time when some bright spark compares office rentals without taking the whole picture into consideration, it offered one of my colleagues the opportunity to relocate to its Croydon office. This chap lived in one of the remaining non-feral areas of South London and in theory his commute would have been much easier. He refused point blank.

Oh the excitement...

2011-10-10T01:42:00.003+01:00

From the News Shopper:

illustrated with

a random stock photo of part of a fire engine.

The excitement mounts:

illustrated with

a random stock photo of a different part of a fire engine.

The "Beetle", by the way, was a motor car rather than an actual insect. Now that would have been a story.

I'm going to bed now. I hope I can calm down enough to get to sleep.

The halo slips further

2011-10-08T12:55:00.001+01:00

According to the BBC and all newspapers except, seemingly, The Guardian, the Blessed Tariq Jahan has been charged with GBH following a road rage incident.

This is jolly awkward, what? A lot has been invested in promoting Mr Jahan as the Good Paki, or, where more useful, the Good Muslim, an inspiration to all decent folk and a rebuke to those among us who harbour dark thoughts and unworthy reservations about our vibrant multiculture. Steps will need to be taken to resanitize Mr Jahan's reputation. Unfortunately the emotional trauma of his bereavement is not in play for purposes of mitigation, as the incident over which he has been charged took place in July. The current holding position is that the matter remains open as Mr Jahan remains to be convicted. Hmm. Lamping another driver hard enough to break his jaw? I wish you well of that. Could have been Tommy Robinson in a false beard I suppose.

On one level it should not matter that Mr Jahan is a violent former Hizb-ut-Tahrir thug; it should not be allowed to detract from his action during the recent rioting season which stands on its own merits. Ceteris paribus, I would be inclined to that view. But then I find myself wondering, if a White man with a similarly "interesting" background were to defuse an angry White mob in a comparable manner, would he receive a comparably sympathetic and forgiving treatment from the Righteous, the MSM and the Elite? Probably get banged up for being White in a public place and incitement to non-violence, more like. Ceteris decidedly imparibus.

I await developments with interest. I take it Tariq will be returning his Pride of Britain award if he is found guilty.

To develop the point I made earlier. The reason our masters are grateful to Tariq is that he spared them the embarrassing spectacle of one group of ethnocentric third-world savages attacking another group of ethnocentric third-world savages in a supposedly British city, with no practical possibility of blaming Whitey for it.

You know, a little voice — a voice of which I am not proud, but also no longer ashamed — suggests that it might have been preferable if our Tariq had kept his own counsel and allowed the savage colonist tribes to have at each other. Our lords and masters would have had some explaining to do to fit the events into the multicultural, multiethnic narrative.

(Almost) the acme of pointlessness

2011-10-08T09:37:00.002+01:00

The particular genius of the late Steve Jobs has been identified by some as his ability to design hugely successful products that nobody realized were indispensable until he started selling them.

Now a Florida firm hopes to achieve the same with...

(*drumroll*)

Alcohol-free halal “whisky”

(via (via)).

You can just imagine "Tommy Robinson" and Anjem Choudhary down your local Wetherspoon having a friendly chat as Anjem sips at his halal alcohol-free Glenfiddich, can't you? (Not that Anjem was averse to a pint or two of lager in the days when was better known as "Andy" but that's another piece of "Islamophobic" tittle-tattle altogether.)

Surely the second most pointless drink known to man, the top prize being reserved for a thankfully as yet unavailable alcohol-free vodka.

Great orators of the age

2011-10-07T13:10:00.004+01:00

I have to admit that whenever Sunny Hundal has come on the wireless in the past I have tended to tune my mind out until it's over. But this morning he was interviewed on the Today programme attacking the proposed BBC cuts and I decided to listen properly to what he was saying.

Not that one would want to get all ad hominem or anything, but's he's an inarticulate little twat, isn't he? How does he get away with it?

Leaving nothing to chance

2011-10-07T10:42:00.001+01:00

In the seething fleshpots of Greenwich they have all the angles covered.

She: Not tonight, I have a headache.

He: No worries, I just happen to have this packet of Anadin with me.

Plus ça change

2011-10-05T16:12:00.002+01:00

History Today, writing on the 1936 Cable Street incident whose 75th anniversary is currently being celebrated ad nauseam by the Left.

("The Myth of Cable Street")

In the week after Cable Street the BUF ‘conducted the most successful series of meetings since the beginning of the movement’, attracting crowds of thousands and little opposition. Mosley made an ‘enthusiastically received’ address to an audience of 12,000 at Victoria Park Square, which was followed by a peaceful march to nearby Limehouse. By contrast the Communists’ efforts to consolidate their victory had ‘met with a very poor response’. ‘A definite pro-Fascist feeling has manifested itself’, the Special Branch report concluded: ‘The alleged Fascist defeat is in reality a Fascist advance.’

The reason the BUF was able to profit so handsomely from what had initially appeared a setback was that, at this stage, it thrived off the publicity that violent opposition produced. The national media, under pressure from the government, largely avoided reporting on Fascist activity other than when disorder occurred. A leading Mosleyite lamented the ‘total silence’ in the press when BUF events passed without incident, complaining that only after disruption by opponents did newspapers show any interest.

(My emphasis.)

Nothing changes, does it?

And isn't it curious that we have all heard of the events of the "Glorious 4th", when the united working class routed ~~the fascists~~ the police, but nothing of the slightly less heartening consequences that followed?

Plus ça change, plus c'est les mêmes mensonges

Interlude

2011-10-05T11:57:00.004+01:00

Apparently, effective 1 October 2011, bestiality is illegal in Florida. (You find your own links for that one, you pervert; I'm not going to facilitate that sort of thing.)

Ah the things you only learn about when it's too late. Such is life.

Anyway, on to more important matters.

Did you hear about the zoophile country singer? He had to cancel a gig because he was feeling a little horse.

A racist confesses

2011-10-01T10:16:00.004+01:00

Those who are kind enough to read this drivel regularly will be aware that I have little truck with the accusations of racism, or even Racism, that are bandied about with careless abandon (you can't really say "gay abandon" these days, can you?) by Righteous White Liberals and Darkie career race-hustlers. If I call a Spade a Black bastard, it's because he is a bastard, not because he's Black; "Black" in this context is just an opportunistic intensifier. And I dare you to demonstrate otherwise. When you call me a four-eyed racist git, are you suggesting that is it because I wear glasses that I am, so you allege, a racist?

But I have to admit that there some are ingrained attitudes ~~which I'm ashamed of~~ which I find mildly amusing. I was reminded of this the other day during the current Native American Summer (© Pavlov's Cat). When the sun comes out many young White males of the rougher sort are wont to remove their T-shirts and wander round bare-topped. I always find this behaviour vaguely intimidating. Perhaps because the sort of person who indulges in it tends to be vaguely intimidating anyway. Perhaps because of all that testosterone-laden sweat radiating into the atmosphere. Certainly I'm not alone in this view: witness the outbreak of "Shirts must be worn" notices outside the more respectable boozers and fastfooderies. (Question: My shirt is brand new and shows absolutely no sign of fading or fraying. Am I still allowed in?)

But I noticed some young Black males the other day who were walking about bare-topped and it didn't seem at all intimidating. As individuals they were no less intimidating than their White counterparts, but their state of partial déshabillé seemed perfectly natural and unthreatening. Interesting buried cultural assumptions lurking there.

All this brings to mind an earlier brush with deep-seated cultural and racial prejudices: the first time I encountered a physically disabled non-White person. Not a common sight in the 1960s, I have to say: persons of colour were then a) few and far between and b) mostly recently-arrived first-generation immigrants who almost by definition are youngish and able-bodied; the crook and the broken ones tend to languish back home.

But my reaction to this person, and to pretty well any other handicapped non-White until fairly recently, was one of extra compassion, over and above what I would have felt towards a similarly disadvantaged fellow White. It took me half a lifetime to realize what the subtext is that underlies that reaction: "Being handicapped is an awful thing. But having the misfortune to be handicapped and a Darkie as well is to really draw life's short straw."

There you go. Us White folks are human too.

The Empire strikes back

2011-09-29T15:21:00.003+01:00

After 25 years I thought I had finally settled into a sort of armed truce with the Beast of Redmond. Microsoft has abused its position right from the start, as the monopoly supplier of the operating system while at the same time writing applications to run under it, effectively providing one published standard to third parties while quietly using an undisclosed and more capable set of interfaces for its in-house applications. Of course the undocumented OS calls and all those nifty direct memory pokes and peeks eventually leaked out or were reverse-engineered and became part of an unmanageable de facto industry standard. Three decades of fun and random instability have ensued as a sequence of not entirely backward compatible versions of DOS and Windows have been published and third-party publishers have struggled to reverse-engineer and and adapt.

