Blogoir

BBRU lurches back to life in 2011.

 

The great drama of our time is the moral, political and psychological battle around the limits (or not) on collectivist action as expressed through formal state power. Most postings submitted to BBRU bear on this in one way or the other:

 

Either the state should be doing more (or less), or whatever it’s doing it’s doing badly. And where lies the scope for simple private teamwork to solve problems? Is there any ‘private’ space at all these days anyway? What about personal responsibility? If you have a problem, should the state snap into action to solve it? And whatever outcome you favour, who pays for it - and how?

 

Let’s start this time with the links to writing on overtly ‘feminist’ themes, many uneasily pessimistic where the human condition is concerned.

 

Thus FemAcadem, who indeed blogs in a confused, exploratory feminist kinda way but makes a solid point in looking at the lurid reporting of murders of attractive young women:

 

This fetishisation of female victims of violence is not only objectifying and insulting to women, it can also have negative effects on male victims of crime, whose suffering is often ignored by the media and the public – they’re apparently just not sexy enough.

 

Cath Elliott (inter alia unapologetic feminist, and a trade union activist) once again has too much to say for herself when analysing the (for her) vile rapist intent of a man who ‘initiates sex’ when his girlfriend is asleep. Is she saying that if the girlfriend ‘initiates sex’ when the man is asleep, she too is committing a criminal offence? Boo. Hiss.

 

Kate Smurthwaite seems to think that the state is obliged to send the police straight out every time a woman feels uneasy after dark. But maybe they were already busy protecting women under the 2008 Criminal Justice and Immigration Act (s.63) which makes it an offence to possess any "explicit and realistic" image that depicts certain violent or life-threatening acts in what is deemed to be a sexual context. As the UK’s smartest blogger Heresy Corner points out, don’t carry clips from old Hammer horror films around on your iPhone in happy modern Britain or you can get arrested:

 

… stills taken from a Hammer film - to say nothing of more recent (and much more realistic) mainstream horror - even if passed by the BBFC might well form the basis of a prosecution if the police or CPS believe that the picture or sequence was extracted "for the purpose of sexual arousal".

Should circles of women green activists be, hem, penetrated rather too deeply by undercover (sic) police spies? A very British Dude firmly says no – it’s not fair on the policemen concerned to subject them to such ghastly dangers.

 

And what about the state’s ingenious ways of getting people on a Sex Offender’s register when they have done nothing of a sexual nature?

 

Almost nothing sums up the state v individual battle more than the issue of drugs. Some former state police professionals oppose the whole ‘war against drugs’ thing. Devil’s Kitchen pores over the rival arguments, to reach a terse conclusion:

 

It is not the state's job to tell me what I may or may not do with my own body, you authoritarian bastard! It is my body, not yours.

The state wisely nags us to use public transport to help save the planet. Hurrah! Yet somehow the result is unpleasantly overcrowded trains in a badly run system.

 

And so we turn with a sigh to bloggers who write directly about British Politics. Collectivists v The Rest – battle is joined.

 

Is the core issue that we all are just not innately left-wing enough, so the collectivists grab state institutions and use force to bludgeon us into submission? Extreme (but not fanatical) Stumbling and Mumbling thinks so:

 

The brute fact is that there is no public demand for liberal socialist policies. Voters don’t want worker ownership, a citizens’ basic income, a liberal immigration policy, steeper inheritance taxes or many other items on the left’s wish list. I’ll grant that there is some demand for higher taxes on the rich, but I fear this is arises less from socialist ideals than from the same motive as hostility towards paedophiles and immigrants - a hatred of people who are different.

 

Counting Cats likewise fears that we are Doomed unless we can free ourselves from collectivist control of education.

 

After lamenting Australia’s floods Brian Barder (always there for us to defend unpopular causes) comes out in favour of Ed Balls:

 

It’s hard to think of any front-rank politician better qualified by forensic skills, economic expertise, and practical experience at the centre of power, to expose these monumental Tory-LibDem lies than Ed Balls.  The lies must be comprehensively exposed and the fundamental dishonesty, the breath-taking opportunism, of the liars brought home to the electorate, if Labour is ever to regain the respect for economic competence that it had earned and deserved during more than a decade in office…. 

 

Well, it’s a view. If you want to expose supposed lies, opportunism and fundamental dishonesty, bring in a true expert. Maybe one reason why Liberal Conspiracy is leaving the Labour Party – let everyone else in that shameful organisation follow this fine example.

 

Here is Brian back on safer dry ground, casting a beady professional eye over the latest so-called revelations about Labour/Libya/Megrahi:

It’s a sound rule of diplomacy not to make demands of another government which have no prospect whatever of succeeding; such demands can only give the impression of misjudgement and misunderstanding on the part of the demandeur.

There’s lots of advice for Ed Miliband these days. The Daily Maybe peers into the darkness:

 

So mist like is his appearance that you see the Coalition forces growing more and more disconcerted at the lack of opposition. Like children camping they can't work out if there's a monster out there or not. They turn on their torches, they start at a snapping twig, they start to argue, "Look, there is no Labour Party, it doesn't exist!" The other child starts crying, "Labour are out there and they're going to eat us raw!"

 

Retro Woman gushes forth a mighty stream of (un)consciousness for Ed M’s benefit, part of which pertains to the curious notion of size:

 

Part of the problem is our size. We are a much smaller generation than our parents and grand parents. On the one side this is good because with population booms in the 1950s, and 1960s it has meant an overpopulation problem we are less likely to contribute to. But on a social and political side this is not good because whenever politicians have to decide whether it is better to cater to the middle aged and elderly which is a massive constituency, or to act in our best interests they will ere to the larger group of voters who have clearly forgotten how hard it is as a young person to get ahead in the world, and the ability to strike out into the world is more difficult than ever, regardless of whether one has a degree or not.  

Moving quickly on, Heresy Corner (again) demolishes the phoney and incoherent radicalism of UK Uncut:

 

Yet by choosing tax-avoidance as its Big Issue, the group expresses an abiding and paradoxical attachment to the conventional political institutions, a belief that if the state is no longer central then at least it should be, that its irrelevance is something to be regretted, because the best way to restore balance to politics and to society is to make sure that politicians get More Of Our Money.

