19Aug03 — 3

Lest We Forget

Little Green Footballs annoys me. It’s a ‘Blog which does the useful service of accumulating various racist rantings from Islamic extremists. And it’s a ‘Blog that does itself a disservice with its own racist rants.

While dropping by today to disapprove, I picked up a link there to a letter in the Telegraph that every Brit should read. It might remind some of them of past mistakes. (You may need to register with the online version of the newspaper yada yada).

19Aug03 — 2

Hey, Sloth Girl!

Congrats to fellow blogger Casual Savant who has submitted her dissertation and is now conspicuously inactive. Thanks for the postcard from Paris which finally arrived at work today—doncha love those productive Frenchies? Lovely handwriting as always.

Here’s the obligatory Douglas Adams quote:

"My favourite piece of information is that Branwell Bront,Ak(B, brother of Emily and Charlotte, died standing up leaning against a mantelpiece, in order to prove it could be done.

This is not quite true, in fact. My absolute favourite piece of information is the fact that young sloths are so inept that they frequently grab their own arms and legs instead of tree limbs, and fall out of trees."

(Update: I should point out here that this extract is a play on the subject’s “well deserved sloth”, rather than being any reflection on the Savant’s skills in tree-climbing—or anything else. I’m even being careful with the sensibilities of the regulars these days.)

18Aug03 — 0

Rebels Without a Brain

This article about the “Iraqi” “resistance” adds a couple of new-ish twists to the tales of guerilla warfare. I love the bit at the end about those Yankee bastards bringing attacks down on themselves by insensitively playing John Cougar Mellencamp through speakers strapped to their Humvees. That’s just evil. Why can’t they celebrate by firing Kalashnikovs into the air like ordinary civilized human beings?

Here‘s some more stuff about post-war justice. Someday, someone’s going to write a brilliant novel or make a wonderful movie about the things going on in this crazy country.

17Aug03 — 2

Enemy at the Gates

Enemy at the Gates is to Saving Private Ryan as Battlestar Galactica was to Star Wars.

Enemy at the Gates does several big-budget things well. It terrifies us with its depiction of a Stuka attack on troop carriers. It renders the grim vistas of the destruction of Stalingrad so spookily you’d feel sad just looking at the matte paintings. At every opportunity (that is, between the implausible human interactions of the leads) it hammers home the sheer scale of the conflict. Most importantly, the actual sniper combat, is tense and exciting (if not historically accurate).

The small-budget things—the acting and writing—are, unfortunately awry. Ed Harris shames the largely British cast (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz, Joseph Fiennes, Bob Hoskins). The young Brits deliver their Estuarine whining with the stiff, overblown earnestness of thesps performing Uncle Vanya on stage at the Almeida; meanwhile Harris somehow makes himself the small, cold, unhysterical centre of the piece: ironic, subtle, wearily intelligent.

The script is broken, the editing lazy, the plotting crude, save for one brilliant and shocking twist, bought at the cost of grafting a love story onto a fascinating true tale. Watching something like this makes you realize why Spielberg is so admired and so despised. He would have resisted the twist and made the ending that much neater and happier, but would have blessed everything else with his talent for pleasing audiences, constructing myths and his simple technical genius for making movies. (And he wouldn’t have made such an embarrassing mess of the bolted-on Jewish family stuff.)

16Aug03 — 2

Tour de Force

After his appearance in PooterGeek this week, Allan Brigham—this the last time I will refer to you as “celebrity roadsweeper“, Allan, I promise—invited me on one of his tours of Cambridge for free. What a revelation!

Sonya and I joined the throng outside the Guildhall yesterday evening and (after some shockingly un-English touchy-feely stuff so everyone could get to know everyone else) our band of mostly-locals were treated to the most amazing introduction to what had been under our noses for so long.

Firstly, I can see why Allan thought I might enjoy myself. He is a “Blue Badge” certified guide so normally he would charge quite a bit for the “Allan Brigham experience”. We were treated to a freebie, punctuated by what were, by his own admission, rants. The history was enlightening, but the rants were exhilarating. He railed against the profound political corruption that persisted in Cambridge until relatively recently in the city’s history, against social injustice, against ignorance, against our short memories of infectious disease, disenfranchisement, and sexual discrimination. He railed against ill-informed NIMBYism, against sentimentality of all kinds, and (all the more shocking from a historical tour guide and the chairman of the Friends of the city’s Folk Museum) against the chronic English fetish for heritage.

Allan, you are a social radical in the finest tradition. Trustafarians have the luxury of being able to kill an(other) idle hour waving a banner saying “free grants” or “Bush=Hitler”; very few people are prepared to walk the streets (as he does every day, cleaning them), to sit in the library studying for exams and to come out with a striking and genuinely progressive set of beliefs, underpinned by real rigour and learning.

