Ali G, Bruno & Borat.

When Sacha Baron Cohen's creation Ali G first appeared on television it was one of the most brilliant satires in years. It wasn't so much the send up of the moronic elements of hip hop culture (although that is a target rich environment) or the phenomena of middle class white kids aping Jamaican culture badly, it was the reactions of the people he interviewed.

They were members of the establishment and were almost universally highly accomplished and very intelligent. Yet when they were faced with a Yoof TV interviewer who was clearly a halfwit they refused to pass judgement on his stupidity or his outrageous attitudes. If anything they largely pandered to him and sought his approval. There were a few exceptions to that rule such as Tony Benn challenging his references to 'me bitches', Donald Trump walking out as Ali G proposed a stupid idea or when Andy Rooney got sick of his idiocy here:


Borat was amusing but didn't really show anything that hasn't been done a thousand times before, be it dumb rednecks or funny foreigners. I haven't see the Bruno movie yet of course but as a TV character he hardly broke new ground as a flamboyantly camp fashionista and I doubt the movie will either. It may well work as comedy but it is a waste of talent for someone like Baron Cohen to do John Inman meets Zoolander when he has shown he is capable of making cutting satire that says something about society.

I think the difference between Ali G in 1999 and Borat and Bruno since then is that Ali G was exposing the cant and hypocrisy that was practiced by the sort of people who watched him, whereas Borat and Bruno don't hold up a mirror to the audiences own shortcomings but instead point and laugh at the little people.

Pressing The Reset Button.

It's too early to say that President Obama's foreign policy in in crisis. However the policy of building bridges, engaging and entering dialogue without any conditions, with countries that had fallen out with the USA needs rethinking.

It is one thing to repair some of the silly and pointless rifts that emerged between the USA and some European countries during the Bush administration. However applying this idea towards the likes of Russia and Iran isn't going to work. To present the Russian government with a symbolic reset button implies that the tense atmosphere between Russia and the USA was the result of US actions and had nothing to do with Russia's actions over the last few years.

Similarly his unconditional offer to engage with Iran not only undercut the EU 3 who had been trying to end Iran's nuclear programme with assorted diplomatic sticks and carrots it has also seems to have led the US government to react slowly to the ayatollahs election stealing antics for fear of imposing such preconditions.

The policy seems to have come about as a result of a gaffe in a debate with Hillary Clinton, but because a lot of his party's primary voters could only see foreign policy in terms of domestic politics- by which I mean they assumed that because they didn't like Bush, that any fraught relationships the USA had under his administration must have been the result of his failings- the gaffe became a very popular idea.

Nothing To See Now, Move Along.

I am impressed by the heroic efforts of the Times to play down the illegal bugging affair that their stablemate, the News of the World, has been caught up in. Let's see:

• Whereas all the other newspapers as well as the BBC have it as their top story, the Times relegates to the number four domestic story.
• They make no mention of Rupert Murdoch, who appears to have a greater right to anonymity than Nightjack.
• They focus the story on how it effects David Cameron, as his spin doctor is the former NOTW editor, Andy Coulson.
  
• The normal comments facility is disabled, despite working perfectly well on all other stories.
  

Still their coverage is better than the Sun's, who have decided not to cover this celebrity filled political scandal for reasons of space.

Death By Chocolate

They say it's an accident but apparently the victim had a Bounty on his head.

Sorry I know that was in bad taste I shouldn't Snicker especially as his colleagues must really need a Boost right now, he wasn't just some Drifter.

Pure Television Genius.

This is truly outstanding:




I take back every criticism of the BBC I have ever made, 'cos at least they don't produce "Deadliest Warrior".

I Can Read

I've added a couple of reviews to my Amazon page- Jared Diamond's Collapse along with Noel Malcolm's Kosovo- A Short History. I may add a couple more in the next few days depending on how much time I have.

Modern Witch Hunts.

After writing about she who must not be named, I've been thinking a bit more about the whole topic of the bogus Satanic Ritual Abuse (SRA) scandals, concocted by an alliance of Freudian Quacks, Evangelical Christians and Radical Feminists. The obvious comparison to make is with medieval witch hunts.