But Windows is unavoidable and, since Win95, has been quite a decent if flaky GUI. I've never fancied the Mac, which is certainly well swish and reassuringly reliable and devilishly stylish to boot, but comes with the nagging feeling that you need to get Steve Jobs' written permission before executing each mouse click. And as for installing unapproved third-party applications, expect a visit from a couple of heavies from Cupertino who'd like to have a friendly chat. Linux is fun and great for building servers — I must have built and run a couple of hundred of the damned things over the years when I worked for a living — but it remains a constant guerilla war to keep it running as a client laptop in a changing environment. I have a little Linux netbook which I carry with me for logging into public Wifi hotspots. Switch it on in Wetherspoon's and it's up and running and connected to the free Wifi within 20 - 30 seconds, unlike the two to three pints my old Windows Vista laptop (now thankfully stolen) used to take to start. But I'm not planning to use the EeePC for anything more than web browsing using the pre-installed Firefox.

So I've accepted Windows 7 as the OS but seek out competent, no bullshit third-party and preferably freeware apps to run on top of it. VLC to watch DVDs, ImgBurn to burn the occasional CD or DVD, Seamonkey and Firefox to access the Interweb. An old version of Winamp, without the video support and the insistence on managing my media experience® which infests current versions of the program, to play music and other sound recordings. Paintshop Pro v7 for simple picture editing. Icedax under Cygwin for ripping CDs and a command line tool to compress the WAV files to FLAC. To be fair, Microsoft's very own Wordpad suffices for most basic word processing but OpenOffice is there waiting for any fancy bollocks that turns up, and that bloody paperclip can chase itself up its own jacksy.

And then my TV dongle packed up. It came as a bit of a shock, to be honest. We've become so used to these no-moving-parts electronic gizmos being ultra-reliable. You expect it to become obsolete, you resign yourself to the fact that the software is often crap, but the last thing you expect is for the hardware to fail.

Even if you've got a proper telly on the wall, these little Freeview sticks are handy to have, and so I sallied forth to Messrs Maplin's and bought myself a new one. Now these gizmos are jolly clever, a DVB-T2 tuner the size of the top joint of my thumb, no less. But the software is pushing the envelope a bit, particularly in rendering the display. One gets the feeling hardware short cuts are being resorted to. So these things have always been a bit hit and miss. Unfortunately the software bundled with the new gubbins turns out to be just too unreliable to use, on my machine anyway. And so it was that, after 18 months of using this machine, I resorted to the pre-installed Windows Media Center for the first time.

And ye Gods what a patronizing fascist it is! If I want to record, ad hoc and manually, one section of one programme, say an interview on the news programme I am currently viewing, I click on the little red button and what does it do? It starts recording OK, but also goes off and consults the EPG and automatically schedules all future episodes of that programme for recording. Very helpul, chaps, but not quite what I was after. To deal with this I have to chase through various menus to "cancel the new series". This is typical Microsoft. Plus, of course, it records not to an industry standard format, like MPEG2, oh no, it has its own proprietary closed-source disk-filling format, WTV. I hear dark mutterings that this overblown crap incorporates DRM stuff which stops you playing back the recording on a machine other than the one it was recorded on, even if it's an off-air recording for personal use. I hate these bastards.

One typical little example of the gulf between what I expect in software and what the Beast deigns in its condescending wisdom to provide: suppose I mute the sound on my laptop, for example if I am watching a TV programme and the phone rings. Like most laptops, there is an "Fn" key to facilitate this. Media Center detects this change and automatically switches on subtitles. Now that's quite clever and quite a thoughtful little feature. I'm sure people appreciate it. But why is it not offered as an elective option? Why is there no obvious way of switching it off if it is not what I require? And where is that set of pull down options at the top of the Media Center window, in particular that essential Edit|Preferences|Advanced or Tools|Options submenu? (Hmm. A thought suddenly occurs. I'll bet they're there in the inevitable "Pro" version which you have to pony up extra $$$ for. Yep, that'd be the Micro$oft way alright.)

Alright, I admit it. I'm an unreconstructed old fart with a command-line mentality. As soon as I get a new Windows machine the first thing I do is switch it to the Windows Classic interface 'cos the default XP-and-later interface is too much like interacting with a fucking Tonka Toy. The second thing I do is to kill the wallpaper and set the background to plain black and turn off any silly little noises and fatuous animations. Look guys, I know you're just leveraging the baseline experience to meet the dictated aspirations of the 21st century market and, er, sell more product an' stuff, but I'm a 63-year-old bloke who cut his computing teeth on one of these things
at a blistering 10 uppercase characters a second, not a podgy-fingered toddler in nursery school.

Bah humbug! Let the war of attrition recommence.

By golly that's better. I haven't had a good anti-Microsoft rant for, ooh, at least three and a half yonks. Małgorzata, another bottle of cheap Polish lager, prosze! And a quick sniff of your apron, if you'd be so kind.

Compliments of the British taxpayer, Sir.

2011-09-28T23:55:00.007+01:00

I was listening to the amiable Mrs Elizabeth Heiney's genteel conversation programme, Midweek, on the steam wireless just now. Well, a couple of hours ago, but that's close enough. One of her guests was the Nigerian musician Muyiwa Olarewaju. Apparently he's fairly upper crust in Nigeria and his full name is about a yard and a half long, and he rattled it off for our benefit at Libby's request. You don't frighten me with your long names, matey, I've worked with Tamils. So there.

Anyway, Muyiwa was born in Nigeria and sent to England as a child to "get a decent education", living in London with a series of distant relatives. A fairly common practice; and at least he did better out of it than the unfortunate Victoria Climbié and Damilola Taylor.

But it's never occurred to me before to wonder specifically, who is actually paying for all of this? I suppose he could have been sent to a fee-paying independent school fully funded by his parents back in the old country, but I can't say I'm entirely sanguine about that assumption. There are no checks on eligibility for free state education.

So I guess we're not only providing a free world health service but a free world education service as well. No worries, just get to the UK and they'll look after you.

Hmm. To quote that excellent, if noisy, popular American songster Mr M Loaf, "Life is a lemon and I want my money back".

Addendum

What is it with bloody Google? After I posted, the Blogger response screen offered me this:

The other day they were trying to find me a nice Muslima to marry. That bastard Hundal's behind this, I tell you. Nurse, quick, the orange pills!

No platform..

2011-09-27T12:21:00.005+01:00

... for people we don't agree with. 'Cos the normal rules don't apply to them, innit?

From Corporate Watch via Lancaster Unity.

Silverdale Tours has been revealed to be the latest company prepared to profit from transporting the English Defence League (EDL).

Revealed to be? As in having the name Silverdale written in big letters on the side of the coach along with the local EDL's own confirmation that the coach came from Nottingham. Intrepid sleuthing there lads. Award yourself a couple of gold stars.

The EDL had planned a march through Tower Hamlets to the East London Mosque on 3rd September 2011. The planned demonstration was in the vein of loyalist Orange marches in Northern Ireland.

A heavy police presence kept groups separate throughout the day but, at around 6pm, a group of EDL supporters, travelling in a vehicle hired from Silverdale coaches, drove past the East London mosque hurling insults. The coach was pursued and set upon by a crowd who broke windows and hurled street furniture. As the news spread around Whitechapel, hundreds of local people poured onto the streets and confronted police who had moved in to protect the EDL.

Confronted police who moved in to protect the EDL? What, to protect them from a mob of overexcited violent savages who might well have committed murder? Naughty policemen, hindering the righteous revenge of the oppressed like that. As to whether the EDL contingent "hurled insults" from inside their coach, with its sealed tinted windows, I can't say. I wasn't there, was I? (Or should that be, "innit?") At least Corporate Watch refrains from propagating the meme about the EDLers breaking the windows themselves, from inside the coach.

In February 2011 Andrews of Tideswell, another company used by the EDL in Bradford, made a statement that it would not carry the EDL (or other protesters) again after several of its coaches had their tyres slashed by anti-fascists prior to the EDL's Luton demo.

Ah yes, this little incident. Nice!

Silverdale Tours are based in Nottingham at Little Tennis Street South, Nottingham,NG2 4EU.Tel: 0115 912 1000(0115) 912 1000, Fax: (0115) 912 1558, Email: info@silverdaletours.co.uk.

