Religion and Politics Blog

Card-carrying Liberal Democrat. My views are my own, and do not necessarily reflect party policy.

I’m from the Vatican, you’re ….

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Tim Hall

I am probably a very bad person for finding this funny. It’s even worse that “I’m the Bishop of Southwark, this is what I do”.

A Church of England vicar shouted: ‘I’m from the Vatican, you’re f*cked’ as he brawled with police after a vodka-fuelled nightclub binge.

Parish priest Gareth Jones, 36, yelled: ‘I have diplomatic immunity’ as he punched, kicked, bit and spat at a police officer and a paramedic who found him passed out in his clerical frock on Charing Cross Road, in Covent Garden, central London.

Read the whole sorry story in Court News UK.

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Viaducts and the European Union

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Tim Hall

A photo from back in 2006 of the viaduct at Tellenberg, Switzerland, showing a northbound frirght train.

Note the two viaducts; the elegant masonry one dating from the original openng of the line in the early year of the 20th century, and the more utilitarian modern structure alongside it, built to accomodate increasing traffic in the 1970s.

Switzerland is not in the EU, but the formation of the EU had a big impact on this railway line. It’s the Bern Lötchbern Simplon railway, part of a chain of lines linking Italy to northern Europe via the Simplon tunnel.

Why did traffic increase in the years after World War Two such that this like across the Alps needed to be widened at great expense? One reason was surely the formation of the European Union, which resulted in greatly increased trade between northern and southern Europe.

Think about this on June 23rd. How much trade between Britain and the rest of Europe might be put at risk in the event of a Leave vote? And how many jobs will that put as risk?

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Purity politics works against getting things done

Posted on June 1, 2016 by Tim Hall

Good piece by Ian Dunt on the way purity politics has spread from the Toytown worlds of student unions and social media activism to infect the world of real politics, and has a negative impact of the ability to make positive change in the real world

There are two options in politics: stay pure and accomplish nothing, or compromise and affect change. No one ever changed anything on the basis of moral purity. The history of radical change is the history of principled men and women making painful compromises. It’s terribly easy to sit on the sofa and shout righteous indignation at the television. It’s much harder to work on how to expand the audience which might be interested in your campaign, to convert those who might be open to some of your ideas. But as soon as you do that, as soon as you get into the mucky business of debate and compromise and practicality, there will always be people out there calling you a traitor to the cause.

It’s always been like that, but right now it’s worse than ever. Much of the blame must surely rest with the digital echo chambers of social media, the daily self-propaganda machine in which we can surround ourselves with those who already think like us and then shriek with outrage when the it turns out the world does not agree.

It’s making us incapable of nuance or compromise and highly sensitive to the visuals of cooperation, which we take to be a sign of corruption. That’s where the online and student debate is. And mainstream politics is just now learning to profit from it. The SNP and the Tories have proved highly adept at it. And Labour, previously the victim of these efforts, is now gearing up to use the same rhetoric itself. The frenzied tactics of student politics and Twitter shouting matches are increasingly the common currency in Westminster.

The way the falout from the Scottish referendum campaign deeply damaged Labour’s brand north of the border suggests that the electorate is as guilty as the parties. But it would be a tragedy if the parties, especially Labour, were to risk the European referendum to be lost purely for short-term electoral advantage.

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Time for Remain to get its act together.

Posted on May 31, 2016 by Tim Hall

An opinion poll showing a narrow lead for Leave in the EU Referendum ought to be ringing alarm bells. While it’s just one poll, and it’s too early to tell if it’s just a statistical fluke, it’s time for the Remain camp to get its act together before it’s too late.

At the moment, Remain campaign is a complete car crash. Nobody trust David Cameron, who’s increasingly seen as a cynical opportunist with no deeply-held principles beyond personal ambition. And Jeremy Corbyn is completely useless; his enthusiasm for Remain comes over as luke-warm at best. Neither seems to care as much about Britain’s future in or out Europe as they do fighting internal battles within their own parties. Corbyn’s refusal to share a platform with Cameron because reasons is simply pathetic. The Liberal Democrats speak with one voice, but nobody is listening and the media ignore them.

It says a lot that the most positive and most enthusiastic piece I’ve read in favour of Remain comes from, of all people, Jeremy Clarkson.

The result matters at lot.