Witch hunts were quite common in the middle ages but by the early modern period they were confined to just a few sects- notably the puritans. Whilst there is a puritan influence on the UK it isn't geographically concentrated enough to separate it from other cultural effects. In the United States however it is different because one part of the country, New England, was settled by puritans and their descendants spread across certain regions of the country- through New York state, the Upper Midwest, the Pacific North West and parts of coastal California. So if the SRA is a modern version of witch hunting then one would expect the cases to be concentrated in those areas. This dialect map gives some idea of what I'm talking about because language is a cultural marker:

So using lists of these cases from Imaginary Crimes, Wikipedia and any other source I came across I'd estimate the distribution of the cases to be:

New England- 4 cases
Upper Midwest- 6 cases
Pacific North West- 6 cases

New York City- 2

Midland - 3

California- 5 cases

South- 11 (3 North Carolina, 3 Texas, 4 Florida* & 1 Mississippi)

Rockies- 1

By my estimate of the 37 cases (which often involve multiple suspects) at least 16 are from areas shaped by the puritan diaspora. Puritan influence was also present in shaping the culture of California and the Rockies, so that's another 6. All of which backs my hypothesis that the ritual abuse scares are secular reinvention of witch hysteria.


* Three of the four Florida cases were from Miami, when the future US Attorney General Janet Reno was the State Attorney responsible for prosecutions.

China's Wild West.

The Han Chinese rioters in Xinjiang look remarkably well disciplined, they look more like fun runners than an angry mob. I almost sent them sponsorship money.

There isn't anything that the West can do to influence what China does in a landlocked province in the the middle of Asia other than cluck loudly in disapproval. There are only two ways that the situation in Tibet and East Turkestan (Xinjiang) will be resolved- Independence at some point in the future or more likely the swamping of the territory with Han Chinese.

Here's a good article from 1999 which more or less predicts the current situation.

It is still not widely understood in the West that Mao Tse-tung's greatest achievement was the re-creation of most of the old Manchu Empire. Less than half the territory of the People's Republic is ethnically Chinese. A quarter is Tibetan; a sixth is Turkic; a tenth is Mongolian.
..
Of all these territories, it is Eastern Turkestan that is most populous, most productive, strategically most important, and most fractious. Occupying the westernmost part of the People's Republic, Eastern Turkestan is home to several million non-Chinese peoples speaking Turkic languages and practising Islam. By far the largest group is the Uighurs. Precise numbers are hard to state because Chinese statistics on minority populations are deeply unreliable. Officially there are 8 million Uighurs; there may in fact be more than 13 million. They are rapidly being swamped by incoming Chinese, most recently by more than 100,000 peasants resettled from west-central China as part of the Three Gorges Dam project. All this is of course deliberate policy by the Peking government, as is revealed by occasional lapses into frankness in the Chinese press. Da Gong Bao, Peking's mouthpiece newspaper in Hong Kong, reported on June 2nd this year that official policy was "to adjust the proportions of the populations of different ethnic groups in Xinjiang". ("Xinjiang"-- which means "New Territory"-- is the Chinese name for Eastern Turkestan. It is an abomination to the Uighurs, who say: "It may be 'New Territory' to the Chinese, but it's been our homeland since the beginning of time!") This population policy is augmented by parallel strategies for cultural annihilation that will be familiar to followers of Tibetan affairs: forced abortions, religious persecution, outlawing of local languages, suppression of any truthful discussion of the region's history, and so on.

Obviously rioters who murder the Han shouldn't be treated sympathetically but the way the Chinese government has behaved was always going to end in violence.

Extraordinary Sighting.

This is quite unusual:

A snow white Bengal tiger has become the first of its kind to exist in the wild today after being born without stripes.

However I saw something even more impressive yesterday- two zebras without stripes. They were dark brown!!!

Quote Of The Day.

The schools secretary, Ed Balls, today called for an investigation into the number of parents who lie about where they live to secure school places for their children.

Lying about where one lives is pretty wicked and I for one am looking forward to MPs framing a new law which makes it a criminal offence across the board to falsify one’s address for personal or family gain. There may have to be a few exceptions to such a law, and the House of Commons is just the right institution to decide what they should be.

North North-Wester here.

Ronnie Biggs & His Private Island- Not Eliciting That Much Sympathy

Michael Biggs, son of Great Train Robber Ronnie, is campaigning to have his father released, in this sob story he reminisces:

Michael and his father remained close. Together, they bought a house, a yacht, a restaurant, a disco - and even a private island. "They were great days," Michael said. "We were best mates. People always said, 'It's amazing, how can you be such good friends with your dad?' But we were."

Reading about all the fun he had with the proceeds of a brutal robbery really makes me feel bad that the government could be so cruel as to expect Ronnie Biggs to serve his sentence. I mean if I'd realised that they would enjoy the cash so much then who could have begrudged Biggs helping himself?