That's very detailed. And what, perchance, are readers expected to do with this information? Send them a Christmas card? Recommend them to the students' union for getting to the next UK Uncut gig?

The article ends with:

Companies that have provided services to the EDL in the past and have not pledged not to do it again include:
[List of coach hire companies follows, with detailed contact info]

You might like to read that sentence again. I certainly missed the double negative first time round. This is a list of companies which have not yet given in to threats from "anti-fascists".

Now it's just possible that a number of irresponsible antifascists might be so enraged that they might pop round and relieve their frustration with a spot of impromptu tyre-slashing. Not that we'd condone such behaviour of course. Heaven forfend. We're just saying, like.

As a friendly warning, if you get my meaning. I mean, nice little business you've got here. Wouldn't want anything to happen to it, would we?

The most depressing thing is that these people don't see the contradiction.

Kudos to the Guardian

2011-09-21T14:23:00.003+01:00

Now there's a statement you don't read very often round here. In a piece which is actually about the Een Stannat's "Get London Reading" campaign, Nick Cohen's original copy began

On the worst night of London rioting almost every shop in Clapham High Street was ransacked - except one. The bookshop.

and you can still see this version on the numerous sites which have quoted the piece or copied it wholesale. Following comments from readers, this is corrected in the online version to

On the worst night of London rioting almost every shop in Clapham Junction was ransacked - except one. The bookshop.

The correction has been made silently, which makes some of the below-the-line readers' comments a bit confusing. The Guardian, whatever else you might say about it, would have explicitly acknowledged the erratum.

Une petite question

2011-09-21T09:56:00.005+01:00

Angelique Chrisafis writes in the Guardian about the impact of the niqab ban in la belle France (via). It is illustrated with this photograph,

"Hind Ahmas", reads the caption, "one of two French [?] women facing a fine for wearing the niqab..."

How do they know it's her? It seems to me there's an opportunity here for our cash-strapped media to save money on photographers' time by using a single stock photograph of "a woman in a niqab". Or perhaps a small range of photos covering women of different skin colours. Ditto burqas.

For what it's worth, I would oppose the introduction of a similar universal ban on the wearing of the burqa or niqab in public places in this country, certainly when simply walking down the street. There's something "un-British" about that; and it also opens up other cans of worms — what about people dressed up in animal costumes in an advertising stunt or as part of some kind of festivity, pour exemple?

Instead I would clarify, through guidelines and if necessary through legislation, that any private or public organization which required actual or potential facial identifiability of people on its premises would be supported by HMG against claims of racial or religious discrimination. For example where a railway season ticket or building pass requires the photographic identification of the named individual, or where a shop or bank requires customers' faces to be visible to staff and security cameras.

Keep it simple: our gaff our rules.

Timing is all

2011-09-20T16:30:00.003+01:00

An elderly German-sounding gent approaches the checkout in Waterstone's.

"You haff an excellent bookstore," he comments to the assistant — or bookseller as I believe we are now required to call them — as he hands over his intended purchase for scanning.

The assistant, sorry, the bookseller preens, appreciatively accepting the compliment on behalf of his colleagues. A pause of at least 4 or 5 seconds ensues.

"... at Trafalgar Square," finishes the elderly gent. The bookseller slumps visibly.

I'm convinced there was no sarcastic intent. Perhaps he was struggling to remember the place name. Or whatever. The bookseller was of the same opinion when he and I discussed the incident afterwards.

But the natural comic timing was exquisite.

Alle Pässe u. Ausweise, bitte

2011-09-20T10:41:00.005+01:00

The young woman finds a seat in the beergarden, carefully skirting round the feral furniture I photographed earlier. The stools have settled down a bit since my last visit and are grouped attentively around their respective parents. Nonetheless there is still a bit of a nervous edge about them, and the woman is wise to give the cluster a respectfully wide berth.

Meanwhile her male companion enters the pub to negotiate the purchase of alcoholic refreshment. Some 30 seconds later he re-emerges and, standing outside the pub, gestures for his lady friend to join him. "I've just lost ten years," he comments glumly as they set off to pursue their quest elsewhere.

Hmm. 18 + 10 = 28. Looks about right. The bloke definitely looked to be in his late twenties to me. And yet he had obviously been challenged for ID by the barmaid.

Madness.

I hope somebody doesn't take it into their heads to ask me for proof of age. The only photographic "ID" I carry around is my old freeloader's bus and train pass — my "Oyster Pay Never" card as I sometimes call it to wind up the farepaying punters. As of this writing, you have to be at least 61 to qualify for a blue Freedom Pass in London, but I don't think it's on most pubs' list of approved IDs.

Quote of the day

2011-09-19T11:39:00.003+01:00

Libby Brooks writing at CiF,

Perhaps the Gypsy and Traveller population is so regarded because it is a national vexation out of all proportion to its numbers.

Just a thought.

Nurse? The screens!

2011-09-18T11:08:00.007+01:00

Private Eye has been published for the past 50 years, and I've been reading it for about 45 of them. And I'm seriously beginning to wonder if it has finally outlived its original purpose. For what point is there in parodying and lampooning politicians and the press when they make such a good job of doing it to themselves?

We have had the Guardian obsessing about Kelisgate. First, Hugh "I is (sort of) a Darkie and I is a victim" Muir and then Barbara "I is an overprivileged White tart and I apologize for everything" Ellen trying to parlay this tedious minor chantoose into some kind of latterday St Stephen Lawrence with which to browbeat what remains of the unbroken indigenous British population.

According to Wikipedia, "Kelis" is pronounced /kəˈliːs/, or for those of you who don't speak IPA, cur-LEASE with the stress on the second syllable. Well Gordon Ben Et, as they say in Israel. It would seem that this attention-seeking bint, who it appears is too thick to remember her own surname and so it is hardly surprising that she has had difficulty understanding which country she is in, has not been getting nuf rispek from the local serfs and so she kicked off with some outrageous cock-and-bollocks story which the Grauniad eagerly laps up to demonstrate how incorrigibly racist the Brits are even after 40 years of exhaustive antiracism indoctrination. Thing is, Hugh and Barbs, we've heard all this before and we don't fucking care.

And, frankly, the only kind of "red-faced Brit" likely to use "slave" as an ethnic slur against an "African-American" would himself be of West African heritage. Contrary to Alex Haley's sanitized portrayal, those who captured and initially enslaved his putative African ancestor Kunta Kinte would have been other native Africans who then sold him on to Europeans. "Real" Africans are quite aware of this and some of them take malicious pleasure in reminding American and Caribbean Blacks of their Loser heritage.

And now to cap it off, we have the fascinating case of the Cherokee and the Freedmen. To the extent that I can get my tiny brain round this, it's a grubby political inter-ethnic conflict revolving around access to federal handouts. Unfortunately the protagonist groups both have victim-status, which is well tricky, innit. The agonizing among the Righteous must have been truly gutwrenching. But don't worry, the White Man is to blame in the end.

I can't cope with any more World of Victimhood (now available for Xbox 360 and PS3) just now, so let's get back to the real world with a wildlife photo I shot on a recent safari in Sarf London. (Sorry about the poor lighting.)

Here we have a nest of semi-feral beergarden furniture spotted in Greenwich. Note how the young, known as "stools", retain some mobility and also have short arms, known as "rests", with which they entrap dog leads and attack passing ankles. The adult form, the "table", is however completely sessile. The arms disappear entirely and the feet fuse into a single pod. Curiously, in this stage of the beast's lifecycle, the original quadrupedal form of the beer table's ancestor, the dinner table, becomes apparent, if only vestigially.

The adult beer table is generally docile and obtains its nutrition mostly from spilt beer and discarded food, as well as the occasional incautious pigeon. The juveniles, however, when particularly hungry, have been known to take babies and small dogs. While beergarden furniture can generally be approached safely, tourists are advised to exercise vigilance.

The group photographed above, it should be added, have quite clearly been badly spooked by something and should not be approached at all.

As the late great Dave Allen was wont to say, Goodnight, thank you and may your God go with you.

How (not) to run a blog

2011-09-16T12:53:00.006+01:00

In this post by Jai the Prolix at Pickled Politics, we are told (as of this writing) that there are "71 comments". This is not true; there are 53 tweets and retweets linking to the post plus 18 actual comments. I don't really understand why people list incoming tweets like this; there is rarely anything interesting in the text of the tweet itself. OK, Sunny, you want to tell the world how achingly popular your blog is. If you're that desperate, fair enough, but why so disingenuous about it. Others (eg Seymour) at least have the honesty to explicitly separate out the two subtotals.

