08Oct04 — 0

“Hunting Blacks And Jews”

Not having a television, I have only seen some online snippets of Sacha Baron-Cohen‘s comedy creation “Borat” before. Tomodachi at Susurration linked this week to a clip of an American hunter agreeing with the invented Khazakstani television presenter in front of cameras that it would be alright by him if the USA had a game reserve where Amer’cans could hunt Jews and blacks. For those of you not familiar with the man and his techniques, Sacha is only pretending to be a barely literate anti-Semite; he’s Jewish and has a first from Cambridge. Stay through the recorded bigotry to hear the interviewee’s hilarious response to Borat’s deer imitation [requires a player that can handle Windows media—ptui!].

07Oct04 — 1

David Duff Update

David Duff has sent me two gracious emails. I was going to say this anyway from my geek’s perspective, but he stated in one of these emails—I believe truthfully—that he has never posted here or elsewhere under different names. As Chris Brooke notes David Duff has made some good contributions at the Stoa and he has done so here too from time to time. If only he could deal with his Dark Side…

I was intentionally unfair to him in the comments of my banning post. This was because, up until now, I have felt hamstrung by my own scruples and manners in dealing with his unreasonableness. I wanted to make a point harshly; all my tactful approaches had failed.

Sitting here, on my throne in the Geek Cave, I have absolute nerd power to destroy any who challenge my grip over this great Web empire. I am, however, a Good King. I approach the metaphorical balcony of my palace daily, say my piece, and then maintain my regal bearing while The People pelt me with the rotten leavings from their humble peasant farms. This is how it should be. I pray that I will never have to banish one of my subjects again, but, like Switzerland, Pooterland is a country that reserves the right to expel its guests.

06Oct04 — 5

Nerr Nerr Nerr-Nerr Nerr

There are some broken “arguments” that stupid people deploy with a smug smile and a fold of the arms time and time again. Subject to even superficial analysis these supposedly debate-clinching gambits break. You know the sort of idiot offerings I’m talking about: “I’m not racist, but flooding this country with people of another culture can only lead to trouble”, “How can I be ‘anti-Semitic’, eh, when Arabs are Semites too?”, “So tell me, how is anyone is supposed to make money from software that’s free?”, “We were the ones who armed him in the first place—Rumsfeld wasn’t saying that when he was shaking hands with him!” After a while you know which standard spanner to pull out of your reasoning toolkit and lob at each one. Phil Libin deals with the relatively new old chestnut “You can’t fight an abstract noun” and saves me the bother of doing so again, but online.

06Oct04 — 11

New Labour Censorship

One thing that has always surprised me about PooterGeek over the years is how good-natured and reasonable most of the comments here have been, compared to many ‘Blogs. ‘Bloggers have linked here commenting specifically on this strange phenomenon. Admittedly, PooterGeek is not a forum for free speech. I have deleted thousands of spam comments, suppressed one libel directed at someone very rich, removed a whole thread after a contributor admitted she had gone too far in attacking me personally, and barred one commenter whose “contribution” linked to a program designed to make visitors’ PCs dial a premium rate phone line.

David Duff has now collected the not-very-impressive honour of being the second person I have barred from PooterGeek. Last night I hoped to head off the problem with a long and silly Duff parody I briefly posted. One of the reasons the debate is healthy around here is that commenters usually take my hints well, but I realised he wouldn’t, so I deleted the jokey post and the single (neutral) comment it had attracted (sorry, Timbeaux).

I thought about banning Mr Duff a while back when he made a false and appalling insinuation about me and my father. He still hasn’t apologised for that. Instead, like a chav caught on CCTV, he pretended, as usual, complete ignorance of an offence plain to everyone else’s eyes. This week he started using the comments here to make excuses for racists. I pay for PooterGeek. I’m not paying for that. For your future reference neither will I pay for people to deny the Holocaust, incite violence, or promote Morris dancing here. Everyone else is welcome to write about everything else, and (especially) to continue criticising, mocking, and abusing me as usual. From now on there’ll be a slight filtering delay after you post before your comments appear on the site.

(Anyone who knows me will know that I do not deploy the words “racist” or “appalling” in print casually and I haven’t been casual about this decision—not that I expect to be besieged by The Friends of Duff any time soon.)

04Oct04 — 0

PooterGeek Writes Bollocks (Again)

My rant about the British and sex before I went away got a result: two hot scientist babes contacted me privately to offer me correction. First, Helena, a specialist working on pathogenic species for the Wellcome Trust, pointed out that, despite my checking it twice, I had misspelled “chlamydia”. Then Leasey, co-author on this Nature paper, pointed that I had seriously exaggerated the statistic from the article I linked to. In fact, one in eight sexually active teenage girls has the disease.