Mainstreaming Loonies.

I don't want to go on about Beatrix Campbell OBE, but I really do find her an extraordinary figure. By rights someone who has spent decades promoting absurd conspiracy theories about satanic ritual abuse ought to be an obscure and marginal figure. Her views on almost every single subject are laughable and usually motivated entirely by extreme political ideology with little connection to reality. Her Marxism is ridiculous enough but at least that's a 20th century superstition whereas her witch hunting is utterly medieval.

Yet instead of being looked at as a David Icke type figure, she is treated with the utmost seriousness by the powers that be, as her OBE demonstrates. She is for example a member of the "Women's National Commission", a quango set up by the government a few months ago which is "the official and independent advisory body giving the views of women to the government of the United Kingdom." Right.

There are a number of reactions this raises, firstly why are the government still funding quangos when WE HAVE NO FUCKING MONEY. Seriously stop wasting our money on providing sinecures to political fellow travellers. A large proportion of the WNC's members are associated with the Labour Party or organisations to the left of Labour so I'm not sure what right they have to claim to be giving 'the views of women'. I don't know if any of the other members have been involved in anything as despicable as Campbell's attempts to destroy innocent people with ridiculous allegations but they are plainly not representative of anyone but themselves.

The government's agenda on 'equality' is directed by Harriet Harman who appoints a bunch of people with identical views to her own to an 'independent' quango to advise the government. This is more dangerous now than it would have been before the economy collapsed because the government's scope for effecting radical policies is going to be limited to areas that don't involve immediate spending increases. There is also an argument that hanging around wih people of similar views tends to push people to even greater fanaticism which considering the starting point for Bea Campbell is alarming.

F1 Volk, F1 Reich, F1 Fuhrer!

Bernie Ecclestone says..... sorry let me rephrase that- Labour Party donor Bernie Ecclestone praises Hitler and also says that his long time colleague Max Mosley would be a good person to lead Britain:

Max would do a super job. He's a good leader with people. I don't think his background would be a problem.'

Sure, but given the problems our country faces- an deep economic downturn, a war in Afghanistan and assorted other problems- why would he want to lead Britain, is he some kind of masochist?

Witch Finder General Denounces Witch Hunts.

Exposing hypocrisy by Beatrix Campbell OBE is easy but is worth doing anyway. Today she writes:

When David Cameron says "sorry" for the witch-hunting section 28 passed by the vengeful Tories in 1988

Now if there is one person who shouldn't be accusing others of 'witch hunting' it is surely Beatrix Campbell. Witch hunting is often used as a metaphor, as Campbell uses it here or as when it was to describe the McCarthyite anti communist accusations. However Bea Campbell wasn't simply involved in metaphorical witch hunts, she literally claimed to be uncovering conspiracies of people carrying out ritualistic abuse in order to please Satan!

Painful Cuts.

Ouch:

A man who gave himself a DIY circumcision using nail clippers was taken to hospital for emergency treatment.

This is why I'm not a fan of DIY.

"This is something we would advise men never to attempt,"

Where would we be without medical advice?

Musical Interlude

Swine Flu Parties.

Some parents are so awful that even Joe Jackson thinks of calling social services on them. If this isn't an urban myth based on one jokey message board post, then these parents are in that category:

Parents were warned yesterday not to take their children to 'swine flu parties' in the hope of getting them immunised from the virus.

Some mothers have suggested deliberately exposing youngsters to the virus now before it mutates into a more potent strain, according to the website mumsnet.com.

Okay swine flu kills around 1 in 1000 victims. That really makes it quite dangerous and subjecting your child to a 1 in 1000 chance of dying is insane.

Isn't the rationale behind exposing children to infectious diseases to prevent them suffering from it later on? So why would anyone risk infecting a child with a disease that has been around for a few months and will probably diasappear in a few years anyhow?

How Hard Can Driving A Red Truck & Pointing A Hose Be?

This seems rather patronising:

It is (to put it mildly) far from clear that fire departments are compelled by necessity to place a heavy weight on multiple-choice exams when making promotion decisions.

Yeah because unlike journalists ( or whatever it is you call someone who rewrites political propaganda so it can appear in newspapers) fire fighters never have any cause to have to make tough decisions under pressure.

This is the principle expressed in the Dilbert cartoons by the pointy haired boss that anything he doesn't understand must be easy.