 

What does the state do when it grabs all that money of ours? Tim Worstall reminds us of the familiar Whitehall end-of-financial-year splurge. Not to forget the outlandish cost of a new bridge in Scotland. Lone wolf Neil Craig also howls in despair at the BBC – and calls for action:

 

If somebody not only defends a licence fee prosecution of the BBC but counter sues for previous year's payments they would also be able to call a number of top executives & Trust members & make them testify, under oath, how the decisions to censor everything from the weather to NATO police's Crimes Against Humanity were taken. That opens whole new cans of worms. I suspect it would go viral online, though unmentioned by the MSM. 

 

P J Byrne wonders if it would be possible to move away from brute force and rely instead much more on voluntary contributions to collective causes:

The idea that a lumbering centralized state is necessary for the protection of the working class is the consequence of using an antiquated theory outside its proper context, of examining 21st-century problems through a 19th-century lens, and those who employ it are blinded to liberal possibilities for a fairer, freer, and more prosperous society. To be sure, though, if anything like a libertarian state is ever going to work, it will need many more people like Toby Ord.

Madsen Pirie hopes that the Coalition sticks to its supposedly radical policies.

 

Down at the so-called grass-roots, what does purposeful shared action for Big Society aims look like in real life?

 

Something like this determined attempt to save the empty Station Master’s house in Wivenhoe? Or small museums such as the obscure Church Farmhouse Museum in Hendon:

 

It costs £130,000 a year to run but attracts only 8000 visitors, which isn't seen as cost-effective by Brian Coleman and his slashing councillors. They argue that scarce funds needs to go to frontline services rather than optional heritage, and will be proposing closure at an Executive meeting on February 14th…

 

But some cuts are needed to nudge us back in the general direction of sanity:

These were the people who told us to believe in the Force Activity Survey when we all knew it was nonsense. It has since been abolished... And most grievous of all, these are the people who refused to stop spending time and resources gathering statistics for the very targets the new government abolished back in June 2010.

I am glad that the cuts will thwart their plans for real power at senior rank.

What should we (not) know about what the state is up to? Here is a thoughtful piece by Crooked Timber on Wikileaks:

 

… it is redefining the boundary between facts that ‘everybody’ (for political elite values of ‘everybody’) knows but that are non-actionable in the public space, because they are not publicly confirmable, and facts that are both perceived as politically salient and confirmable, and hence are legitimate ‘news.’

 

* * * * *

Let’s wrap up with some extra brisk writing which pulls things together for us.

 

David Thompson helpfully reviews assorted ravings from the Guardian month by month in 2010.

 

Archbishop Cranmer is unimpressed with Mehdi Hasan’s assertion that Jesus was a lefty:

 

 His is a crass and superficial piece, manifesting a caricature grasp of ‘the left’ and ‘the right’, quite ignorant of Christian theology and oblivious of 2000 years of socio-political history.

 

Mark Pack writes thoughtfully about ‘smaller, simpler, faster’ and social media (with special reference to the Ark Royal) and about the Glorious Revolution of 1688: something for President Mubarak to mull over:

 

… whether or not the crucial early stage of revolutions is when the existing establishment starts to break down existing power structures in its own desire to bring about change – but thereby also opening up the possibility of a different form of change replacing the establishment.

 

And, very finally, British Dude gets right to the bottom of Australian sporting dominance. 

 

* * * * *

Someone may or may not do the next BBRU. If you have any links to suggest or views on the value of the whole enterprise, please send them to britblog @ gmail dot com

Things have been quiet here at this for a few days over Christmas, and are going to be quiet here for a few days more as we enter the final throes of moving house.

The current house looks like a total wreck as we try to sort things out and discard unnecessary items. It has taken me two days just to weed the study room, throwing out vast quantities of paper and miscellaneous 'stuff'.

Then I got on to packing up my LPs, sigh. LPs in a box are really heavy. As are massed CDs. And the bulky Naim hifi system. What a social and maybe psychological change it is that children now alive will rent most of their home music and films from a digital e-cloud somewhere, and not actually own them. All that sheer weight - gone from their lives.

I wonder if the very idea of private property will start to erode in parallel. There's an evidently diminishing amount of private, and the value of property (other than land) may tend to lie more in the relationship it represents with suppliers rather than the 'value' of the items themselves. Or somesuch.

Back to the boxes. We move out on 5 January so you can expect to hear from me again in a structured way sometime thereafter, or not as the case may be.

In the meantime here is an interesting and readable conversation between two German economists about the future of the Eurozone: is it wiser to stick with the devil you know, or to leap to safety before he throttles you? Never an easy question.

And here is a ridiculous article over at Open Democracy about the volcanic eruption of student anger and militancy in Britain over the last few months. Gasp! According to my spies deeply infiltrated into Leeds University the mass of students hate the 'activists' and most of those who went on the coaches to the London demonstrations did so to get a cheap ticket for Christmas shopping.

In any case, what sort of movement is it which rants away about their 'demands' that other people (in practice their own grandchildren) should give them money? Looters are no less looters because they are 'socially networked'. 

Here too is the latest BBRU. The otherwise sensible Chameleon opposes student loans:

“This isn’t a handout, it’s an investment in the future of our society.  Education cannot simply be a debt trap, a step on the learn to earn treadmill that we’re all stuck on for life”.  I wholeheartedly agree.

Am I missing something here? Most students (if they have anything about them) at some point will take out a mortgage to buy a house. That loan will be massively more than the puny sum they pay to get through college. So why is a student loan of the modest proportions now put forward a debt-trap?

Why shouldn't we learn to earn, as well as earn to learn? Where the hell do you people think things come from?

The Cloud! It's just there. It gives us cool stuff.

Students! Grow up! Start campaigning against the state's meddling in your lives and education, not whining for even more of it.

As I was saying, back to the boxes.

I may be some time.

Is hosted by Jackart.