Below the line, as we apparently now say in blogspeak, we find regular commenter the well-meaning but grumpy Douglas Clark bemoaning the fact that only he and the equally well-meaning and excruciatingly even-handed Sarah Annes Brown are the only ones bothered to comment on Jai's most important post.

Well this sort of stuff doesn't help:

(captured We 2011-09-14 09:45)

(captured Th 2011-09-15 10:47)

Gone, gone, and never called me Mother! Not deleted in the sense of having their contents deleted and replaced with an explanatory message, if only a standard generic one, but removed silently, without explanation. Quietly airbrushed from cyberhistory. (Well, excepting arseholes like me who are given to snapshotting untrustworthy websites.)

I'm not familiar with Just Visiting's posting history at PP but he has been a fairly regular commenter at Liberal Conspiracy where his comments have been cogent and non-abusive. Regrettably they have never toed the party line du jour.

Earlier on in the comment thread we had this exchange,

The opening post had indeed been substantially cut down: as it happens I have a snapshot of the original. If you've read any of Jai's many posts at PP without falling asleep, you'll understand why I usually refer to him as Jai the Prolix. If Jai talks as he writes, I wouldn't want to be depending on him to warn me that I was about to be run over by an approaching train. By the time Jai got to the gist, after a broad history of railways with special reference to the importance of India in their development, I would be long dead and cremated and in all probability the offending train will have reached the end of its working life, been decommissioned and scrapped.

Grudging plaudits to Sunny then for losing patience and cutting the bugger down. But to do so absolutely without notification in the case of a published and "established" post is another matter. No wonder Douglas and Sarah are puzzled. Quietly correcting unremarked typos, spelling mistakes and minor grammatical infelicities is one thing, but this is stealth editing worthy of the Ministry of Truth and is very discourteous.

So there you have it. Artificially inflating comment counts; stealth-editing of the opening post; silently deleting comments which disagree with the site's point of view. A fine example to us all.

Bogging off effectively

2011-09-12T15:20:00.002+01:00

While we're on the subject of food at Wetherspoon's, here's a bit of a marketing failure.

The pub manager has, as you might expect, some discretion to supplement the standard food menu with special offers, whether to clear an unexpected overstock or simply to keep the punters interested. And of course he gets to price them too.

I think Sean (for it was probably he) has missed a trick here. All the meals are priced at £4.99. Yet the 12oz Angus steak is not only 50% larger, but would probably have been one of those premium offerings — you know the sort of thing, hand reared beast hung to mature for 30 days after slaughter while the farmer's daughter sits by the carcass singing it soothing ballads to improve the tenderness. So a higher price would be expected.

Now I was tempted by the 8oz rump steak, which was entirely sufficient to still my hunger. The 12oz Angus would, as we say oop North, have been overfacing. On the other hand, I felt somehow foolish for not "maximizing my value" and would have felt irrationally embarrassed in ordering the "lower value" selection at the bar.

So in the event I took my stomach elsewhere.

Pricing, especially where special offers, bundles and BOGOFs are in play, is a subtle game. Had Sean differentiated the prices by no more than a pound, I would probably have felt comfortable enough to proceed.

Desperate business

2011-09-11T20:52:00.003+01:00

First it was Pork & Bombardier sausages, conjuring up terrifying images of the MoD's plans for "managing down" the size of the armed forces.

And now this:

Desperate times in the Church too, it seems.

And they used us...

2011-09-11T18:36:00.005+01:00

Laban's piece on the enslavement of vulnerable derelicts by the "travelling community" reminds me of a a programme I heard on the steam wireless a few months ago. Simplest I think to copy the BBC's summary across,

A new series of The Choice begins this week with the story of Mikey Walsh.
He grew up in the closed world of the Romany gypsies.
Rarely at school, he seldom mixed with anyone outside his community with its colourful characters and strict family code. And despite its violence and hardships, it was the life that Mikey loved.
Eventually he was faced with the agonising decision of whether to turn his back on everyone and everything he knew .....and face an alien world with no education and support... knowing he would never be able to return.

Mikey, it turned out, was gay. His father attempted to beat and humiliate this "weakness" out of his son, who eventually ran away with a casual gay lover who soon abandoned him. Mikey eventually found his feet in the outside world and was even eventually reconciled with his father.

Quite a sympathetic story and I found myself wishing the young man well.

But one thing stuck in my mind. Mikey's father made his living by the tarmacking scam. He was apparently entirely sanguine about this, happily cheating and threatening pensioners out of their meagre savings. Even Mikey himself accepted this without demurral.

My experience of the "travelling communities", Romany and Tinker, has been that they regard the "settled community" as stupid prey animals to be exploited. Without mercy.

They hold us in contempt. I have to say that I am inclined to reciprocate the sentiment. Fuck 'em.

Update (12th at 08:00)

The local MP is calling for "us" to be the eyes and ears of the police. Erm, three small points.

1. No member of the settled community is going to get anywhere near enough a criminal pikey encampment of this nature to see anything suspicious.

2. If you are close enough to spot something dodgy and you grass the bastards up, they will find out and your life will be literally over.

3. In any case, have you not noticed that pikeys are a designated victim group? If you grass them up or are otherwise disobliging about their activities, you will probably be done for racism.

The identity game

2011-09-10T12:25:00.010+01:00

I was groping round for a snappy title there, on the model of "A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse" or even "Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me". But you'll be pleased to learn that I thought better of it. Anyway, onward and upward!

I rarely read Cristina Odone's pieces in the Telegraph — I can get all the aggravation I need from my CiF addiction, ta very much — but this one sucked me in alright,

Muslims feel so British, they're ready to die for this country

Cristina writes,

The riots brought out a nasty streak in thousands of looters – and in thousands of ordinary citizens too. They didn't kick in a shop window or make off with a pair of Nikes. But they gave their xenophobia free rein. While the sikhs, Turks and Poles drew praise for their efforts in defending their neighbourhoods and restoring order, hostile little Englanders gave vent to their paranoia: immigrants can't be patriots, was their mantra – and Muslims above all. (For a taste of these rants, have a look at the responses to my meek and mild article on immigrant patriots).

They'd do well to read the riveting study of Muslims and the Army, "Ties That Bind" which Policy Exchange has just published. Author Shiraz Maher discovers not only that almost 90 per cent of Muslims here feel British, but also that 79 per cent of low-skilled Muslims would consider joining the Army and just under 48 per cent of Muslim women said they would too.

Hmm. Startling numbers there. I'm not sure how they square with other polls of Muslims testing them for primary loyality to the Ummah, Shari'a, the righteousness of 9/11, etc. But I guess he who pays the pollster writes the questions. So let's just pick up the assertion that a significant proportion of UK-based Muslims "feel British" and run with that.

It's all very nice, Cristina, but it's only part of the story, isn't it? Identity is a two-way street. Your tame Union Flag-kissing Muslims can feel as British as they like, but that doesn't automatically mean that others, for example the "indigenous" British — remember us? — will necessarily reciprocate the sentiment.

Despite the best efforts of Bhikhu Parekh and his little posse, British identity is not a property available for vacant possession. There are incumbents. Folk like me. So do we clasp these keen wannabe new Brits to our cultural collective bosom? Maybe. Maybe not.

But hark! I can already hear the approaching hooves of a detachment of the Righteous, bearing their proud motto, "They were born here, so they're British. Or are you some kind of racist, hmm? End of. Innit."

Fraught area, this. I think a little bit of distance is needed to lend perspective.

Sunny Hundal, political blogger, professional angry wog and UK-born son of Punjabi immigrant parents, is always asserting (writings passim) that "you don't have to be White to be British". Indeed, last year Sunny, for some career-driven opportunistic reason or other I haven't fathomed out, spent several months demanding that he was now to be acknowledged as not only British, but English as well.

There are times when a spot of righteous whataboutery is your only man. And this is one of them. Let's consider a counterfactual scenario.

As best as I can guess from known family history and assorted circumstantial evidence, my ethnic background is a mixture of bog trotting Irish, Saxons probing north into the Midlands and Lancashire, and Norwegian Vikings settling in the Wirral and South Lancs. (I propose to ignore Oppenheimer's revisionist theories here: they don't really affect the overall conclusion.) There are persistent family rumours of an exotic minor aristocratic connection through dalliance between a serving wench and the young master at some country house in, er, Cheshire, but that's as exotic as it gets. OK, so I'm a six-foot blue-eyed Viking with dodgy eyesight and a penchant for cheap Polish lager.