A Leave vote will leave Britain a nastier, meaner, more xenophobic place as well as a less prosperous one unless you’re already rich, and is highly likely to herald the break-up of Britain. The Scottish Nationalists have already stated they will seek a second referendum in the event of a Leave vote, and the danger of unleashing dark forces in Northern Ireland’s politics can’t be dismissed.

The stakes are far higher than the careers of any Prime Minister or would-be Prime Minister.

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Gawker Media and Press Freedom

Posted on May 27, 2016 by Tim Hall

Gawker MediaHow many of the people going to the barricades to defend Gawker Media would do the same for News International if they were being burned to the ground over their Hillsborough lies?

The usual suspects from the left-wing internet media are painting Gawker’s legal defeat at the hands of wrestler Hulk Hogan as a tragedy for press freedom that gives the wealthy the power to shut down any media company they don’t like. It doesn’t seem to matter to them that Gawker broke the law.

You do get the impression that this is tribal thing to them. Gawker Media have a terrible track record of violating privacy and destroying the lives of innocent people; remember Justine Sacco? But Gawker are part of the tribe, and Hulk Hogan and Peter Thiel belong to the enemy tribe, so that dictates the side they must take.

There are valid issues on striking the right balance between press freedom and press responsibility. A free press should not mean a press that acts as though it’s about the law, and the law shouldn’t be something that’s available only to the rich. A situation where the gutter press can destroy the lives of the little people with impunity while the rich and powerful can use the threats of legal action to silence any criticism would be the worst of both worlds.

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Jamala bathes in Neil Clark’s Tears

Posted on May 17, 2016 by Tim Hall

Jamala
Photo Albin Olsson – licenced by, Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0

Whatever the merits or otherwise of the songs themselves, Saturday’s Eurovision result giving victory to Ukraine’s Jamala seems to have produced epic levels of salt from Vladimir Putin’s propagandists.

Mark the date. Saturday May 14, 2016, the day the music died and a song contest whose well-intentioned original aim of national harmony has become the latest front in the Western elite’s obsessional and relentless new Cold War against Russia.

A blatantly political song by Ukraine – which should not have been allowed in the contest in the first place as it clearly broke the European Broadcasting Union’s ‘No Politics’ rules – was declared the ‘winner’ of the Eurovision Song Contest, even though the country which got the most votes from the general public was Russia.

What helped Ukraine ‘win’ were the ‘national juries’ panels of so-called ‘music industry professionals’ who were given 50 percent of the votes and who only put Russia in joint fifth place, with 81 fewer points than Ukraine.

That’s a vile little man called Neil Clark, who in a previous life was an apologist from the genocidal Serbian leader Slobodan Milosovic, before and even during his trial for war crimes. It’s hardly surprising this insignificant far left hack is now toadying to Vladimir Putin.

His basic argument is nonsense. In the absense of any song strong enough to capture the imaginations of people who actually care about music, the Eurovision popular vote tends to default towards politics. Russia’s entry was no Lordi.

The only mystery was why the jury vote gave the utterly forgettable boy-band-meets-landfill-indie British entry any points at all.

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Boris Goes Full Godwin

Posted on May 15, 2016 by Tim Hall

Boris Johnson has gone full Godwin. More evidence, if any were needed, that Boris is an utterly cynical charlatan who says things he doesn’t even believe, and is willing to sacrifice the future of the nation to further his own short-term political ambitions. He cares far more about becoming Prime Minister that whether or not Britain leaves the European Union.

I hope a critical mass of the British public is smart enough to see through him.

And no, Leftists, this doesn’t let Ken Livingstone off the hook on anti-Semitism. Both Boris and Ken have been using classic internet troll tactics, saying something which is technically factually correct but ripped so far out of historical context it’s a dog-whistle for a far bigger lie. Hitler neither wanted to create a European equivalent of the United States nor cared about the future of Germany’s Jews “before he went mad”. To assign the same motives as Adolf Hitler to either the EU or to Israel is utterly grotesque, and it shouldn’t be necessary to have to explain why.

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Nick Cohen takes on the Right

Posted on May 13, 2016 by Tim Hall

Nick Cohen has long been a scourge of the regressive tendencies of the post-modern left, but with The English right’s Putinesque conspiracy theories he turns his guns on the equally regressive right.

Vote Leave is not a fringe organisation, like UK Against Water Fluoridation, or The Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts. The Electoral Commission decided in its wisdom it was respectable enough to lead the official Brexit campaign. Whether it is Michael Gove or Boris Johnson, a Vote Leave politician will be the next leader of the Conservative Party one way or another, and hence our next Prime Minister. The darkness on the right of politics is about to cover the land, and it is worth peering into the murk before it descends.

