Wednesday, February 18, 2009
Amiel Comes Out for the Kulaks
There are people who say Guantanamo Bay is like Auschwitz and, from the other end of the political spectrum, there is Barbara Amiel saying the excoriation of the bankers is like the Soviet persecution of the Kulaks and Mao's slaughter of the intellectuals. A sense of proportion is a wonderful thing.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
A blog about, among other things, imaginary ideas - What ifs? and Imagine thats. What if photographs looked nothing like what we see with our eyes? Imagine that the Berlin Wall had never come down. What if we were the punchline of an interminable joke? All contributions welcome.
The delectable Babs, Baroness and fraudsters moll, you would think, would you not, that she could afford a new pair of sunglasses to replace those wee eighties jobies, no doubt the reason for the accuracy or otherwise of her edict.
ReplyDeleteBetter noos in the article below hers, that other highly prized addition to the enrichment of our lives, the bricks and mortar tottie Allsopp has gone tits up, poetic justice if ever there was.
Location your way out of that one petal.
And I want to see Ann Colter naked!
ReplyDeleteHi Bryan,
ReplyDeleteIn the fantastic world of blogging I don't have to just think about how I enjoyed your article in the Sunday Times this weekend, I can just pop in here and thank you personally-so thanks! Without your article I may never have found the man who runs away from his camera and would certainly never have considered looking at the blog of Paul Daniels which I greatly enjoyed. I loved your article and agreed with much of it. Apart from the part about wanting to stop blogging! Looking forward to part two.
Welcome Sarah - nice to have someone else from South East London. We discussed Bryan's Sunday article on Saturday. Prescient or what? In fact the man picked our brains on it at the end of last month. I learned one heck of a lot from that page. One interesting thing I've been mulling over since is which was better, the article or the blog discussion. The article's very cool and certainly more tidy ... but I think the untidy, unpredictable blog debate was in fact even better. Kinda the way it should be.
ReplyDeleteOn a more serious note, and back to a sense of proportion, I was very angry on Sunday evening about what looked to me like Holocaust denial being tolerated on the official Newsnight blog. I'd originally got involved in the early hours of Friday to say thanks for the truly excellent debate Kirsty Wark had chaired on the banning of Geert Wilders that night. I was very annoyed by the haughty response of 'JadedJean', no doubt about that, but I'm still not sure that clouded my judgement. So how pernicious was this? It was certainly totally off topic, as far as I was concerned.
ReplyDeleteAnd was JadedJean posing as more than one contributor throughout - a technique Wikipedia insiders have learned to call sock puppetry? For when 'NewFazer' turned up he seemed to disagree with what he was saying earlier in the thread and be speaking in the voice of JadedJean. In other words a classic mistake of a puppet-master on the back foot. But does this mean the whole thing was a 'tease'? Sick joke would be closer, in order to close down any decent debate. I find that very hard to judge.
This last question will probably be seen as too esoteric for most looking for an Appleyard Adjustment. But I'd be interested in any independent impression on the point about Holocaust denial and its relevance to the discussion of Thursday's Newsnight. And what Newsnight should do about it, given that all this is license-funded. Even my first link is worth a look from that point of view.
I was genuinely disturbed by what the Newsnight moderators were prepared to tolerate. The blogscape isn't all awe and beauty, as I guess we already knew.
Don't take Morticia (Lady Amiel-Blackula) too seriously. In less than two weeks it'll be a full year since her Lord and Master started giving Bubba what he used to give her, and she's too over the hill to get someone new.
ReplyDelete