Now in real life, my father did his wartime service in the RAF as ground crew; he was one of those jammy bastards who never left Albion's soil for the duration. When the Interval of Unpleasantness came to an end in 1945, he returned to Manchester and married his childhood sweetheart. My parents were raised in literally adjacent streets in Moston, where I was born in 1948 and where I grew up.

No ambiguity about my Britishness there, then.

OK, let's switch to the counterfactual. In this scenario my father, lacking the metalworking skills which landed him in the RAF, is drafted into the Army and posted "out East", where he ends up at the end of the war in the Punjab. He takes a shine to the place and believes he can make a living there in civvy street. His childhood sweetheart comes out to join him and I am born in 1948 in, shall we say, Chandigarh in newly independent India.

I grow up fully bilingual to native standard in both Punjabi and English, with the required smattering of Hindi thrown in. Fully au fait with and comfortable with Punjabi life, though retaining my nominally Christian heritage. Picture me in your mind's eye perhaps 40 years ago, if you will, a six-foot, pallid young man with blue eyes and hair the generic turd brown colour of the North European. Picture me answering back to local racists with a fluent flow of Punjabi profanities that would make Sunny blush, let alone his mother.

So, in that scenario, could I claim to be Indian? Or indeed Punjabi? Would that claim be accepted by the local "indigenous" Indians? And if not, why should I extend the corresponding courtesy to Sunny or to any other South Asian resident in the UK, whether born and raised here or not?

You want me to be inclusive, then rather than screaming "racist" at me, try convincing me that your "all the same colour under the skin" inclusivity is a universal principle.

So let's get back to Sunny's question, "Do you have to be White to be British?" It's a real "Do you still beat your wife?" question, that one. Well it is if you answer yes or no as the questioner wants you to. I am going to answer differently.

Do you have to be White to be British? It helps. The British are a North European ethnic group (or long established amalgam of several such groups if you prefer it that way) with a North European secular Protestant culture. To be accepted as fully integrated British it does help to be able to pass the John Smith test. By this I mean that if Jan Kowalski, the UK-born and raised son of Polish immigrants, changes his name to John Smith, nobody would know that his family had not been here since King Ælfred burnt those bloody cakes. Until you looked it up on Wikipedia, did you know that Denis "Adenoids" McShane was a UK-born Irish Pole. But if the similarly placed Vijay Patel, born in the UK of Gujarati parents, tried the same stunt nobody would believe him.

So yes, being White, and preferably North European White, does help. That's the way the cookie crumbles. But what of the others? I'd say it's a slower process, a process which may not run to completion for all. Intermarriage helps. Cultural assimilation helps. I know a chap of Jamaican parentage born in London, entirely British in his speech and attitudes. His Jamaican heritage is part of his background, not his foreground, just as my known Irish and putative Viking heritages are little more than distant semimythical background to me. In the present I am English and therein lie my cultural, political and tribal loyalties.

But some, even unto the 3rd and 4th generation, may in the end remain alien, or might at best become "country members" of the British club.

Tariq Khan, let us say, may speak English with a native command and a Brummagem accent, but if he speaks Urdu indoors, goes regularly to mosque, spends his evenings watching Pakistani satellite TV, flies "home" to visit the folks in Peshawar or Karachi every year and is negotiating to marry off his daughter to a nephew from "back home", just where do his political, cultural and tribal loyalties lie? You can't just be British only when you're going down the DWP office.

There's more to this than simply where you were born and your entitlement to a British passport. This goes beyond the simplistic yes-no shibboleths of the Righteous.

As for Sunny-ji, I'd conclude that he's not British, he's a Punjabi expat with British citizenship and living in the UK. His loyalties lie with his Desi tribe, not with us palefaces.

Does any of this matter? Potentially, yes, if you need to answer the question: in whose interests is this country ultimately to be run?

Interesting times.

Addendum

By the Great Spotted Phallus of Samarkand, that confused it. This is the selection of advertisements that Blogger offered me after accepting and posting the above,

The algorithms must have been spinning like an oozlum bird on crack.

Slab news

2011-09-07T14:21:00.004+01:00

Well, I said that the myth that it was the passengers of the trapped EDL coach in Mile End who broke the coach windows from the inside would rapidly achieve unstoppable memetic status.

And in the readers' comments to an article in yesterday's Een Stannat we have

Of course, you knew that Stephen "Tommy Robinson" Yaxley-Lennon is actually Nick Griffin's love child with Carole Thatcher, didn't you? It's obvious, innit? I mean, I've just said so, on the Internet, so it must be true.

Mindworms

2011-09-06T13:00:00.005+01:00

So I was looking round the Internong for a picture to illustrate this post and I found this little selection. Look at the second illustration in the top row. There is something deeply disturbing about a purveyor of road signs who cannot tell his left from his right.

Anyway, press on regardless. Whenever I see one of these signs on my travels, hopefully pointing in the correct direction, I find myself wondering whether following the sign will lead to anything at all diverting. I have to say I've always been disappointed so far, so I try my best to ignore the signs now. I am no longer impressed even by the refreshing honesty of the signs which point to a "Pedestrian Diversion".

A seemingly conditioned response that was mildly chuckleworthy the first couple of times but, like the ritual witticisms of a middle-distance relative which you come to dread each Christmas, it has become a bit of a curse.

It's a mindworm. Just as an earworm is a catchy tune that you cannot shake out of your mind's ear, I think of a mindworm as a chain of thought that is predictably and inescapably triggered by some repeated event. A chain of thought that you come to wearily accept rather than delight in.

I seem to have acquired a new one. Around the City of Westminster you will encounter examples of this sign,

This one is at Charing Cross. There are also a number of them at the slightly posher end of Shaftesbury Avenue. One imagines that the streets management division of TfL, for it was indeed they, put them up to warn drivers of double decker buses and other tall vehicles that they might get clipped by the overhanging branches of these rather splendid trees.

Unfortunately a little voice at the back of my head tells me different. "Low", it says, refers not to the height off the ground of the tree's outer limbs, but to to the tree's moral character. These are low trees, trees which pass offensive remarks about our sartorial taste as we pass, trees which delight in extending a stealthy root for the inadvertent tourist to trip over, and then snigger vulgarly when he does so. These are trees which, if they can get away with it, will clip you a blow on the back of the head with a low hanging bough that didn't seem to be there a moment ago. Worst and cruellest of all, these are trees which, when a pair of birds builds a nest in their upper branches, will stealthily withdraw the sap from a key supporting branch, carefully timing the branch's slow starvation so that, as the chicks are beginning to fledge but are not yet quite ready to fly, a gust of wind will snap off the branch, tumbling the wee things to their demise.

Low, evil trees. Trees to give a wide berth to.

Nurse, the blue pills, quickly. No, no. It's withdrawal symptoms. Wetherspoon's have run out of Lech. I'll be alright after a little nap.

Meme news - Tower Hamlets edition

2011-09-05T22:19:00.004+01:00

It's interesting how memes develop. And how they persist, seemingly indestructible, in the face of any and every counterargument. (Remember the EDL supposedly beating up innocent "Asian" youths at Chadwell Heath, or indeed BNP "thug" Bob Bailey going round randomly abusing "Asian" youths in Barking?)

When I came across this link

Extremist group EDL members breaks coach window from inside
& media blames Muslims

I thought, aha, the paranoid are on the march; this'll be fun. Then I read the more considered than its previous effort but still very slanted piece at the Mail about the attack on the EDL coach in Stepney. A number of the commenters there are also suggesting that the EDL passengers broke the windows of the coach from the inside. Hmm, something more to this. So I finally got round to watching the YouTube footage,

And at roughly 20 seconds in, a window on the coach does appear to shatter outwards. Indeed, one Daily Mail commenter suggests that the window has not only been broken from the inside but that an EDLer throws a "slab" through it at one of the poor "Asian" rioters. Looks quite plausible when you view the video.

Hold on a minute. Let's think this through. You are a group of EDL sitting in a coach in hostile territory. The coach has broken down and is going nowhere fast. A number of "Asian" youth are running about in the street. At least one of them has thrown a projectile at a window of the coach, fortunately without doing any damage. So what do you do? Apparently you break one of the windows and climb through the hole in order to attack the innocent "Asian" lads. Well no, according to the video footage, you break the window and then just sit there. OK, you toss a "slab" which you happen to have handy through the hole where the window was, and then you just sit there. Doesn't work does it?

Well, it doesn't work unless you sign up to the standard trope that the EDL are mindless thick illiterate violent knuckledraggers. Then it's perfectly obvious that a coachload of EDL would respond to a situation like this by punching a window out with bare hands and then just sit there like a group of very puzzled and very dim gorillas, not knowing what to do next and making plaintive ooh-ooh-ooh noises.