I might have, on occasion, argued with one or two of the things you said, but I was always awestruck by the quality of your argument. Thank you and bravo! I’ll be coming on more of your tours—and I’ll be more than happy to pay next time.

15Aug03 — 2

Who Breaks a Butterfly?…

I’ve pulled the Monotreme reviews and associated debate. PooterGeek has, surreally, already become Google’s 12th highest hit for “K*** vs O******”. As previous experience has shown, it would be number 1 within a week. No one deserves that—even R** P***** V**********.

(The title of this post is the beginning of the Alexander Pope quotation in the title of a famous Rees-Mogg Times editorial protesting the conviction of Mick Jagger for drugs possession.)

15Aug03 — 0

Cruel Summer

Here’s another one from The Guardian, via Wiqqi, about the messiness of post-war justice in Iraq under the U.S.. There is something grimly ironic about an Iraqi trying to explain away gunfire to an American soldier with the phrase “every household in Baghdad has a gun”.

I have no doubt that Americans are ballsing up all sorts of things to do with the processing of POWs and arrested civilians, but I’d argue that these kinds of stories should be read against “Chief Wiggles“‘s accounts of his experiences as a U.S. interrogator in post-war Iraq. Then again, I would, wouldn’t I?…

14Aug03 — 0

What Kind of Monster?…

I’m trying hard not to feel threatened as I absorb the news that PooterGeek’s readers’ comments have become more interesting than my postings.

Before you guys start getting cocky, just remember who pays for the bandwidth around here.

13Aug03 — 2

Quotes of the Week

A twenty-something female work colleague began a non-ironic sentence like this:

"I don’t want a perfect body or anything, but, you know Halle Berry?…"

…before continuing on to covet in detail Ms. Berry’s defined deltoids—only her deltoids, I must admit. If I could focus on Halle’s deltoids alone long enough to see what my co-worker was getting at…

From a Slashdot user‘s sig:

"I wore a Kashmir sweater to class yesterday. The Indian girls and Pakistani girls started fighting over me."

Overheard from a(n Arab-looking and -sounding) guy in the kebab shop, Tuesday evening:

"And his parents are devout Muslims of course, so they hung him up in the house for three days to beat the gayness out of him. It’s not his fault, though. It’s not a disease. You can’t blame someone for the the way they are."

13Aug03 — 1

Material World

The BBC has a report on a man who has gone into business to sell virtual goods that exist only in the Internet gaming community of Ultima Online.

As the sneering became deafening, this Slashdot comment rose above the whine to make a telling point:

You could call this social criticism
(Score:5, Funny)
by panurge (573432) on Tuesday August 12, @07:41AM (#6673237)
What are the established churches but ways of making real money out of virtual worlds? The clergy get paid for exploring, reporting on, and handling virtual goods in, a spiritual realm that is actually invisible and whose existence is unproven. At least with online games, the players can experience the virtual environment.
I guess you could say the same thing about much of commercial law, the stock market,and insurance. And there is more money in all these things than in being a real producer or creator.

13Aug03 — 0

Version 1.01

Not surprisingly, my flurry of postings in the small hours contained lots of typos. I think they’re all fixed now. Thanks to Casual Savant for spotting a couple—but not all of them, smartypants.

12Aug03 — 0

High Traffic

I don’t think I’ve ever woken up to so many PooterGeek comments. If you haven’t visited it lately you might be shocked by the stack of messages from lusty schoolgirls, demanding to see their hero in the buff at the “Naked H**** P*****” entry.

Every Blogger in Christendom has linked to this, but you might also be shocked (and even grumpy Leasey might be entertained) by this amazing demonstration of the power of PhotoShop. I hope the holiday is going swimmingly, Lease.

Yesterday, I had to leave the office because two men were clambering around in the ceiling over my head trying to fix the air conditioning which was raining water onto my desk. On my way to work at home, I had my first high-speed blowout, but had forgotten my mobile at my flat.

Plodding along two dual carriageways on foot to find a telephone in the middle of the afternoon with the temperature over 30°C is not my idea of fun. (I can’t believe I whined about this in an email to Allan, when he spends all day on the roads in multiple layers of clothing, actually doing stuff while he walks.)

The AA man who rescued me was a star, and, in typical Cambridge style, his roadside reading was a history of the Norman conquests.

11Aug03 — 2

Dirty Pretty Things

Months ago, when it was on general release, Hind told me that I would enjoy Dirty Pretty Things. A friend of Sonya’s had recommended the movie to her too. So the two of us watched it on DVD yesterday afternoon.

