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Nice to see the party I voted for get so completely up the nose of Samizdata.net’s David Carr:

No, sorry I cannot find anything charitable to say about them at all. This creepy collection of local government officers, geography teachers and assorted smelly cranks combine the hungry opportunism of a trap-door spider with the prim, bossy condescension of an Edwardian school ma’am, only without the good looks of the former or the moral fibre of the latter.

When a party makes mortal enemies of the people who want to return to nineteenth-century robber-baron capitalism accompanied by heavily-armed armed vigilantes, they must be doing something right!

Four weeks ago, I predicted that the UK general election would result in something like this:

• A Labour majority of sixty or seventy, down from the 166 of the old parliament.
• The Tories making modest gains in seats, but far short of overturning Labour
• The Liberal Democrats gaining about ten seats

Perhaps I should have put money on that, because it’s precisely what actually happened.

I suspect a significant proportion of the electorate really wanted to see Labour reelected but with a sharply reduced majority. If people really wanted Michael Howard as PM, the Tories would have got more than a third of the vote! A lot of pundits claimed there was no way people could actually vote for ‘Blair, but with a smaller majority’, but that’s precisely what the electorate actually did. Perhaps the great British public are cannier than the pundits think?

All three main parties are probably disappointed. Labour, of course, have lost a lot of seats. But the Tories can hardly claim to be on the road back to power. Their share of the vote was just once percentage point higher than last time round, and much of that was at the expense of UKIP. And while the Liberal Democrats made inroads into Labour territory, finishing up their biggest tally of MPs since the 1920s, they failed to gain any ground in their other front against the Tories.

As for the smaller parties, Robert Kilroy-Silk’s political career is finished. With just 2000-odd votes, and fourth place, he’s history, and good riddance. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the repellant George Galloway, who managed to win in east London with his unpleasant mix of Stalinism and Islamism. The high vote in many places by the far-right British National Party is also very worrying. I suspect the Tories heavy use of the immigration issue has played into their hands and increased their support.

The fact that Labour still won a 60 seat majority with just 37% of the popular vote means we do need to take a long, hard look at our antiquated and creaking electoral system, and consider alternatives. The case for electoral reform used to be made only by political anoraks and supporters of the Liberal Democrats, whose party suffered the most at the hands of the present system. But now questions are being asked across the whole of the political spectrum, which can only be a good thing.

The latest from Silkenray

Apparently it will take 3 weeks for them to get my husband out of the country. Apparently, also, they are going to require that 2 officers escort him on the plane, staying with him the entire time across the Atlantic. What the? What do they think he’s going to DO?

Which means that to get him out of the country, they’re going to be paying two people to escort him for an 8 hour flight – and presumably paying them to fly back… flights which, at this time of year, cost about $400 or $500… That’s three plane tickets, which makes, say, $1,500. Not to mention the salary of the people going with him. Not to mention that having him under guard is just ridiculous in the first place.

I’d say the US Government has wasted tens of thousands of dollars on this farce (if it hasn’t reached $100,000 yet, which is doubtful). Talk about wasteful and stupid… and over such a petty issue!

It’s easy to take all the stories about America becoming a police state with a pinch of salt. But when things like this happen to someone I know personally, I do begin to worry about the direction the world’s 800lb gorilla is taking.

If you live in Britain, especially in a marginal seat, you’ll have seen the posters warning us how hordes of illegal immigrants let out of prison will infect your daughter with the hospital superbug unless you vote Tory. With lots of white space, they’re very tempting for ‘unofficial additions’. Such as this one (Click on the picture for a larger version that’s easier to read)

Now this site lets you create you own parody versions of these awful posters. Such as:

Or this:

Or what about:

And finally, for any Cthulhu fans reading this:

Link from Harry’s Place

And they’re off! The British election phony war is finally over, and the metaphorical tanks have begun rolling through the Ardennes. We Brits are in for four weeks of wall-to-wall politics, until we’re all completely sick of it by May 5th.