Yes, OK then. Let's download the video in as high a definition as possible and take a closer look. I find the Firefox Video Downloadhelper extension handy for this. I'm sure there are plenty of other tools just as good. Then I viewed the relevant section of the video. Repeatedly. And in slow-mo. And in slower mo. And then frame by frame.

At about 17s the young man in the black top throws a projectile at one of the windows towards the rear of the side of the coach. The window survives. He runs forward and at about 20s throws another projectile at a window half way along. Either that or he strikes the window with something. The resolution is not good enough to be sure. Immediately the window seems to flex outwards and a portion of the pane crumbles away and slides downwards. This is the so-called "slab" — a large piece of broken glass detaching itself and dropping. If the window has been broken by someone inside the bus then I can only say that the co-incidence in timing with the youth's action is quite remarkable. Most impressive in fact.

In my earlier post about Searchlight's fascinating gallery of photographs supposedly depicting Tommy's private army brandishing their weapons, I admitted my ignorance of guns and readers were kind enough to fill in the detail for me. Perhaps someone can help me out again, for as a non-driver I have had little incentive to gen up on the detail of the glazing of vehicle windows. But I would guess that what I describe above is how you would expect the sort of safety glass installed in the windows of a coach or bus to behave, namely to break gracefully and preferably away from the passengers.

Dunno. That's my take on it anyway. It makes a damned sight more sense than the other explanation.

One thing I can say with certainty is that reason will make sod all difference. The meme is launched. Years from now Lefties and Muslims will tell the tale of how EDL thugs deliberately punched out the windows of their own coach in order to ... well what? To provoke the innocent Muslims into attacking them, I suppose.

Out of the mouths of babes and branch secretaries

2011-09-05T18:09:00.002+01:00

From Socialist Worker's liveblog of Saturday's festivities in Tar Amlets (via GoV).

A number of trade unionists spoke to the protest. John McLoughlin, branch secretary of Tower Hamlets Unison, said, “We got rid of the BNP before and we won’t let the EDL get a foothold in Tower Hamlets.

“There is a lot of anger among working class people at the moment. The EDL want to exploit that and to turn people against each other. But in our union branch the most common name is Begum. Muslims are a key part of the trade union movement.”

(My emphasis)

They really don't understand, do they? Look, if there were a couple of women in your branch with the "surname" Begum, and they were decent folk who obeyed our laws and contributed to our society, then they would be welcome guests in our land, welcome to stay and prosper and even to put down roots. But if the most common "surname" among your members, let alone just among the female members, in your branch is Begum, then that is indicative of a process of colonization, of invasion.

No Sunshine, I'm not impressed and I really am not getting that happy warm vibrant multicultural buzz here. You treat the ongoing process of colonization as an achievement. Wanker.

On a minor point of pedantry

2011-09-05T11:27:00.005+01:00

The Righteous appear to be setting great, nay enormous store by the "fact" that the EDL did not penetrate the Islamic Republic of Tower Hamlets last Saturday. (Richard Seymour, Nick Lowles among others). The symbolism of this seems to be very important to them in epitomizing the "defeat" of the EDL and the vindication of their ¡No pasarán! rallying cry.

Little Nicky Lowles even has a nice piccie of a City of London boundary post to ram the point home. (At a guess, Whitechapel High St at its junction with Mansell St, but don't quote me on that.)

Leaving aside minor incursions by small groups, it is true enough that the mass static demonstration was confined to Aldgate High Street in the City of London. The police line blocking the path of the EDL crowd stretched across the street about 20 metres west of the Tower Hamlets boundary.

So, er, no pasó then, eh, Comrades. Well, not quite. At the end of the demo, the EDL were escorted ... no, as this video and "Esmeralda's photo report clearly indicate ... the EDL marched, chanting, banners aloft, along the Minories, across Tower Bridge and into Tooley Street to board their dispersal buses.

One hates to mention this, but the big road junction at Tower Hill and the Tower Bridge northern approach road across which the massed EDL marched are firmly within the borough of Tower Hamlets. Tower Hamlets is so named because it includes the Tower of London, a royal palace which, as a matter of English political history, cannot be tolerated to be within the bounds of the semi-independent City of London.

So, on a point of pedantry, not wishing to rain on your parade and all that, the EDL not only marched in Tower Hamlets on Saturday, they marched right across it. No skin off my nose, but I expect it may be important to some people.

That is all. Feel free to resume your vital debate about the number of Huguenots that can dance on the tip of a Lascar's penis.

¡No pasarán! my arse. NFSE, more like.

Now that's jolly useful

2011-09-03T11:11:00.003+01:00

If you live in London you will be familiar with the "countdown" displays at many bus stops, giving the estimated number of minutes until the next bus. When the bus stop displays were first trialled they were pretty hit-or-miss; locating buses with GPS is no great shakes nowadays but accounting for variations in traffic delays is clearly a two-pipe problem. But they must've been honing their algorithms 'cos these days the forecasts seem to be pretty reliable.

The ever-excellent and exhaustive Diamond Geezer alerts us to a new TfL service which puts these displays online.

Now if I can get that one working on my mobile, tharral be a cracker.

Nice to be able to write about something positive for once.

They don't speak proper anymore, innit?

2011-09-02T13:07:00.011+01:00

A splendidly, quintessentially Daily Mail piece in yesterday's, er, Daily Mail about the decline of English usage,

OMG! These buzzwords, are like, soooo uber irritating!
Why it's suddenly trendy to speak like an idiot

in which, among other things, the incomparable Harry Mount fulminates against the phrase "Can I get..." used in place of "May I have..."

Whenever someone next to me in the queue at the coffee shop says: 'Can I get a decaf latte?', I'm willing the person behind the counter to reply: 'Where do you think you are, Greenwich Village? In Central Perk, waiting for the cast of Friends to arrive?

'No, you can't get a decaf latte. It's my shop — I get the latte. You ask if you may have a latte and I will get it for you.'

All good stuff, though I have to admit that I've resorted to this particular Americanism myself occasionally and it doesn't really bother me that much. Mostly used in "Can I get a glass for that?" when some spotty teenaged bar associate assumes that everybody has succumbed to the tiresome affectation of swigging beer straight from the bottle rather than from a glass in a civilized fashion. Look, Kiddies, if I wanted to neck my beer straight out of the effin' bottle, I'd buy it in the bleedin' offie for half the price and drink it in the street, innit? Awright?

But what really gets up my nose is when the latte in "Can I get a decaf latte?" is pronounced lah-tay.

OK, it's an Italian word and you really really want to demonstrate that you know that it's a foreign word and you're relaxed with it, don't you? Well the Italian pronunciation is something more like latt-teh with a short 'a', but we'll forgive you not attempting the geminated 't' and that short 'e' sound which doesn't normally occur word-finally in English.

Try latty. That's close enough. And a sight less pretentious. Please, pretty pur-leaze. You know it makes sense.

Pedantic rant over. As Ken Dodd used to say, "Ah! That's better. I needed that!"

Off to the pub for a bottle of Lekh, er Leck, er... Oh sod it, that Polish beer in the green bottle. And can I get a glass for that? Pint glass please, I'm not going to sip it like some nancy boy with my little finger sticking out at an angle. Where do you think we are, Old Fucking Compton Street? Gordon Bennett!

The woolly mammoth in the room

2011-09-01T16:12:00.001+01:00

Sorry, I had to write this post if only for the chance to use that title.

It's important not to go completely overboard over recently published results about the proportion of Neanderthal DNA in modern European (or more precisely non-Subsaharan African) populations. The mainstream media in general — and I don't just mean the Daily Mail — has serious form for picking up on some tentative and circumscribed experimental or analytical result and hyping it up into the breakthrough of the century. If the Mail on Sunday tells you that you can catch cancer off a dinosaur bone, well if I were you I'd seek a second opinion.

One thing I've learned from reading the "news" pages of (the regrettably increasingly sensationalist) New Scientist over the last 50 years or so is that if team A at the University of Scunthorpe reports an experimental result that red-haired men produce the largest average volume of ejaculate per orgasm, then sure as eggs team B from the Peckham Institute will come along in due course with an entirely different and contradictory set of results. And that's measuring something well-defined and physically measurable.

Going off at a slight tangent, I recall — but cannot pin down a reference to — a report of an experimental test of the slur, "all you Darkies look alike to me". Subjects were shown numerous pictures of individual people and asked to remember facts associated with each individual displayed. Subsequently tested, subjects scored better in identifying individuals of their own ethnic group than in distinguishing individuals of a different ethnic groups. The results were similar irrespective of the ethnicity of the subject, ie "all you Honkies look alike to me" too.