The way they’re tried to bully ITV and Robert Peston threatening “consequences” once they’re in power is the sort of thing you expect from the rulers of a tinpot dictatorship, not from those who aspire to lead a major democracy.

Yet more confirmation that Boris Johnson’s persona as a lovable rogue is completely fake, and he’s actually a nasty thuggish little man. And it’s a reminder that the whole referendum debate that’s putting Britain’s future at stake is really a proxy war for the leadership of the conservative party.

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Lead Guitar is Sexist?

Posted on May 11, 2016 by Tim Hall

I am a bad, bad person for posting these things from Real Peerreview. Though I choose to spare the author by not naming them or linking back to the originals.

This one reads like a nasty collision between academia’s Critical Theory and sort of terrible music journalism that gave the 1980s NME a bad name.

This paper critically examines the gendering of electric guitar technique in its limited scholarly reception. Focus is given to the work of Steve Waksman, specifically the “technophallus,” a coinage through which he engages feminist scholarship to interrogate the electric guitar’s masculine performative identity. This paper offers a counter-archive of punk guitarists whose work, when approached with a queer analytic, problematize the pairing of virtuosity with heteromasculinity. Synthesizing the work of José Esteban Muñoz and Jack Halberstam on queer failure and virtuosity, I offer disorienting guitar practice as a critical lens which can materialize efforts at refusing the linearity of guitar technique as well as guitar hero worship. Consideration is given to St. Vincent’s pairing of a disorienting virtuosity with her extension of the guitar’s sonic possibilities through effect pedals.

Let me get this right; lead guitar is sexist unless  you play it very badly. Or use a lot of effects. Or am I missing something?

OK, so I get that there’s a lot of coded sexism in genre snobbery. But surely the author is guilty of the exact same mistake, by using critical theory to suggest their taste in music is somehow morally superior?

It’s not even being iconoclastic in this day and age. Today’s focus group driven mainstream rock has largely pushed virtuoso guitar to the margins. Genres like blues-rock and power-metal that still celebrate virtuoso guitar are niche scenes nowadays.

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Salsa Dancing is Sexist and Racist

Posted on May 7, 2016 by Tim Hall

Or so claims this academic thesis, via the imimitable Real Peerreview

In a discursive context where Europe is associated with modernity and ‘progress’, salsa dancing is often claimed to offer ‘difference’ in terms of the gender roles it propagates. The multi-million salsa industry sells the dance practice as ‘sexy’, ‘hot’ and as the epitome of heterosexuality. This thesis explores gender and sexuality discourses among salsa dancers in Switzerland and England. Drawing on unstructured in-depth interviews with heterosexual and lesbian/gay salsa dancers, it traces culturalist understandings of salsa genders that defer heteronormativity and ‘strict’ gender roles to ‘Latin American culture’. Based on queer-feminist, postcolonial and race critical theory, this thesis offers an analysis of how gendered and sexualised formations come into being on the salsa scene. It will do so by deconstructing Latin American gender stereotypes, narratives of passion and heterosexual romance as well as heteronormalising processes that inform the salsa dance studio. Overall, it will argue that claims to gender and sexuality on the salsa scene are racialised in the way that they reflect broader discourses of race in contemporary Europe. This thesis presents the first analysis of salsa dance practices in Europe that is led by postcolonial and queer-feminist theory. Beyond an analysis of salsa from this perspective, it aims to contribute to the study of postcolonial racisms in Switzerland and England. Additionally, it makes a case for the study of Latinidad in Europe and the gendered and sexualised stereotypes associated with it.

Sometimes I worry that I’m perpetuating white supremacy and The Patriarchy by highlighting this sort of thing. But I do believe there’s a dangeous totalitarian ideology behind it that does need to be called out and ridiculed. As has been said before, our future politicians, bureaucrats and chief police officers are currently studying in establishments that teach this stuff.

What comes over in the above abstract is the sheer joylessness of the mindset behind it. Take a popular cultural activity that brings pleasure to many and declare it harmful because reasons. The one thing it most strongly recalls is the 1980s “Satanic Panic” when everything from metal music to Dungeons and Dragons was declared “Satanic” and claimed to be a gateway to demonic possession.

That nonsense faded away with the decline of the Religious Right, but the same sort of censorious and joyless puritanism has reappeared in left-wing academia. One can only hope it fades away in the same way.

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