It’s an excellent, low-budget drama/thriller about the lives of refugees in contemporary London; a little worthy, a little cartoonish, but well worth seeing.

There are only a couple of token whites in a solid cast of many ethnic types—one of the running jokes is the inability of Britons or Americans to distinguish between members of broad racial groups. Chiwetel Ejiofor is superb: he manages to come across as weary, thoughtful and proud, without slipping into “noble savage” mode (© 1977 Roots). Audrey Tautou almost completely atones for animating the hugely slappable Amélie. The screenplay and direction make clever use of that script-school favourite “foreshadowing“. And, photo geek that I am, I was particularly impressed by the gentle “slide-film” glow of the lighting.

Life for illegal / semi-legal immigrants in Britain is probably both worse and better than it is depicted in the film, but this is good art so I’ll allow that facts shouldn’t obscure the truth.

Sonya asked me about the state of Nigeria afterwards—the male lead is meant to be Nigerian; I was born there—and I gave her a fuzzy overview of what I admitted was a horribly complicated situation. I was relieved to read that my summary more-or-less agreed with this likely more authoritative article recommended by Instapundit last week.

It wasn’t exactly fun, Hind, but I did enjoy it, thank you.

10Aug03 — 1

Sweat Box

My first photographic commission: everybody enjoyed an amazingly hot, steamy, dazzling evening of “Afro Cubism”, dancing at Club Afrika to Martin’s band last night. Half the Campus seemed to be there, and, once again, his posse had somehow managed to gather together all the brown people in Cambridge in one room. Sadly these were probably the worst conditions I could imagine for taking photographs. My camera was literally dripping with moisture. We’ll see.

Update: Martin has emailed me to reveal his secret

09Aug03 — 0

Heaven is a Half-Pipe

It’s a bit parochial, this one, but who cares? I now have a mandate to please myself 😉 . This morning Allan Brigham, Britain’s only celebrity road sweeper, emailed me John O’Farrell‘s latest piece for The Guardian.

There are two youth tribes that dominate the City of Cambridge. Fortunately they have complimentary seasons. In Winter, the Goths dominate; in Summer the Sk8ter Boys take over. One running local debate here is what to do about the little city surfers’ urge to take over every public paved area larger than a patio with their boards. Now the council has built them an impressive little “skate city” in centre of Cambridge and (almost) everyone is happy. O’Farrell’s article tells the same story about a London borough and uses it to make a wider point about the Labour Party—as Blair fatigue is setting in in across Britain.

Some time soon I should go to a local Labour Party meeting that isn’t about Iraq.

09Aug03 — 0

By Popular Demand

Thank you, PooterGeek readers, for your response to yesterday’s ‘Blog entry. I’m genuinely touched. I think we can call it three votes for this page to continue its tradition of cranky, queenie, venting. Four, if I count the off-board response which simply quoted Judith’s post, punctuated with the repeated incantation “exactly“.

Ironically I have a bit of a social whirlwind planned for this weekend so, as the real pros say, blogging will be light. I would, however, like to join the chorus of protest on this particular controversial issue. Photograph your nieces (and nephews) now!

08Aug03 — 5

Who The Hell Is PooterGeek?

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?…

07Aug03 — 0

Pish Pash

Judith sent me a link yesterday and I rewarded her with an email rant implying that she was being over-sensitive. (I was so ranty that I spelt “brilliant” with one ‘l’ and attached a random possessive apostrophe to “Conservatives”; pretty serious stuff by my standards.) I suppose it shows that I am ready to argue with fellow members of the non-Jewish Jewish conspiracy.

By way of public apology to her, I invite you to check out the original story she recommended, about “Mel Gibson’s” new film The Passion [free New York Times registration required blah blah] and admire her lovely family. (They’re the ones not made out of bronze.)

06Aug03 — 0

The Youth of Today

Crikey. PooterGeek generated some controversy with my work colleagues today. You devote whole posts to attacking Robbie Williams and Oasis and the kids stay silent. Link to an analytical Marxist at a redbrick university or disrespec’ Wittgenstein in passing and they’re bursting into your office demanding satisfaction.

The point that I was making about Wittgenstein was that his Remarks on Colour was a classic example of a philosopher believing that he was musing on profound questions, but, in fact just failing to understand basic physics and biology and, as a result, writing cobblers. I chose Wittgenstein because he is a favourite of the students’ union bar wanker and rivals Stephen Hawking for being talked about without actually being read.