Who somewhat ungrammatically draws attention to a lefty blogger's poor spelling and grammar in her rejection of police handling of the student demonstrations:

HarpyMarx gives her perspective of the protests, and her spelling & grammar deteriorates as her anger rises...

Oops.

I never know quite what to make of persistent spelling and grammar blunders in other bloggers' work. Occasional typos are one thing and have to be ignored - we don't all have armies of proof-readers or even an easy Spellcheck.

But methinks Jakart can't have it both ways: it's not fair to poke fun at someone else's feeble errors while repeatedly deploying the egregious priveleged onesself.

Or is it oneself? I can never remember.

Jackart also looks in a businesslike way at blog comment moderation:

The F-word deals with the fraught process of comment moderation. This is not something I have to deal with on this blog - free speech and all that. But some people think that words can hurt, and feel the need to censor others' opinions, and it can become a lengthy and time-consuming process. Which is another reason I don't bother.

A third reason to not bother is that as I understand it, if you moderate you ARE responsible for comments which are potentially libellous...

Because most readers of this site (a) sensibly agree with me, and (b) in any case are usually too senior and busy to litter the Internet with ad hoc thoughts, I do not have too big a job moderating this site. If some people are getting too strident or unpleasant in their comments, I drop them a private line asking them to ease up, which usually works well enough.

It's not a question of 'free speech'. More a question of aesthetics - just as some restaurants and bars go for a certain deliberate style and keep it that way (eg via dress-codes), so do websites.

That said, certain feminist and other supposedly progressive sites seem to have a policy of excluding comments from people who firmly disagree with them, even if politely couched. So they lose credibility accordingly, as far as I'm concerned.  

Anyway, here I am in Brussels. Every time I come here I struggle to get on the right train on the appalling Metro.

It astounds me that all major cities do not have some sort of Oyster card system. Here in Brussels there are no obvious reasons to pay for a ticket, or obvious obstacles to getting on and off the system for free.

So the service must be losing huge sums of money, one reason for the horrible state of the Metro station right by the main EU Commission buildings, like something out of a dystopian B-horror movie.

On the subject of Brussels, here is Ambrose Evans-Pritchard again exhibiting unseemly glee at the state of the Eurozone:

It is no surprise to eurosceptics that Europe should have reached this fateful point where leaders must choose between the twin traumas of EMU break-up or giving up their countries.

Nor is it a surprise to an inner-core of schemers within the EU system, who have always calculated that they could exploit such a crisis to catalyse political union.

However, it is a big surprise to Europe’s leaders, and they do not know what to do about it...

Back to BBRU. Jackart urges all readers to send in ideas for the Britblog Roundups, so I do the same.

If you spot a good piece on a British blog which deserves a mention, send the link to britblog [at] gmail [dot] com

Stop Press:  Drogba and now Rooney both miss penalties hahahahaha

Is hosted by the always feminist Philobiblon.

Look out for the gloomy thoughts of Diamond Geezer on Olympic travel chaos in London in 2012 when the Games are on.

 

These Britblog Roundups are getting erratic.

 

This one, for example, is a week late. The previously scheduled one never appeared. Nonetheless, pressing on, let’s start with what really matters. The arrival of British fish and chips in Poland.

 

An unapologetic feminist and trade union activist is unimpressed with an organisation which wants to save lives by reducing abortions:

 

Awwww.  So basically, in a nutshell, the stories in this book/pamphlet/anti-abortion-religious-tract boil down to: I was young.  I didn’t know what I was doing.  I had an abortion.  I lived to regret it.  But then I found Jesus.  The end.

 

Always good to have a happy ending.

 

If you stupidly decide not to destroy your children before they are born, you at least can give them a fate even worse than death: social obliteration at school when they turn up on a bicycle sporting mudguards made from recycled plastic milk-bottles.

 

Or you can horribly stereotype them. What I don’t understand about these rantings against gender stereotyping is that the feminists who write them must have been stereotyped as children, yet as if by magic they grew up as feminists. If they were strong-willed enough to resist the blandishments of silly pink girlie stuff, maybe everyone else can be too?

 

If your vile children somehow survive all these humiliations and grow up, there’s still one other way to get rid of them. They can be executed for being gay in some countries – and the shameful UN will do nothing about it…

 

On the other hand, they may get their own back on you – and mutate into revolting students. Try this one, where students are discussing whether the UK ‘really’ has a coalition government:

 

But the student wasn’t having any of it. What was true didn’t really matter in one sense, they argued, it was the perception of that reality that was important

 

Yup, who wants to learn musty old facts, when we can have so much more fun validating our perceptions? Then there’s this:

 

Students are right to be angry. Students are right to protest. If anything we need more energy, not less, in these movements to help them show the rest of us the way.

 

Er … and those of us who slave away to pay for these so-called students are right to believe that they need to get their little runny noses back in their books. If not, the deal’s off.

 

Pub Philosopher reminds us of the time when there were not so many male students around:

One hazy morning in 1917 the senior mistress of Bournemouth High School For Girls stood up in front of the assembled sixth form and announced to her hushed audience:

"I have come to tell you a terrible fact."  Only one out of ten of you girls can ever hope to marry. This is not a guess of mine. It is a statistical fact.

"Nearly all the men who might have married you have been killed. You will have to make your way in the world as best you can. "The war has made more openings for women than there were before. But there will still be a lot of prejudice. You will have to fight. You will have to struggle..."

 

How good for ‘the Left’ and its struggles are cooperatives? Not good at all when the horrid Coalition government talks about them? Lo! Politically Rambling Jane brings a fine new verb to our language – to re-vigour:

 

If the left is going to re-vigour itself, it has to embrace these new ideas of ownership. They shouldn’t be seen as a threat to socialism or whatever, it should be seen as a way to bring in real local democracy. We shouldn’t become set in a thought that the state is the answer to everything, there are ways to reform areas of life so that we can provide real face-to-face democracy, real control and thus, real self freedom.

 

It doesn’t help when the left and those supporting worker’s rights, seem to conflate meanings and undermine the cause of progressive movements such as the cooperative/mutuals movement.