While I’m not really much of a political pundit, here are a few of my predictions as to what we might see over the coming weeks:

• It’s going to be the dirtiest and most negative election campaign in British history, as both Labour and the Tories try to fight the election the Karl Rove way. The turnout may well be the lowest in history, as a direct result of this.
• There will be disputed results due to alleged abuse of postal ballots, accompanied by much gloating from the Americans who deservedly took so much stick about Florida. Expect at least one resulting by-election where the number of dubious ballots exceeds the winning majority.
• At least in England, it will be a three-party election, which means the assorted would-be fourth parties such as the Robert ‘Ronseal’ Kilroy-Silk’s xenophobic Vanitas and George ‘I Love Saddam’ Galloway’s Stalinist-Islamist unholy alliance Respect will fail to get a significant vote anywhere.
• Since I live in the most marginal constituency in the entire country, I won’t be able to move for bloody election workers for the next four weeks.
• The most exciting moment of the whole campaign probably won’t be the deputy Prime Minister getting into a brawl with a guy with a mullet.
• Transport won’t become an election issue. Both Labour and the Tories have reason to keep quiet about their past record. Who was it who gave us the quite literal trainwreck of railway privatisation, and who else has spent eight years doing nothing whatsoever to repair the damage?
• The influence of the Blogosphere will be over-hyped, and exaggerated. The influence of Rupert Murdoch will not.
• Regardless of all the above, Labour are still going to win.
• At least one of the above predictions will turn out to be wrong.

This post also appears on Blogcritics. I’ve chosen that Amazon link there for a reason….

Slacktivist is on a roll at the moment. This is what he has to say about the Satanic Ritual Abuse myth propagated by some fundamentalists, which hit the headlines a few years back and caused a lot of genuine human suffering, not just in America, but in Britain too.

The strange thing about believers in “Satanic Ritual Abuse” is not just that their belief persists despite an utter lack of evidence, but that they seem so eager for these things to really be true. They seem to want it to be the case that a vast, secret, predatory network exists that abducts, abuses and murders tens of thousands of children every year as part of its ritualistic worship of Satan.

This is not a healthy thing to want to believe is true. And yet, despite the fact that no actual practitioners of Satanic Ritual Abuse have ever been found, thousands of people believe in it because they somehow want it to be so.

I suspect some of these fundamentalists have fallen into the heresy of Dualism, their worldview, especially the obsession with sex, seems very, very Manichean. It also ties in with the Premillenial Dispensationalist heresy which circulates in the same circles.

And these people, holding beliefs I consider to be deeply and dangerously heretical, are the first to screech “Heresy!” whenever a mainstream cleric suggests that some detail of The Bible might be interpreted metaphorically rather than literally. What was that line about motes and beams again?

Fred Clark of Slacktivist explains how different fundamentalist sects interpret this very old joke.

So this gorilla walks into a bar. The gorilla slaps a $10 bill on the counter and says, “Give me a beer.”

Bartender figures what does a gorilla know? So he gives him the beer, but only gives him $1 in change. It’s a slow night, though, so the bartender figures he should make some conversation. “We don’t get many gorillas in here,” he says.

Gorilla says, “Yeah, well at $9 a beer I’m not surprised.”

I’m inclined to concede one point to Fred’s Literalist; the joke does sound pretty antideluvian…

Sadly, the reality-based community has lost control of the world.

According to Francis Wheen, the values of the enlightenment are in full retreat in the face of religious fundamentalism, ivory-tower ideological nonsense, misty-eyed sentimental idiocy, and vacuous new-age twaddle. And if western civilisation is to survive, all of this nonsense needs to be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Unlike the crusty conservatives who think the world went to pot somewhere about 1963, Wheen dates the downfall of rational civilisation to 1979, the two pivotal events being the Iranian revolution and the election of Margaret Thatcher. One saw the ugliest face of religious fundamentalism, a retreat into medieval barbarism. The other saw the economic policies dominated by wingnut ideologues that plunged the nation into deep recession, and the beginnings of politics where style and presentation was considered more important than substance, something which was to get even worse under Tony Blair

The whole book is a first-class rant; very little of today’s world escapes unscathed. For example, in the chapter ‘New Snake Oil, Old Bottles’, Wheen attacks new-age management gurus and all those ludicrous self-help books full of ‘Hallmark greeting card platitudes’. In ‘The Demolition Merchants of Reality’, he skewers the deconstructionism of the recently-deceased Jacques Derrida. Wheen suggests that once you start regarding history as being about ‘conflicting narratives’ rather being about what actually happened, it’s a slippery slope that ends with Holocaust denial.

And once these lunatics get their hands on science, well. A hilarious section tells of the hoax played by Alan Sokal, a physics professor who submitted a paper called ‘Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity’. Although the article was complete and total nonsense, it was filled with enough quotations from various deconstructionist academics that they all completely fell for the hoax. Much egg on faces when Sokal revealed it was a hoax a week later.

The chapter ‘Candles in the Wind’ reminds us of the terrifying collective insanity that gripped Britain following the untimely death of Princess Diana.