I have to go now. A woman in a white coat has just walked into the Geek Cave, peered over her spectacles at me disapprovingly, and unravelled her hair from its severe bun.

04Oct04 — 2

Even The Mediocrities Are Good

At my sister’s I also took advantage of access to Sky Sports to watch Villa draw entertainingly away at Blackburn. These are two Premiership teams so ordinary their shirts are sponsored by firms you’ve never heard of, yet the speed and quality of the play was so much better than, say, ten years ago, that it’s scarcely recognisable as English football. Modern Premiership first-teamers are super-fit and the accuracy of their passing has improved to the extent that every loss of possession seems worthy of a groan from the armchair. (I have to admit there were still too many of those.) Christ, what do Arsenal / Man United games look like these days?

04Oct04 — 9

Over And Over

I also no longer buy either the London Review of Books or The Independent (daily or Sunday). I think I should go further and stop reading spare copies of either journal. Reviewing paperbacks in the broadsheets is occasionally delegated to some emptyheaded twentysomething trustafarian, but Laurence Phelan in the Sunday Independent should be given a special prize for unselfconscious, callous, stupidity. He reviews the often contemptible London Review of Books‘s 25th anniversary anthology like this:

“The contributors’ initial responses to 9/11 are variously insightful, prescient, graceful, and provocative (‘however tactfully you dress it up, America had it coming’).”

Call me “provoked”. The nearest Phelan gets to condemning this quote is to imply that other pieces in the book are more “considered”. The massacre of thousands of innocent American civilians at the beginning of this century exposed in a terrible moment the nastiness and snobbery of this country’s political, media, and academic classes and it does so over and over again. So did Europe’s persecution of Jews in the middle of the last century and its persecution of Muslims at its end. Comments like these stink of the same blank spite and caste conformity.

04Oct04 — 0

Never Mind The Swiss Racists

On trains this weekend I have been mostly reading other people’s newspapers. Turn to page 47 of someone else’s Saturday Guardian magazine and gasp at the advertisement for skin whitening cream illustrated by a fair-skinned mixed-race couple kissing.

04Oct04 — 0

Where The Hell Was PooterGeek?

First of all I hung out with Claire as she researched her new book, talking to various bright Cambridge dons about Europe and Britain and religion and immigration and anti-Semitism and the state of the World today. Her questions were so good and the resulting conversations were so long and wide-ranging that there is far too much to write about here. I might stir some samples into PooterGeek posts over the next few weeks. Claire, you should have let me commit it all to MiniDisc.

Then to Oxford, for a big retirement do. To answer Backword Dave’s question, lunch with Chris Brooke (at the middle-class McDonald’s) was excellent, thank you. Though it was only later when I was chatting with [namedrop]the Master of Balliol[/namedrop] that I was reassured that Chris isn’t employed by the Tourist Board to play the role of of a young Oxbridge politics don, so much does he look and sound the part; Chris does that job for real. Incidentally, Chris, you ‘Blog our lunch and get seven comments; none of them are about me! I’d appreciate it if you kept your visitors on-topic next time. I am hoping that Chris, Norm and some other British ‘Bloggers will be joining me for a scholarly gathering on the subject of ‘Blogging next year. Watch this space.

I bottled out of my rebel gesture and paid for the dinner in the end—one of the main organisers was a PhD student who I like immensely. The meal was excellent, the company was stimulating and diverse, and the preceding seminar and reception were interesting and fun. Balliol seems a lot healthier than it has for a long time. Presentation, lecture, reception and dinner were all in honour of Denis Noble, who, apart from being a computational physiologist of renown, campaigned energetically for British government funding of science and against the awarding of an honorary Oxford degree to Margaret Thatcher. There was a time when being a Leftie and sympathising with Israel’s predicament made a common combination. No longer, I’m sorry to say. Noble has been described as “a famously Marxist don”—he isn’t; he has also worked conspicuously and unembarrassedly with Israeli academics.

Then to my sister’s huge new home in the Derbyshire countryside to see my folks and take photos of my niece and her spectacular hair. The wardrobe in the bedroom of the house that my sister and brother-in-law own is about the size of the kitchen in the flat I rent. The further north you go the less insane the British housing market becomes; the easier it is to strike up a conversation with a stranger without being arrested; and the more likely you are to bump into a member of my family.

04Oct04 — 2

Still Alive

There will be some ‘Blog posts before the end of today, I promise. Come back this evening. I’d also like to say, in passing, that you’re all looking particularly gorgeous, even though it’s a Monday.