In the light of knowledge accumulated in series of simple experiments conducted at Imperial College on a small sample of graduate students, Wittgenstein’s book reads rather like someone agonizing in print over whether the Man in the Moon is made of Edam or Cheddar. These experiments “completed” our understanding of colour vision to the extent that they mapped the perceptual space of colour, as seen by young non-colourblind adults. Hello, philosophers! There is no problem about the consistency of the colour red from person to person—except when there is some defect of vision. Just leave it. It’s not an interesting matter for discussion on any level. If you would like to wade through the kind of angels-on-a-pin crap that entertains (and, God help us, employs) some people you could go here for a bit of a laugh.

I put Wittgenstein in apposition to Newton because Newton famously demonstrated that colour was a property not of an object but of the light reflected from it—something which Wittgenstein (despite his original training in engineering) seemed incompletely aware of hundreds of years later. It has been a good 6 or 7 years since I read Remarks on Colour, I must confess, so I may well be wrong, but not as wrong as cleverpants Ludwig.

05Aug03 — 0

Deliberately Killing Innocent People is Wrong

I keep recommending ‘Blog entries from Oliver Kamm—another Leftie with principles—to my friends. Coincidentally, today in another excellent entry, he links to Norman Geras’s ‘Blog, as I did yesterday. How many times do we have to explain it to you, you bigoted, anti-American pinheads?

Update: There is a problem with the link above. I think that, for all his erudition, Oliver Kamm might not have grasped the technical details of his blogging system. What I am trying to do is link to his entry from Tuesday, entitled “The Voice of Reason” which recommends Norman Geras’s ‘Blog and quotes him:

“Half the world stood aghast [after September 11], but in no time at all there was a great chorus of left and liberal opinion – the Guardian in Britain a prime representative site of this – saying, ‘Yes, terrible, appalling, but…’; the ‘but’ following so close upon the ‘yes’ as to squeeze out any adequate registration of either the significance or the horror of what had occurred. By contrast, the matter following the ‘but’ was so extensive and one-sided as to read like an apologia.

“What followed the ‘but’ was that the assault on New York and Washington had to be seen as a response to US imperialist policy and its effects: to America’s wars; its support for despots; the distribution of global wealth and power; ‘social conditions’ for which America was to blame; injustices likewise; Palestine; Iraq. The notion was of a comeuppance. However, except if you indulge the world-view of those who were responsible for the assault, there is an unacceptable slippage here. For it was not American imperialism or the US government that they struck at. It was a large number of (mostly) American citizens. It is no more a response to imperialism and its effects to massacre thousands of civilians at random than it would be a response to bad conditions in some inner-city for a person aggrieved about them to rape the child of a wealthy family or kill a few passers-by. It is an elementary principle, not merely of just war, but of ordinary morality, that the murder of the innocent is a crime. But to explain (it was said by some of those insisting on the need for context in this matter) is not to excuse or justify. The defence is not available just so, without more ado. To explain is not necessarily to excuse or justify. Yet it can be precisely that. It depends on the quality and substance of the purported explanation.”

But, if you follow my link and get Oliver Kamm’s other recent entries, about the terrible state of the Democrats in the U.S., about the oft-repeated lie that the Palestinians “already have a state” in Jordan or criticizing Thomas Friedmann for not being combative enough, you’ll probably find those interesting too.

04Aug03 — 3

Said. Again.

Nick recommended this piece by Edward Said to me. I must admit that he did so with serious qualification:

“It is tainted by intellectual snobbery, but my more fundamental objection is its failure to address or even mention ethics and the need to recognise absolute wrongs in the face of cultural relativism.”

. Nick was right about the intellectual snobbery. It’s the Oxford variety, the sort that drops the names of “authorities” like designer labels. Instead of addressing the issue at hand, it was one of the favourite debating defences of the slow-witted toff to argue that without having “read the original” you couldn’t possibly understand. One of the many things I love about science is that it doesn’t matter how influential a “thinker” you are, how many fashionable shelves your name appears on; all that matters is whether or not your ideas survive the ultimate test of Nature. You don’t have to read his Principia to understand everything important about Newton’s physics completely. Why? Because Newton was right. (Unlike, say, Wittgenstein, Oxford philosophy’s answer to Nike—and I don’t mean the Greek goddess.)

Nick was also right about the moral relativism.

My main problem with the piece is that it’s not just wrong, it’s breathtakingly silly. Said explains the state of Arab regimes this way:

“Because the governments are relatively powerless to affect US policy toward them, they turn their energies to repressing and keeping down their own populations.”

What? In other words:

“I only pick on my little sister because Daddy won’t listen to me so it’s his fault she’s in a mass grave.”

Update: Oh bugger, about Newton being right…

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