 

Talking of being angry, the brilliant Heresiarch (the best writer in the UK blogosphere?) identifies a new crime: being English.

 

What has been on trial is the possibility of humour itself, the right of a freeborn Englishman to be facetious as and when he feels like it, about any subject whatsoever. Against that age-old national instinct to make light of adverse circumstances - the spirit that got us through the Blitz - we now find a new and alien notion that there are some things that are beyond joking, that even an obvious joke must be treated seriously. Because it's no laughing matter.

 

Because you can't be too careful. Because any imagined threat, however patently absurd, must be ritually investigated. And the person making the joke must bear the responsibility for the time-consuming and costly process of investigation, even though the possibility of such an investigation never crossed his mind, just to drive the message home that You Cannot Make Jokes About Terrorism.

 

See also the Ministry of Truth on Gareth Compton’s fate:

The construction of the joke is one that, if well executed, has a least of chance of working when delivered to a English/British audience precisely because, within that culture, it cannot reasonably be taken seriously and works, as such, precisely because in Britain we don’t routinely stone people to death.

By the same token, its a joke that would certainly fall flat on its arse in some parts of Islamic world, where stoning remains very much on the cultural/judicial menu, but as we’re not in Iran that’s rather a moot point.

Contemplating telling jokes on Twitter? Stumbling and Mumbling nails it:

 

The desire to protect fragile purified identities (all pure things are fragile) leads to a demand for protection, which bolsters the self-importance of the police, security and judicial professions. And their self-importance in turn helps to legitimize the excessive sensitivity of the easily offended.

 

There, though, a wonderful irony here. One form which a purified identity can take is radical Islamism - the belief that adherence to a single book can ward off the jarring elements of modernity.

 

In this sense, Ms Alibhai-Brown and the pompous, humourless security professionals have something in common with the terrorists they oppose.

 

Maybe there just are other ways to deal with such things, even if they involve fevered British diplomats and the always-intriguing subject of megachiropteran oral sex?

 

Brian Barder can always be relied on to explain some not-so-obvious constitutional points. Such as, what is a Queen? And he even jousts with Tim Worstall over what to do about the long-term unemployed.

 

Another tireless blogger is Neil Craig. He manages to get a nice letter from Freeman Dyson, whose brilliant ears set a superb example to all would-be scientists. And when he is not wildly defending Slobodan Milosevic in Comments at this very site, he lays into the Scottish National Party:

 

I am forced to the conclusion that this is incompetence rather than deliberate fraud. It is nonetheless as gross as such incompetence can be. The attempt to cover up by pretending it was intentional is then dishonest. Either they are incompetent liars who have no belief in their party's philosophical goal or they lying incompetents who have no belief in their party's philosophical goal - I go for the latter.

 

Mark Pack warns us not to believe all the hype about social media. Which has had a faster take-up? Dull old radio or the cool iPod?

 

At the time radio hit 50m listeners in the US the US population was around 132 million, making radio's penetration 38%. Currently the world's population if around 6.8 billion, so to hit a similar 38% figure the iPod would have had to have got to 2.6 billion users. Kind of makes the iPod's current take-up levels look rather puny compared to what radio actually achieved

 

Are you cross about security searches at airports? Know your place! Just accept them! So says a Magistrate: 

 

A lot of the remarks seem to express indignation that important travellers can have to speak to oiks in uniform. Those 'oiks' don't make the rules.

 

It's a bit like the pompous fools who react to being stopped for speeding by asking the officer why he isn't out catching burglars instead of harassing motorists. The officer won't answer the question, but he will be more likely to write a ticket than he was before it was asked.

 

Some public sector workers help save lives in a different way:

 

Little two-year-old Timmy with a cut to his head will be called into an examination room where I'll assess him to make sure that he isn't going to drop dead from an undiagnosed fractured skull. I'll then clean the wound, glue it shut and then educate the parent (or Timmy if the parent is a bit dim) about how to look after the now neatly glued wound.

I'll also tell them that if Timmy decides to have a seizure or collapse unconscious they should think about bringing him back as the head injury is obviously a bit more serious than I originally thought.

I then type up the notes on the computer system (because we are a paperless system. Mostly), discharge the patient and then call in the next one.

Repeat that for the rest of my twelve and a half hour shift.

 

Penultimate, but not least, an interesting posting by Slugger O’Toole about Roger Fenton, the first war photographer. Was one of his most famous photographs – a road in the Crimea conveniently littered with cannonballs – staged?

 

And to conclude, some thoughts from Counting Cats about the lassitude of the long-distance libertarian blogger:

 

Hmm, I appear to be out of steam all of a sudden. Am I speaking like a crazy person? Does this make any sense?

I just feel that one reason the socialists succeeded was that they created structure for themselves; little jobs here and there, sources of income, an ability to sustain a network. We can only get so far with volunteering, battling the inevitable psychological disincentives to keep churning out articles day after day without anything in return but the satisfaction of keeping going.

Blogs are good. But is it time for something a bit more organised that can make a name for itself and become a bit of an institution?

Good question.

 

Send your contributions to the next BBRU to britblog @ gmail dot com. Who knows, it may even appear at some point. Or not. 

Is hosted by a Very British dude

Who has a brisk line in literary criticism:

Philobiblon tries to be more upbeat by reviewing "Rethinking Contemporary Feminist Politics" by Jonathan Dean which can be yours for £54 on Amazon. Those long winter evenings will just fly by.

What caught my eye was this fine sentiment:

Of course libertarian, feminist, socialist or some combination, the joy of the blogosphere is not in the ranting, entertaining though that is, nor in campaigning whatever your axe to grind, but in the enlightening posts by people who really know what they're talking about, for this is the one area where the Blogosphere really beats the Mainstream media, hands down.

Former diplomat, Charles Crawford points us to a shameful episode in Britain's history ...

Is hosted by Pirate Party activist Amused Cynicism.

It links to a completely zany piece by Natalie Bennett attacking the way the US runs its affairs:

The “American model” of politics and society supports a small state and everything possible (and sometimes impossible) being left to the market. And the most minimal of minimalist (ranging to non-existent) social support systems.

