Yesterday evening I had an interesting debate with Wiqqi. He made some valid criticisms of PooterGeek.

He feels that this ‘Blog is “incredibly camp”. Guilty as charged, m’lud. He says that, instead of gentle dissection of my opponents’ views, I tend to go for “intellectual bludgeoning”. It’s a fair cop, guv’nor. He also thinks I should give people a little more background on my own opinions otherwise they will assemble a false image of me from the little glimpses they get here.

I’m going to try to do something about the first two criticisms over the next few weeks and this site gets enough visits from strangers now that it’s probably time I made it clearer “where I’m coming from”, just in case newcomers misunderestimate me.

When I touch on politics here it’s often to have a go at the sort of people who were prominent in student “debate” when I was at college: rich, white, expensively educated and intellectually lazy. Many of them, and many of their peers from other universities, now work in the media. They are usually Left-leaning, usually anti-American. Even when I agree with their views, their arguments in support of them are often flimsy—so, yes, I bludgeon them.

When the BBC or newspapers like The Guardian and The Independent attack obvious and deserving targets I tend not to join in, justifying it to myself on the grounds that the World hardly needs anyone else to tell it, say, that U.S. and U.K. have been propping up thug governments in Africa, Latin America and the Middle East for decades. I’m going to try to be more balanced.

On religion, it would be wrong to think from my postings here that I have a grudge against Catholicism, Islam or any other faith in particular; I have a grudge against organized worship in general. This probably won’t change much, but I’ll try to be less offensive about it.

On popular music I am a great believer in properly crafted songs, stylistic innovation and stuff performed by humans that makes you want to dance. I despise most “indie” music, almost all things retro, and lyrics that don’t scan. Any musician that the NME hates is worth a listen. (Right now the White Stripes are on the NME‘s Web front page; they make exactly the kind of clumsy, derivative, joyless, fashion-driven student rock I hate.) As many of you know I am (still) bitter from my (long past) years of music industry rejection and music press sniping, so, on this subject, there will be no compromise. You’ll have to peel my computer keyboard from my cold dead hands before I stop beating pretentious, ignorant “music” journalists and ill-informed, loud-mouthed performers about the head with it.

Now, how long before Claire emails me to tell me not to be such a wuss about politics and religion?…