The result provides some tentative support for the "common sense" observation that while you need to be able to quickly and reliably distinguish members of your own clan as individuals, outsiders — and in particular those of different ethnicity who are not candidates for inter-clan breeding — need only be identified collectively as "other".

But note the necessarily artificial and constrained nature of the experimental set-up. Much scientific progress is the accumulation of steps like this, steps which are frequently beset with dodgy a priori assumptions too.

Science is a process, a trend line, a series of testable models, not a single yes or no answer on a piece of paper inside a cosmic sealed brown envelope. (And do remember that "42" turned out not to be the correct answer after all.)

Nevertheless there does seem to be an interesting consensus emerging that Homo sapiens sapiens, having left Africa to seek a better life™, interbred with H. s. neanderthalis, so that Africans and Europeans are different in substantive rather than superficial ways.

But hey, this blog is more about racial politics than racial science. So how do the Righteous handle this uncomfortable idea?

The Observer's editorial points the way

Neanderthals: a bit of rough

with the strapline Their input into our gene pool improved our ancestors' lives immensely.

Our ancestors benefited? Er, the Neanderthals are our ancestors. This isn't like catching a dose of the clap off some hairy Dago you met on your Mediterranean holiday and developing improved immunity to subsequent exposure.

It is common to view Neanderthals as ignorant apemen. Yet their input into our gene pool improved our ancestors' lives immensely and meant they were not nearly as nasty, brutish and short as they could have been. We owe our grunting, club-wielding predecessors a short vote of thanks, in other words.

Translation: Immoral Europeans debase their pure African bloodline by having sex with monkeys; fortuitous slight improvement to disease resistance follows.

Below the line the response of the Righteous is try to distract attention with corny jokes, while the Unrighteous poke them gleefully with pointed sticks.

How important any of this turns out to be I have no idea. What the significance of that 1% - 4% genetic input is I don't know. To a layman, the stark difference in the phenotype between Africans and Eurasians suggests it may be quite significant. As do other attributes such as ... well, let's not get into the race realism quagmire just now, eh?

But the dogma that "race" does not exist, that we are "all the same colour under the skin" and that race is a social construct, remains a core belief of the Righteous.

So I'm just going to sit back and enjoy watching them try to defend it, throwing in a "What about the Neanderthals, then?", from time to time.

Good game.

A foreigner in one's own land?

2011-09-01T09:49:00.005+01:00

I came across this little news item in the Newham Recorder. Nothing particularly special, just an everyday tale of a visa overstayer screwing the system. But I decided to do a quick dramatis personæ of the people mentioned by name,

Kay Atwal - the reporter - Punjabi?
Elzabeth Addo - the crook - Ghanaian
Judge Chapple - the beak - English?
Unmesh Desai - the councillor - Gujarati?

This, you will recall is the Borough of Newham in London in, er, England?

Andy no like-a yo face

2011-09-01T09:49:00.004+01:00

From the archives,

Etaoin Shrdlu would never have stood for this.

Mind you, it does beg the question of what a trade union is doing sponsoring a football team in the first place.

Tales from the Multiculture - integration proceeds apace

2011-08-31T19:10:00.003+01:00

Good news! Integration of the ethnic minorities into mainstream culture is going ahead in leaps and bounds.

As I made my way to the ATM to convert a modest fraction of my accumulated lucre into anonymous beer tokens. I was accosted by a gentleman of highly indeterminate ethnicity. Spade with a touch of wog, or vice versa, perhaps; I think that sort of malarkey goes on in the Caribbean. Alas not quite in the Tiger Woods class of material achievement, though, as he asked me for spare change in a tone of voice which challenged me not to dare an impudent denial of his entitlement. I refused politely.

Concluding my transaction with the machine, I turned to walk on, only to encounter our friend again, repeating his demand for spare change. What the fuck was he expecting, a gash £20 note? I fear my reply was rather less polite this time round.

I've always marvelled at those street beggars who sit beside ATMs hoping to shame folk into dropping them the odd tenner. I might have more sympathy for their chutzpah had I not also watched them reporting in on their mobiles to their "co-ordinator" when their shift came to an end.

This was beautiful downtown Greenwich by the way. This beggar is a relatively new one on me. Looks a bit like a younger version of long-term Greennwich fixture Joe the Parasite, and has the same arrogant manner. Perhaps it's a family business.

Uncharitable rant ends.

Here we go again

2011-08-31T13:03:00.003+01:00

Those inventive chappies at Hope not Hate have put up a remarkable set of photographs, altogether too remarkable in my entirely unhumble opinion, purporting to show leading EDLers posing for the camera with a variety of firearms in a variety of largely private settings.

Evidently an element of the ongoing campaign to associate Anders Breivik with the EDL, it builds upon the deliberate misinterpretation of Tommy Robinson's comment after the Breivik atrocity that a similar atrocity in the UK was probable within the next five years to unjustifiably imply that the EDL intends to carry out or foment such an atrocity.

Well, I leave it to others with more knowledge of firearms than I to comment on the plausibility and effectiveness of the motley collection of weapons on display — the last time I handled a rifle was 50 years ago when I was in the CCF at school.

And I leave to the Photoshop experts the analysis of the authenticity of the photos; though I wish you luck given that they are so highly compressed that the typical filesize is 5 to 10K. Why might that be? Some may be real but innocent. What to make of the photograph supposedly of "James Clarke (Nottingham EDL)", for example, posing with a firearm in front of an RAF banner of some kind? A joke pose at an ex-serviceman's gathering, maybe?

But, as I say, I'll leave all that to others better equipped and just offer you one thought. Not so much a reductio ad absurdum, more a reductio ad testiculos totales.

Let's suppose that these photos are all genuine and represent what they are implied to represent. If the EDL are a genuine and serious emergent terrorist organization, do you really think the leadership would allow such pictures to be taken at all, let alone circulated in some manner? If the pictures are truly what they are made out to be, then we can only conclude that the EDL are a bunch of useless Walter Mitty muppets who, given a modicum of attention by the security services, are no real threat to anyone except themselves.

In a word, bollocks.

Oh, and incidentally, did anything ever come out of HnH's last splendid effort in this field, the famous EDL photoshoot? That's gone very quiet, hasn't it? No arrests then?

Very nasty indeed

2011-08-31T10:11:00.008+01:00

The Muslims Against Crusades website is currently displaying as its "intro page" a short flash movie featuring the silhouette of an approaching airliner with engine noise sound effects, followed by a digital clock display counting down to the precise 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center attack. (via)

Here is a selection of stills (full screen but scaled to 50% to keep total file sizes reasonable).

Quite despicable.

Afterthought (13:00)

After both the 9/11 and 7/7 atrocities, there were reports of Muslims in the UK openly celebrating. I wonder if we'll see the same at the impending anniversary. Or indeed worse. That'll do wonders for cohesion.

Tales from the Multiculture - a correction

2011-08-31T09:16:00.002+01:00

Those who are kind enough to read this drivel regularly may have noticed that the "Tales from the Multiculture" series majors heavily on public transport in London, and in particular on how the trains are packed to the gunwales with persons of a non-indigenous persuasion jabbering away on their mobiles in foreign. Or more frequently jabbering on one mobile while keying stuff into another. Busy little bees, whatever it is they are up to.

Not that trains have gunwales, but you know what I mean.

I have to report a correction. You see, I do most of my travelling offpeak. Even when I was working in a proper 40 hour a week job until a few years ago, I was generally able to avoid the full-on 9-5 commuter crush; being an IT wallah called upon to make frequent out-of-hours and weekend attendances does have its quid pro quos*.

Recently, however, circumstances have compelled me to undertake a number of local rail journeys at the height of the peak, squeezed in with the rest of the hoi polloi. And the difference in demographic is startling. You can almost imagine yourself back in pre-Neather London.

So then it would appear that during the peak hours the trains are full of White people. But during the offpeak the trains are full of Dark people.

Make of that what you will.

___
* quid pro quos: apparently the correct plural form of quid pro quo is quæ pro quibus. Now that would be really showing off.

Serves you right

2011-08-30T16:45:00.003+01:00

Yesterday's Guardian has a charming little "and finally" piece to end its editorial column, relating the tale — yes, I did actually write "tail" there and had to go back and correct it — of "Station Jim", a dog famously resident at Slough railway station who was so appreciated that he was stuffed and displayed there after his death. (Read the link.)