What? What? Has she looked at the size of the US federal budget recently? Nothing too small about that. She bewails the fact that a lot of people in the USA are poor. Well, sure they are! Because poor people go there, often illegally, in the hope of becoming richer. Why is that a failure?

Back on earth Raedwald calls for horrible cuts in public spending to help recreate working-class self-reliance:

For me, my old 'Everyman' books symbolise the brief flowering of endogenous British working class culture before the threat was challenged, and the flowering cut-off by the 1911 National Insurance Act and everything that followed that emasculated this class and pushed them into Welfare slavery. It was compulsory, top-down, 'Can't do' on a national scale. 

Nicely put.

Is hosted by Mr Eugenides who through no fault of his own links to some depressing material.

He leads us to Philobiblon reporting on A Female Future discussion. Baroness Kate Parminter (LibDem) noted that in looking at secondary schools for her daughter, she found that one she had otherwise liked offered cheerleading as an after-school club. “I want that to stop.”

Why can't so-called Liberal so-called Democratic people stop telling other people what to do?

Meanwhile it turns out that without taxpayers' money, breastfeeding in Haringey is not happening on the scale needed to save us all huge sums of money. You try to follow the argument, as I can't.

The core of it seems to be that there are potential benefits to be had from collective action, but no easy way to capture them. So Haringey must spend money on breastfeeding experts to achieve a share of a purely theoretical saving far down the line. Ditto for so many other things, which takes us to Communism as the way to bring everything under control once and for all. 

The result of that Ultimate Rationality is for everyone to behold in N Korea and Cuba - people get to run the country because they are the immediate relatives of the last person to run the country.

Whatever the opposite of natural selection based on fitness for purpose is, that is it. (And, yes, I'm not a republican. I can tolerate and even support some historic traditional anomalies such as the public role of the Royal Family here in the UK. Just not raving collectivist lunacy.)

Elsewhere at BBRU an anguished activist/campaigner frets over how to achieve meaningful change. Maybe the problem is that people reasonably disagree on what is meaningful, and what needs to be changed? Just a thought.

On to BBRU 285, hosted by Cabalamat. Please send your suggestions to britblog [at] gmail.com.

 

Is hosted by Matt Wardman.

Check it out. Especially Retro Home Tips:

... the world needs more than just lawyers, doctors, and scientists, and ad executives. In fact we could probably live with out the ad executives.

But we will fall flat on our faces as a society, and some would argue that we already have, without cooks, seamstresses, bakers, cleaners, and teachers amongst other occupations, that are seen as less than palatable by the modern feminist...

Is deftly hosted by Natalie Bennett.

Various points of interest, including a list of feminist bloggers missing from the 'blokeosphere' lists of leading bloggers exemplified by the Total Politics surveys. Hey, women bloggers, there's nothing stopping your blogs being put forward into these surveys and asking readers to vote for them. As eg Jennie Rigg did, climbing nicely up the charts this year.

Another frequently disgusted woman takes unerring aim at the idea that women and the way they dress or behave somehow makes anything bad that happens to them at the hands of men their fault:

Matthew Wright was very close to the crux of the issue when he made the point that blaming women for verbal sexual abuse makes as much sense as 'covering them all up with burkas', but sadly failed to go further and explain why. Burka or mini-skirt, hijab or high heels, the very fact we focus constantly on what WOMEN are wearing, shows that we still see women as being the 'gatekeepers' of sexual activity, and men as the aggressors.

No one would ever seriously make the argument that a man wearing tight jeans is 'asking for' a woman or a gay man to grab his backside, because what men wear, where men go, how men act, is never up for analysis.

This, of course, is right at the heart of the Burqa ban debate and the way Islam currently operates in many societies, as I myself have pointed out. Lawks, am I a feminist?

Part of the problem with some Islamic (and other?) communities in the UK is 'cousin mariage' and consequent 'inbreeding'. Genetic testing to help test the higher risks (if any) of illness/disease?

Finally, Brian Barder is still banging on against Tony Blair, this time over the 1999 Kosovo bombing. Well, Brian's a classic Oldish Labour-type thinker. Did he vote for Labour when TB won all those elections, or at least want Labour to win? I didn't.

Don't forget nominations (britblog AT gmail DOT com) for Matt Wardman next week.

There are only two important ideas in politics and political philosophy:

 

• That government belongs to the people (ie the people are the source of sovereignty)
• That the people belong to the government (ie the government/state is the source of sovereignty)

Mr Eugenides tends towards the former individualist approach:

 

Every year, I propose that each taxpayer receive an itemised statement from HMRC, providing a detailed breakdown of how every penny of your taxes has been spent - £431.20 on the NHS, £193.31 on the police, 59p subsidising MPs' booze, 2p on duck houses, etc. etc. - and countersigned, for good measure, by your local MP.

 

Is it value for money? Does it reflect my priorities to some minimal degree? Am I happy with the political representative that nodded it through? If so, then I may - generously, if through gritted teeth - cut you a cheque

 

That’s the polite bit.

 

The UK Labour Party delivers the second, collectivist option. When in doubt – lots, lots more government. The Daily (Maybe) looks at those Labour leadership collectivists, hoping one day to rule us - and in the darkness bind us:

 

Abbott was strong on name checking all the bugbears of the left: ID cards, the war, ten pence tax, detention of children, bankers are evil, housing et al. As she said in her closing statement "On all those big issues I called them right and every other candidate got them wrong."

 

Zzzzzzz ... huh ... what was that? Bankers? Evil? Very British dude wearily brings us back to real life:

 

The truth is that the investment banks did a lot better than both Governments and retail banking during the crisis because of the idiocy of Governments and the Public in buying assets they couldn’t'afford and spending more than they earned.

 

Imagine the horror for all such Labour and other Left collectivists – the horror - if American-style Tea Party people favouring smaller, honest government came our way:

 

… there is a Palinite tendency creeping into UK mainstream rightwing politics

 

Aaargh.