On that Sunday afternoon I was telephoned by a neighbour, a ferociously conservative columnist on the Daily Mail: ‘I can’t bear any more of this, fancy a drink in the pub’. He had just been given a week’s holiday from the paper after informing the editor that he couldn’t participate in the national ululation and genuflection; having watched several hours of hyperbolic homage on TV, he was beginning to fear that he was the only sane person left in the country.

Then we have the next moment of collective insanity, the madness of the dotcom bubble, when everyone thought the normal rules of business no longer applied. We’re reminded of how investors gullibly wasted their money on ludicrous schemes like boo.com. Sadly he neglects the equally ridiculous Clickmango.com. I worked briefly for the software house that build this “woman’s health and beauty” site, and saw the deeply frightening database model. Where else would there be entities called ‘Horoscope’ and ‘Celebrity Endorsement’? Needless to say, the Mango went pear-shaped in a very short space of time.

Then there’s Enron. Part corporation, part religious cult, part confidence trickster’s shell game. In a fully reality-based world Enron could not have happened; but such was the scale of their hubris that money-worshipping politicians and financial analysts alike completely failed to see through them before the inevitable collapse.

The last half of the final chapter deals with the total failure of too much of the left to understand the world after the end of the cold war, and especially after 9/11. Wheen doesn’t have any kind worlds for the ‘Enemy of my enemy is my friend’ brigade, and the likes of Micheal Moore and particularly the loathsome Noam Chomsky, who appear to be prepared to side with nihilistic fanaticism rather than admit that an enemy that attacks the west is in fact an enemy against which we have to defend ourselves. Perhaps wisely, although supporting the overthrown of the Taliban, Wheen avoids getting into any discussion on the contentious issue of whether or not it was a good idea to invade Iraq.

Wheen’s final words reminds us what will happen if we allow mumbo-jumbo to prevail.

but those who refuse to learn from experience, and strive instead to discredit the rationalism that makes such enlightenment possible – whether they be holy warriors, anti-science relativists, economic fundamentalists, radical post-modernists, New Age mystics or latter-day Chicken Littles – are not only condemning themselves to repeat the past. They wish to consign us all to a life in darkness.

Altogether a brilliant rant, taking blunderbuss shots at the sacred cows of both left and right. An essential read for everyone who doesn’t like the direction the world is heading, and wants us to change course before it’s too late.

More bad news for the human race.

GIANT squid are taking over the world, well at least the oceans, and they are getting bigger. According to scientists, squid have overtaken humans in terms of total bio-mass. That means they take up more space on the planet than us

Can you say “Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn!”? I though you could. Apparently it’s all due to global warming. This possibly explains the environmental attitudes of the Cthulhu Cultists of the right. (Link from Boing Boing)

Judging by the hysterical outrage from the hacks and wingnut drama queens of the American right, they don’t seem to be able to distinguish between a satirical piece The Guardian’s weekend listings magazine and an editorial or serious op-ed piece in the paper itself.

This is what Charlie Brooker (who’s been involved in the satirical Brass Eye) had to say about George Bush’s less than stellar performance in the first presidential debate, and the controversy about whether or not he’d been ‘wired’.

Quite frankly, the man’s either wired or mad. If it’s the former, he should be flung out of office: tarred, feathered and kicked in the nuts. And if it’s the latter, his behaviour goes beyond strange, and heads toward terrifying. He looks like he’s listening to something we can’t hear. He blinks, he mumbles, he lets a sentence trail off, starts a new one, then reverts back to whatever he was saying in the first place. Each time he recalls a statistic (either from memory or the voice in his head), he flashes us a dumb little smile, like a toddler proudly showing off its first bowel movement. Forgive me for employing the language of the playground, but the man’s a tool.

So I sit there and I watch this and I start scratching my head, because I’m trying to work out why Bush is afforded any kind of credence or respect whatsoever in his native country. His performance is so transparently bizarre, so feeble and stumbling, it’s a miracle he wasn’t laughed off the stage. And then I start hunting around the internet, looking to see what the US media made of the whole “wire” debate. And they just let it die. They mentioned it in passing, called it a wacko conspiracy theory and moved on.

As for the final line (you’ll have to read the article itself, I’m not going to quote it out of context), exactly how does it differ from the ‘humourous entertainers’ of the right such as Ann Coulter or Rush Limburgh, the heroes of the same freepi who are screeching blue murder at The Guardian?

Update:

The Guardian have now taken the offending article down, replacing it with this apology.

“Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action – an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind.”

On balance, it was probably a mistake to have printed it, especially as the website doesn’t really distinguish between the listings magazine and the main paper.

I also understand that the paper’s website was offline for several hours due to denial-of-service attacks. I know wingnuts tend to have a tin ear for satire, but I still think the Freepi are completely overreacting.