Ted Rall, one of the few American columnists to say true things about Ronald Reagan after his death rather than sycophantic lies, has published an excellent collection of hatemail on his website.

I especially like the guy who claims Reagan established the Department of Education, and the guy who suggests Mr Rall asks Margaret Thatcher for an honest appraisal of Reagan’s record…

More disturbing is the reaction to Mr Rall’s piece from the less unbalanced right and centre, who seem to think he’s saying terrible and inappropriate things. Was it Cassandra who was cursed to always tell the truth and never be believed?

UK blogger Laban Tall is somewhat right-wing – but (or possibly ‘and’, to avoid charges of nonsequituring) he’s normally entirely fair and reasonable. You may be able to gauge from the previous sentence that I’m about to list a counterexample…

There’s a reasonable, if (to me) unconvincing argument that everyone ought to be allowed to have guns. There’s a reasonable argument that people shouldn’t. But no matter what your take on that debate is, the fact that the BBC may hire gunmen to protect its journalists in lawless war zones is in no way inconsistent with being opposed to the use of guns in general.

The current climate in warzones is different from anything experienced since the dawn of TV: one side genuinely no longer gives a fuck how it’s portrayed, and is therefore happy to slaughter journalists indiscriminately. There’s also a perception (I challenge someone with Chris Lightfoot’s patience and statistical ways to check the truth of this…) that the Allied side is also less willing than in the past to give journalists the benefit of the doubt.

In this context, unless you genuinely believe that a randomly chosen person in part X of Britain (assuming that said randomly chosen person isn’t a crack dealer) is even in the same magnitude of risk of violent death as a war journalist, the claim of hypocrisy here is nonsensical.

And they’re prepared to take any steps, no matter how shameless, to get it.

An exciting new Googlebombing challenge pits the Jedi Knights of blogging against the Dark Side of Search Engine Optimisation… It’s amateurs versus professionals all over again, like the glory days of cricket. Except that this time the game is to be #1 hit on Google for the words “nigritude ultramarine“.

I have a horrible suspicition that the SEOs are going to walk this, but let’s see how it goes – apart from anything else, it’s interesting to compare the effectiveness of PageRank (blogs’ key advantage) versus optimised text pages… Does saying nigritude ultramarine again help with the Google ranking? I can’t remember.

I wonder if the “the UN is unspeakably corrupt and Jacques Chirac took oil-for-food bribes” meme will be hit by the news that the Chalabi crony who broke the news has ‘lost all the evidence in a computer crash’?

I remember a few school and university deadlines where I ‘lost my completed essay in a computer crash’. I don’t think my teachers were terribly convinced then – and I’m not even wanted for fraud (nor have I ever lied to lead a country into war…)

Update: oops, forgot to hat tip the splendid Josh Marshall.

Hopefully it goes without saying, but I feel I probably ought to say it anyway.

Infinite thanks and respect to the brave people who died or put their lives on the line 60 years ago for freedom, democracy, tolerance, civilisation, etc.

As an update to the previous drinking post after having seen the BBC programme, their point does seem to be strongly provicial-towns-focused. Even so, it’s still a *very* tenuous one.

Their evidence from a Saturday night out in a large provincial town was:

* One poor guy who was badly beaten up by thugs with pool cues, in a local pub at 8PM. Rubbish, and lock them up forever, but not very relevant.

* Lots of drunken students doing silly things with roadwork signs. And we’re supposed to care about this why?

* A few daft girls passing out after eight pints, being well looked-after and taken to hospital.

* A couple of drunken fights between consenting fighters, in which no-one was very badly hurt.

Overall, the impression was one of daft puritans, lazy policemen who resented having to work late to deal with clubbers (never mind that we pay £20 billion in drinks tax to pay their wages…), lots of people having fun, and journalists desperate to spin a story together.

Great condolences to the friends and family of Simon Cumbers, the BBC cameraman who was murdered in Saudi Arabia today. Best recovery wishes to journalist Frank Gardner, who was injured in the same attack.

Congratulations to all the brave people like Mr Cumbers and Mr Gardner who risk (and sometimes attain) death to tell us what’s really happening in scary, dangerous and important bits of the world.

Brickbats to any scumbags who seek to celebrate or justify these deaths. Particularly if they aren’t themselves murderous Arab terrorists.

Update: That’d be like these scumbags, then. I can’t quite bring myself to check LGF…

Every year, an enormous scandal miraculously erupts from nowhere. It doesn’t really matter to anyone involved whether the “threat” is from shadowy Internet paedophiles, murderous foreign immigrants, life-saving vaccinations – as long as ignorant masses are stirred up and headlines grabbed, it’s all going well. This year, the relevant topic appears to be one close to my heart: the drink.

From our floundering PM to the BBC via the police (and obviously the traditional right-wing authoritarian commentators), the consensus is that every night, our city centres are reduced to drunken approximations of Falluja. Honest God-fearing folk are scared to leave the house for fear of being looted, raped and pillaged by barbarian drunkard hordes. Civilised society is on the verge of collapse.

This view, obviously, is a steaming pile of horseshit.

Last night, I went out in Manchester city centre. I don’t normally go out in the city centre, because the going-out venues are either fairly pleasant but close at 11, or stay open till late but play terrible music too loudly, serve pissy American and English lager at extortionate prices, and have nowhere to sit down. Indeed, the places we went to last night conformed perfectly to this rule, so we went home bored at about 1:00.

The point? We were all sober or almost sober, and not exactly full of wild Bacchean abandon – but town featured no trouble, no perception of trouble, and the drunks we noticed staggering around were a danger only to themselves. To recap, this is the binge-drinking centre of one of England’s top going-out cities, at bingeing peak time.

Now, Manchester, London, Leeds and Bristol are pretty much the only places I regularly go out in England – and I guess it’s possible that they’re unusually calm venues by the standards of the rest of the country. In which case, I’ll be highly pissed off if the provincial crowd impose restrictions on us civilised types to deal with *their* problem.

However… I can’t help finding it somehow more likely that the whole binge drinking hysteria is a load of made-up nonsense, in traditional government/media/’expert’ crusade style.

The only solution from the citizenry is resistance to this crusade – so it’s clearly time to go to your local, order a drink of something agreeable (if your local serves nothing agreeable, then find a different local), and drink to the day when the absurd puritans fuck off and die.

Update: as Norm says, I should probably also point out that Manchester has a great many excellent drinking venues. However, these tend not to be in the city centre, which is a very Big Chain, mainstream, jugs-of-Carling-for-£8 kind of place.

For anyone who’s managed to miss the news, Ronald Reagan has finally died.

When I was younger, I always planned to have a party to celebrate this occasion; however, it now seems not quite right. I’m not sure whether that’s because 17 years of Reagan being a very long way from any kind of power at all has mellowed my view towards him, or because the past three years have reshaped my view of what a truly bad American president is like.

Both, I suspect.