 

Then there’s collectivist control over Chesil Beach, beloved by diamond geezer:

 

There are reputedly 100 billion pebbles from end to end … you pass a big sign which reads "The unauthorised removal of pebbles from the beach is prohibited".

 

Hmm. If a staggering ten million people turned up there and each lugged a heavy bag of 100 pebbles back to their cars to decorate their gardens, there would still be 99,000,000,000 pebbles left.

 

Amused Cynicism points us to a dim collectivist hoping to blunder around lavishly with other people’s money:

 

I think the root reason is that Balls, in common with most politicians — and certainly most from the main parties — doesn’t really understand modern technology and how it will make the 21st century different from the 20th.

 

The answer? Younger voters should cut loose and vote for the Pirate Party:

 

People under 35 make up about 25% of the electorate and 20% of the voters (numbers are guesstimates, but accurate enough for the argument I’m making), and it wouldn’t make sense for the big parties to appeal to 20% of the electorate if in doing so they alienate the other 80%.

 

Alas for that noble view, up in Scotland Better Nation points out that if a Labour MSP stands down, other parties may not have a good chance of nabbing that seat.

 

Tim Worstall is unimpressed with Labour MP Denis MacShane’s views on prostitution.

 

Calling in the UN, that ultimate phenomenon of governments working together for the Common Good, does not necessarily help. Too Much To Say For Myself on alleged atrocities against women in the Congo:

 

I think in light of these more recent revelations it’s fair to say the UN, once again, has got a lot of explaining to do. UN forces may not be responsible for the rapes, but by the looks of it they’re certainly responsible for not doing enough to prevent them.

 

Here’s someone from a G20 protest showing her defiance of state power, this time (presumably) from some sort of complicated conflicted Left point of view.

 

Thus we trudge on to another unavoidable eternal theme: Women v Men.

 

The Awra Amba community in northern Ethiopia has its own way of balancing male and female roles:

 

… work that people do within Awra Amba is based on their abilities, so women and men do the work which they are best at, regardless of whether that work is traditionally thought to be gendered

 

Should men offer acts of courtesy to women? Watch in awe as one Bidisha of the Guardian (who has views on such matters) is mauled from two different angles:

First, Juliette:

 

Which of the following things is different from the other things in this list:

a) A black eye
b) A fractured jaw
c) A violent rape
d) The phrase ‘you look nice today, sweetheart’

I can’t even imagine how rude and obnoxious these uber-feminists are in day-to-day life. They’ll go mental over the tiniest little thing, and haven’t even got the basic human decency to keep their mentalness to themselves.

 

And then Heresiarch:

 

I wouldn't deny that for some feminists the suffering of the women of Afghanistan is an important issue. It's not that feminists never talk about these issues. It's just that I seriously wonder why they ever talk about anything else …

 

Bidisha's main complaint seems to be that women are marginalised and denigrated in a thousand small ways. But is not her relentless, mind-numbing focus on trivialities a symptom of that very relegation of women's issues to the margins of public debate? Is Bidisha herself a misogynist?
 

* * * * *

 

Let’s change pace. What about blogging as a genre?

 

A Very Public Sociologist has had a clever idea of self-promotion, namely to ask readers to vote for the UK’s 100 Worst Politics Blogs. A wily move which headed off his own blog’s much deserved place prominent on any such list.

 

This exercise helpfully takes us to some exotic places hitherto unexplored on BBRU.

 

F’rinstance, The Stilletoed Socialist:

In a blogosphere dominated by right wing, angry men, I feel a certain responsibility to counteract or merely dilute their poison with a different viewpoint.

Thanks - for caring.

 

Then there’s Through The Scary Door:

 

Body of a wolf, legs of a horse, eyes of a priest, mind of a wasp, hair of a chimp, postman’s shins, bowels of a crab and a buffalo anus!

 

Hmm. Scary indeed. Especially that exclamation mark.

 

If you want to see a really scary true-life picture, check out Rantin’Rab as he ponders the school run:

 

We exit via the gate, pushing our way past people who seem to have no idea of self awareness. The road is heaving with cars parked either side of the road. The majority are decent cars, only a few years old. Filled with one or sometimes two fat disasters, (they are ALL fat, no exception), all the cars have one thing in common. They have disabled parking permits on the dashboard. All the cars are 'mobility motors'. Paid for by me, the tax payer.

As we take a slow stroll home, I'm suddenly struck by a thought.

It's me and my family who are not normal. The scene I have described is normality in the Britain of today.

 

I'm a freak. And you know what, I'm proud to be a freak.

 

Then there’s Blurred Clarity. Hard to be sure what has made this blog score nicely in the 100 Worst Political Blogs list, as it is largely unreadable.

 

Religion? Try Martin Kelly from the West of Scotland:

 

While the person who wrote that might consider themself to be orthodox, in reality their sentiments are the tawdriest mirror image of the southern European anti-clericalism which may have led souls to Hell.

 

 * * * * *

 

Finally, some good writings on a human scale.

 

Left Back In the Changing Room wonders how low Scottish football can go – but looks on the bright side.

 

It’s A Family Thing recalls the unflinching raw courage of Jim Corbett, tiger hunter.

 

Max Atkinson wisely reminds us about Death by PowerPoint.

 

And, following my own recent postings here about UK disability policy, here is a good blog for deaf people, plus another by WheelchairSteve recording the not-so-petty indignities endured by some disabled people in public areas.

 

Very very finally, Manchester leads the way in giving awards to its local blogging community. Cool idea. Try it, other places.

 

* * * * *

 

The next BBRU will arrive at some point in the future, for sure. Contributions from readers of all blogs especially welcome – just email links to britblog @ gmail.com

BBRU 280 is up at Redemption Blues.

The host, Chameleon, loves to take these blog links on their merits (and, yes, many of them do have merits!) and mull over the ideas they prompt.

Plus she has this excellent passage on the idea that we have too many consumerist 'choices':

I may well have been conditioned since birth to buy into the illusion of choice, but quite frankly, I would rather eat my own intestines wrapped around a stick than surrender my autonomy. 