30Sep04 — 4

Class President

Good ‘Blog arguments are interesting because the participants are sophisticated enough to spare each other the usual faulty reasoning and informed enough not to quibble too much about the premises. Because of this, and because the ‘Blogoholics are less likely to be as simply tribal and cautious as politicians, debates on ‘Blog comments pages can, on occasion, be gripping. Most importantly, unlike those involved in the imminent presidential debates, the protagonists are invisible. If I had to give one piece of advice to Kerry now it would be this: “This is not a race or an exam; remember that you are in a popularity contest now.”

30Sep04 — 3

Perhaps It’s The Climate

A running theme here is my depression at the state of British sexual mores. (Or it might be my depression at not getting more sex in Britain.) I’m told that sex can be extraordinarily pleasurable and life-enhancing. Unfortunately, having acquired a professional interest in surveys of sexual habits in the early 90s, I can tell you that many young Britons self-report as having bad sex with the wrong people. It makes them unhappy and sick. I am not going to go all Melanie Philips on you here. I want young Brits to have lots of good sex with the right people (I’m not doing anything next Monday night), but this is about as likely their drinking good wine frequently and in moderation with smart company and fresh food, rather than piling down to a pub throbbing with conversation-destroying, tinnitus-inducing music to get acutely drunk on sugary spirits until they throw up their kebabs in the street.

One of the reasons the British have such bad sex is that they are so uncomfortable talking about it like adults. This is the country that gave the World Benny Hill, the “naughty” seaside postcard, the Carry On film and Page Three—“ooh look, nipples!”

If you can’t negotiate sex soberly then you are far more likely to have an unwanted pregnancy, to contract a sexually transmitted disease; and you are far less likely to seek help with either. If you can’t say what pleases you then you are also less likely to experience pleasure.

Why do people have a bad time making their lives worse? For the usual reasons: peer pressure, advertising, movies, ignorance, wilful stupidity. I continue to be shocked at the level of ignorance, embarrassment, and sentimentality of some of my educated peers in sexual matters; I’m no Doctor Ruth, but at least I don’t think the withdrawal method is a serious form of birth control. British teenagers are worse. They are more afraid of having their “hearts broken” or being thought of as gay or a virgin or unpopular than they are of herpes.

Fifteen years ago young people were scared of HIV. AIDS kills—eventually. Most sexually transmitted diseases do not. They do, however, make people bloody miserable. Because most young people were at least slightly uncomfortable with the idea of dying prematurely they tended to be more cautious about how they did it and who they did it with for fear of acquring the virus. Those days are gone. Now one in eight sexually active teenage girls has chlamydia.

Another one of my themes here is that people lie about sex all the time. The article I link to perpetuates the myth that men are the always the ones who object to using a condom. This is what women in STI clinics always say. Outside STI clinics there are women who say that condoms are “unromantic”, “smell funny”, “ruin the moment” and a man who insists on one “lacks commitment” or is implying that she is “dirty”.

It’s understandable that the demure, hoop-skirted, violated victims of genitourinary infections should protest at the sexual demands of their male suitors. Decades of patriarchal oppression have forced this generation of womanhood into submitting lest they be thrown onto the streets. Perhaps the answer is a return to chaperones and the covering of ankles. I know that would stop my unclean thoughts from spilling out of my stovepipe hat as I wander around the slum-dwellings I own, forcing my unprotected sexual attentions upon the teenage daughters of my impoverished tenants.

29Sep04 — 1

Gillingham Football Club?

Someone on a Gillingham FC discussion board is claiming to be me. He/she linked to this site. Presumably because PooterGeek is less popular than Gillingham I am recording a spike in visitors. For the benefit of puzzled newcomers, I have no idea who “bomber_007” is and no interest in the Gills—and I bet most of you lot have no interest in PooterGeek.

29Sep04 — 0

All Roads Lead To Cambridge

Visits by PooterGeek’s Paris and Manila correspondents to town and my own visits to members of my family and elsewhere over the next few days will intermittently interfere with ‘Blogging. The lesson is: if you want my company, dropping by in person is more reliable than coming to my ‘Blog.

28Sep04 — 12

Willkommen in der Schweiz

Even if you, your father, and your grandfather spent their entire lives in Switzerland you do not automatically qualify for Swiss citizenship. The Swiss voted any change in this and their other naturalization laws down this week. This report on the vote is graced by a poster used in the referendum campaign. The poster shows grasping coloured hands reaching for Swiss passports. I know where not to go for my holidays this winter.

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