Being the Guardian, they can't resist appending a sententious political tie-in to this amusing little anecdote, can they? (Or should that be "innit?")

Jim is in surprisingly good nick. His coat is glossy, and his case well-polished. Compare this with Britain's other modern mummy, Jeremy Bentham, whose severed head has been repeatedly pinched by students amid dubious japes. We would appear to have greater respect for dead dogs than for dead philosophers. It would be nice to think that, rather than revealing deficient regard for abstract thought, this reflects a proud national trait: the British capacity for boundless sentimentality about animals, including those who are animate no more. Maybe, just maybe, as they rebuild after the riots, shops could consider putting stuffed creatures in their window. Public taxidermy as the antidote to public unrest? Stranger things have happened.

The obvious response is not long coming, in the first below-the-line comment in fact,

How about stuffed rioters in their windows?

Serves you jolly well right, you sanctimonious barstewards. Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if many of the rioting demographic were more likely to break the window and attempt to eat the stuffed animal. I think you might be on a loser there.

Addendum

I've just noticed another comment further down BTL

Oh I remember Station Jim from childhood when we went to visit my Aunt Agnes in Slough. How fantastic he's still there! Is The Dolphin pub still there too? I used to thin it was called Courage The Dolphin, and that it was named after a particularly brave cetacean.

Reminds me of when I was sitting in the beer garden (ie several of those one-piece wooden table and bench doodahs in the car park) of a South London pub when a passing German tourist stopped to inquire. He was intrigued by the inscription in huge letters on the side wall of the pub.

TAKE COURAGE

it proclaimed. He had seen several of these encouraging mottoes on his travels round London. Was this an English tradition, he wondered? He was most disappointed when I explained that it was the brewery's advertising slogan.

I've often wondered, should I perhaps have left him with his happy illusion.

Is Ketlan psychic?

2011-08-30T12:45:00.002+01:00

Or is he losing what few marbles he had and becoming totally paranoid.

A kebab outlet in Leicester was destroyed in an explosion in the small hours of Monday. As of this writing media reports (eg this at the Mail) tell us that foul play is suspected and that six people have been arrested by police. A body has been recovered from the wreckage, so this is now a murder inquiry.

None of the media reports, most of them repeated from a single source, identify the suspects in any way, beyond the fact that they are two men and four women. An unusual gender ratio for a violent crime of this nature, to be sure, but beyond that there is absolutely no indication yet of who or why.

And yet Ketlan Ossowski ('Antifascist') sees fit to repost the BBC news report at Lancaster Unity, adding the following tags,

Does he know something the rest of us don't, or does Ketlan automatically assume that all violence in this country is the work of the EDL? Perhaps he can enlighten us.

Tribal balkanization news

2011-08-30T12:30:00.000+01:00

A further example of the sort of intercommunal violence between alien groups resident on European turf which I referred to in my recent posts [1][2] about the miraculous intervention of The Blessed Tariq Jahan.

Nigerians in Mallorca go on the rampage after one of their number dies, allegedly at the hands of a Romany. And why, in the name of Fuck are there enough Nigerians in Mallorca to constitute a "community" in the first place? Still, I suppose it keeps the bastards away from Woolwich.

An insuperable barrier

2011-08-30T10:08:00.005+01:00

In the past year or so I have dropped into the habit of browsing second-hand bookshops, something I've not done for years. In particular those few bookshops, of which type there are still one or two along the Charing Cross Road, which have outside trays full of miscellaneous junk. Booksellers often buy in job lots from, for example, house clearances. The dross, clean and intact but not even considered worth pricing up, is relegated to outside trays, where it is offered at a flat rate per item. (Often with bulk discounts like £1 each, 5 for £4, which seems counterintuitive for items as individual and specific as books, but there you go.)

I'm not after specific titles or valuable "collectables"; I'm more interested in the serendipity of finding things like long out-of-print Penguins and Pelicans which I missed "first time round". There are unexpected bonuses too, like a 2d London bus ticket presumably used as a bookmark in a Penguin probably last opened in the early 1950s. And a couple of non-fiction paperbacks containing relevant newspaper clippings from the 1960s or early 70s, inserted by the original owner. Fascinating stuff.

My most serendipitous find was a copy of the first Pelican I ever owned personally, my original copy of which has long since disappeared. Simeon Potter's Our Language, a popular exposition of English linguistics, brought back from a shopping trip into Manchester by my parents who knew I was interested in that sort of thing.

And in the original plain 1950s edition, too. And all for £1.

It was in this spirit that I entered a newly opened bookshop in Greenwich. There were no outside trays. In a sense which will become clear, the whole shop was one big "outside tray". There was interesting stuff on offer, to be sure, at prices of at most a couple of pints on the Wetherspoon scale.

I toyed with one and began to approach the counter, behind which stood a couple of late-middle-aged, middle-class volunteers. I could not proceed. As with the trapped characters in The Exterminating Angel, there was no physical barrier preventing me from approaching them, but nevertheless I simply could not take those steps forward to complete the purchase.

The clue lies in the term "volunteers". For it was an Oxfam shop, and there is no way I could bring myself to contribute so directly and knowingly to that organization's coffers.

And so it was that I returned the volume gently to its shelf, turned and left, and spent my money on a pint of expensive but delightful Japanese lager in the Spanish Galleon next door.

Sex sells

2011-08-29T13:30:00.000+01:00

I was wandering round Waterstone's — yes, Edwin does visit and even patronize commercial emporia other than Wetherspoon's and Sainsbury's — when I saw this on promotion

and I found myself wondering whom this rather cheesecaky cover image is aimed at. Christmas-shopping mums who are not sure whether they'd like to shag Brian or mother him, perhaps. Mebbe he'll fit both roles: despite his gamin looks, our Brian (who is a Chadderton lad so I will hear nothing said against) is actually 43.

Of course there might be an alternative audience. Perhaps Comrade Putin, He-man of the Soviet Union, might appreciate a copy.

But the other thought which immediately came to mind as I walked past the display was of a series of Carol Vorderman-sponsored GCSE revision books which used to be on sale in Smith's about a decade ago. Carol and her advisers have obviously thought better of the strategy and current editions feature a chaste head and shoulders photograph: Carol is careful these days to separate her arse-of-the-year telly milf persona from her celeb schoolmarm image. But the earlier version, of which unfortunately I have been unable to find an online image, featured our Carol smiling up at the camera and showing off a serious amount of peekaboo cleavage. Tsk!

Sex sells, but only when it's all done in the best possible taste™, of course.

Angelfood McSpade rides again

2011-08-27T12:17:00.007+01:00

Islam v Europe has a post up about a confectionery called Negro on sale in Switzerland. As might be expected, this appellation has attracted the wrathful attentions of the po-faced and professionally offended in the corporate person of a body called the Commission fédérale contre le racisme. Even the robustly sensible Swiss suffer from this sort of bollocks.

You want offensive, I'll give you offensive. The reference to edible negroes immediately brought to mind this Robert Crumb cartoon.

Click for full-size offensiveness. (Source.)

Number crunching

2011-08-27T09:52:00.003+01:00

Number of police officers deployed in London on the last night of the riots: 16,000

Number of police officers to be deployed in London for the Notting Hill Carnival: 16,000

Riposte of the day

2011-08-26T12:57:00.004+01:00

Brendan O'Neill, for whose sensible commentaries I am developing an increasing respect, has a suitably worthy blog post up at the Telegraph on attempts to lay sole blame on Facebook and Twitter for facilitating the recent festival of firesetting, stone throwing and informal out-of-hours shopping.

Below the line, there is a brief outbreak of whataboutery among the hoi polloi in which someone mentions Belgium. Then we get...

Yep! That just about sums up Belgium.

Diddums

2011-08-26T11:40:00.001+01:00

From Socialist Worker Online,

We have a right to march against the EDL racists

In an unprecedented step, Scotland Yard has applied to the home secretary to ban all marches in five London boroughs for 30 days starting from 2 September.

This means that the English Defence League march in Tower Hamlets, east London, set for 3 September will be banned. But the blanket ban will also cover the counter-demonstration organised by Unite against Fascism and United East End.

The English Defence League still plan to come to Tower Hamlets to hold a static protest.

Already anti-racist activists in Tower Hamlets have put out calls for the counter-demonstration to go ahead. Socialist Worker backs all those who want to stand up to the racists. We call on everyone to come to Tower Hamlets to show that the racist EDL is not welcome.

Everyone who opposes racism and fascism should protest about the ban, which denies us our right to stand up to the EDL, and should mobilise to come to Tower Hamlets on Saturday 3 September.

(My emphasis)

*snigger*