True enough, I have accumulated considerable reserves of educational, cultural and social capital along the way, but from very inauspicious beginnings and I am damned if I am going to let some drooling bureaucrat issuing an edict about where to send my offspring to have the three Rs drummed into them.

And this, looking at a posting by Craig Murray:

One sentence jars, however: “Julian tells us that the first woman accuser and prime mover had worked in the Swedish Embassy in Washington DC and had been expelled from Cuba for anti-Cuban government activity, as well as the rather different persona of being a feminist lesbian who owns lesbian night clubs”.

This leaves a sour taste, as Murray uncritically and gratuitously regurgitates completely irrelevant details – irrelevant and gratuitous that is, unless you wish to imply that being a lesbian and, to make matters worse, a feminist undermines the woman’s credibility, as if these two alleged attributes render her testimony inherently untrustworthy or mendacious, as if you were happy to indulge in a little character assassination yourself. 

Ha!

So pour yourself a stiff drink and plunge in to this subtle, bumper effort.

I am hosting the next BBRU. The whole point of this exercise is that the hosts publicise blog links sent in by the masses. If anyone has spotted something good by a British blogger which merits a wider audience, please send it to britblog @ gmail.com and I'll aim to include it.

 

Is hosted by a Very British dude.

Including a deft analysis by The Melangerie about the impact (or not) on the British economy of abolishing slavery in the C19. It responds to a piece by Johann Hari which attacks working conditions in China.

And farewell Nee Naw.

Oh, and here is an interesting website, namely a simple account of all the insults and unpleasantness a female cyclist encounters pedalling around London. Complete with handy maps and lots of bad language...

Is hosted by Mr Eugenides. A double round-up this week.

Linking to Thatcher Derangement Syndrome.

A more than comprehensive analysis by Brian Barder of the al-Megrahi/Libya business.

And a lumbering waddle into the droll world of fat queer activists:

I'm a working stiff, a tired artist, and an aspiring public intellectual who is interested in the intersections between bodies, identities, and aesthetics. I'm interested in fatness in part because of my lifetime struggle to peacefully occupy my own body.

To each her own. Just don't overdo it.

Is neatly hosted by Philobiblon.

Who leads us to two stories of state-sponsored appallingness here in England.

The tale of the non-equipped ambulance.

And the grotesque behaviour of Hackney Council.

Yes, we pay taxes so that these people can get paid to treat us with contempt.

 

Summer looms. Attention wanders. A somewhat unthematic BBRU this week.

 

Let’s start – where else? – with everyone’s favourite subject. Russian spies.

 

One of the very best UK blogs in terms of energy and insight is Spy Blog: Watching Them, Watching Us. And it delivers this fascinating technical account of issues to do with false identities, including this more than helpful tip concerning the information your passport emits:

 

This laminated page has a stupid embedded contactless chip and antenna loop, which act as a "let's blab the nationality and / or unique passport number to anybody with cheap unlicensed band radio frequency equipment" device, even before any encrypted data is sent between the chip and the passport reader equipment.

It has already been demonstrated that this can be done at ranges of several tens of metres, way beyond the few centimetres that the Passport and Passport reader equipment require. It therefore puts British travellers at risk of covert surveillance and tracking, as they pass by unseen detection equipment, operated by anybody with access to some cheap electronics…

Spy Blog recommends, that just as with Oyster Travel Cards in London, you use aluminium metal foil etc. to line your Passport cover, so as to prevent this chip being sneakily detected or read, except when you are actually presenting it at passport control.

Then there’s the aimless disaster that is English football. How can anyone take seriously a manager who tries to deal with an urgent two-goal deficit, takes off a proven Tottenham striker and brings on an elderly lumberer known to be unable to score at England level?

 

The Football Blog sadly picks through the wreckage.

 

And Osama Saeed muses from a Scottish vantage-point on the issue of how far one should root for one’s neighbour.

 

Who would want to miss the start of the English Premier League, when our domestic dopes have good foreign players to support them and so start scoring again? HM Ambassador in Kyiv (as Kiev is known these days) Leigh Turner urges Ukrainians to apply in good time for UK visas.

 

Feeling peckish after all that TV World Cup stuff? Get advice from a leading Cheese blog.

 

If people are increasingly stupid, at least cars are increasingly smart. According to Longrider.

 

* * * * *

The new UK government is aiming to cut government spending.

 

Despite the evident folly of Big Government, some people are wary of doing anything about it. Lenin’s Tomb burbles on about women and work and the sexualisation of labour:

 

… in which women are required to consider their sexuality - not merely their bodies, but their ability to be flirtatious and charming - as part of their job skills, part of being 'professional' … Women have to see themselves as walking advertisements for themselves.

 

What?! Since when is expecting employees of any gender to be charming and positive a bad thing? At least this lumpen Marxism is somewhat droll:

I suggested previously that the phrase 'work-life balance' inadvertently revealed something about work under capitalism, namely the fact that the majority of one's waking hours are not spent alive, but labouring in a sort of undead capacity.

 

If work and life are separate and opposing modes of existence, then the tendency of the former to increasingly dominate the latter outside of formal working hours, structuring our 'fun', commanding and regulating our socialisation, governing how we conduct ourselves in public, etc., means that capitalism is almost literally sucking the life out of us.

 

Just think how much better it was to work in a joyous Soviet factory: neither suckers, nor sucked!

 

Talking of work, here’s Euro-Leftist MEP Mary Honeyball telling us that it is not up to you and me to decide how much work we do. Yes, it’s up to her to decide.

 

How to tackle UK welfare benefit abuse, if indeed there is any? Scabrous Scourges from Scarborough hosts Tom Pollard of Mind, who fears that reforms and cost-cutting will do more harm than good.

 

Which site leads us inexorably to another, spEak You're bRanes, which mercilessly lambasts the views of people as expressed on the BBC’s Have Your Say site:

 

A collection of ignorance, narcissism, stupidity, hypocrisy and bad grammar.

 

Moving quickly on, we come to Isitfair, which campaigns in a heartfelt way for the reform of council tax and greedy public sector bosses:

 

The proposed £250 per annum pay rise for the lowest paid staff now seems to me to be more of an insult.  I just hope that when the good times roll the flat monetary rise should apply across the board.  The highly paid executives, living in their own little world of protected wealth and advantage, and thumbing their noses at their paymasters, must  surely receive their comeuppance.

Raedwald gives us this superb pair of paragraphs:

 

Draw a horizontal line eight miles long with its centre on Westminster. At the Western end, folk will live about ten eighteen years longer than those at the Eastern end, have less than a quarter of the infant mortality, Tuberculosis will be rare and they will tend to be lean as whippets on a diet of olive oil and lettuce. In the West, bedbugs and body lice are virtually unknown; in the East, bus and tube upholstery is riddled with their eggs.

 

The contrast is remarkable in anyone's eyes. For socialists, it is a powerful argument for taking lots of money from the people in the West and giving it to the people in the East. In fact, they've just spent thirteen years doing just this, and the result is that ..... all the inequalities have got worse.

 

As the saying goes, read the whole thing.

 

Tim Worstall points out to Johann Hari that there is a nifty way to achieve all sorts of complex things at the same time:

 

What we want is some method of reducing the future demand for wheat while also increasing the amount of wheat that will be planted.

 

We want both consumers and producers to react rationally to this mooted future shortage.

 

We want consumers to substitute for wheat: eat rice, cassava, teff, rye, oats, instead.

 

We want producers to change their production processes: it’s a standard of farming that you can go for extensive or intensive methods and there’s a spectrum between them.

 

How to do all that simultaneously? Simple.

 

How might we tell if Marxism is on its last legs? Harry wonders about one way of measuring success:

The son of the Hon. Ædgyth Bertha Milburg Mary Antonia Frances Lyon-Dalberg-Acton has noticed that some students at a Russell Group university are attending extra-curricular lectures.

I have to admit to some doubt over whether that’s exactly what Karl Marx had in mind when he predicted the self-emancipation of the proletariat though.

Anna Raccoon notices important things falling down, to ruinous effect.

 

* * * * *

One of the charms of doing BBRU is that it encourages you to look for new blogging universes.

 

Policy here at BBRU is not to link to the vast volumes of frantic and well-resourced material on the Web supporting racist supremacy in one shape or form.

 

Nor does religion feature very often. In the hope that mass prayer will help our teams at the next World Cup since honest human toil is evidently insufficient, here are links to three religious sites.

 

First, a handy roundup by Yahya Birt of the UK Muslim blogosphere

 

Then a long list hosted by Quantum Tea of British Christian sites.

 

And Rabbi Jeremy Rosen looking at issues from a Jewish perspective, including the tricky question of how far Israel can be an ‘ethical state’:

 

If genuine peace were a serious option in the Middle East, Israel would be both morally and politically bankrupt to reject it. But until we reach a settlement, with enemies openly and brazenly seeking Israel's destruction, survival must be the priority…

 

An ethical state can only survive in an ethical world. An ethical people survives despite the world.

 

Not to forget the Heresiarch, mulling over how far the law should intrude on, hem, private alternative lifestyles: 

Even more startling, perhaps, is the probation officer who made the fatal mistake of performing his fire-eating routine in a fetish club. He wasn't even involved in the "scene", yet his employers managed to fire him for bringing the profession into disrepute.

 

* * * * *

The last word goes to a Publicly Militant Sociologist, fretting over the Meaning of Sheds:

 

So bourgeois cultural products can "sink" down into the depths of society from its gilded levels, so seemingly neglected cultural artifacts of working class life can make the reverse journey.

The fate of Banksy's street art that has seen it rise from the mundane urban landscape of Bristol to the toast of the art world is one example. It would seem the shed is on a similar trajectory - and a necessary one as home offices have become depressingly common and so yesterday.

What would we all do without Leftist … analysis?

 

 * * * * *

Suggestions for next week’s BBRU should be sent to Britblog @ gmail dot com

The latest BBRU is pinkly hosted by Trixy.

It's notable for a link to a profoundly depressing link to a piece noting the OK contents of the free condom device at the British Embassy in Hanoi.

Have these people no taste?

Is hosted by Redemption Blues, who somehow manages to find enough inspiration from my piece on Being, Not Producing to take readers to what I suspect is an unfamiliar place.

Namely:

Piotr Sztompka’s brilliant essay Civilisational Incompetence: The Trap of Post-Communist Societies (Zeitschrift für Soziologie, Volume 22, Number 2, April 1993, pp85-95.

Not one on my own reading list, I confess. But she draws a parallel of Barderesque dimensions between post-communist anomie and post-Labour UK:

There are certain familiarities with the litany of discontents related to how unpleasant a place Britain has become to live in, how courtesy and service have vanished from everyday interactions, even the pretence of politeness ousted by grasping commercialism and cynicism, the vacuous cult of celebrity and route to short-term fame (notoriety) via the likes of (now thankfully defunct) Big Brother where contestants parade and perform themselves in all their glorious banality, the eschewal of effort and quietly plugging away as the pathway to the rewards of peer recognition and achievement.

Sounds about right.

Anyway, various interesting links there, not least this one to Matt Wardman on Operation Ore.

And White Sun of the Desert knows a few things about oil blowouts - and where BP looks to have gone wrong.

Is hosted by Amused Cynicism (Scottish pirate).

With a link to a nifty iPhone app, allowing citizens to notify street fixing issues directly to local councils.

This is the sort of idea that the ConDems need to develop - a new Partnership Society.

Mr Eugenides hosts.

Including a smart analysis of why Manchester United lost out to Chelsea this year.

And a fine link to this timeless helpful advice, said to come from Martin Luther:

If the wife will not, nor can performe the due of marriadge, let the chamber-mayde come, and stepp in her roome. Certainly the art of Venerie is as necessarie to euerie one, (see what filth he disgorgeth) as meate, drinke, or sleepe.

Not to overlook Mr E's favourite posting this time round:

Post of the week, for me, is this minor gem from Charles Crawford, which reveals that Albert Einstein was, contrary to popular belief, a total dunce.