That book thing

Right. Nick and Sarah have both passed on the stick (whatever that may mean), so it’s probably about time I answered.

Q: You’re stuck inside Fahrenheit 451, which book do you want to be?

A: The Rachel Papers by Martin Amis. His first, his best and his shortest (when he wrote incisively about being pervy, male and young, instead of turgidly about being pervy, male and old).

Q: Have you ever had a crush on a fictional character?

A: Yes. Including, but not limited to, Estella from Great Expectations, Leela from Futurama, and Kate from the Long, Dark Tea-time of the Soul.

Q: The last book you bought is:

A: Feminine Anarchy: Girls Pissing in Public by Amanda James and Paul Compton [*]. The last, erm, written book I bought was Man Walks into a Pub: A Sociable History of Beer by Pete Brown.

Q: The last book you read:

A: Yellow Dog by Martin Amis. Definitely not in the Rachel Papers mould…

Q: What are you currently reading?

A: Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar by Simon Sebag-Montefiore. Comprehensive and gripping, although the writer’s tone is mildly annoying. You don’t need to moralise and hector when you’re describing events as patently evil as the ones being listed here – a neutral voice would work far better.

Also technically Ulysses by James Joyce (see below).

Q: Five books you would take to a desert island.

A1: Ulysses, in the hope of finally getting the time to finish it without getting to page 100, being distracted by something else, forgetting what I’m doing, and having to start again the following year..

A2: The Magus by John Fowles, which I’d like to read several more times than I currently have.

A3: Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert. I’ve only finished the translated version so far; again, the desert-island-ness would provide a strong impetus to read the original properly.

A4: The Book of Laughter & Forgetting by Milan Kundera (sadly I don’t fancy my chances of learning Czech on the island, so this is going to have to be in translation…)

A5: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley – total comfort reading.

Q: Who are you going to pass this stick to (3 persons) and why?

A: Ryan, Jim Bliss and dsquared, because they’re interesting people and they appear not to have done this yet…

[*] If I said I’d bought this as a present, nobody would believe me, so I won’t bother claiming I did, even though it’s true…

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Departures from tradition

Following Stephen Pollard’s surprisingly good column on the Pope, the Adam Smith lot have a surprisingly good column on charlatan ‘experts’ like Professor Sir Roy Meadow.

Actually, not that surprising: the ASI always been good on individual liberty and protection-from-majoritarian-tyranny issues, which is probably why I can stomach reading the site. However, they do spoil it somewhat by linking to a silly column from senile buffoon William Rees-Mogg.

Claims Mr Rees-Mogg: "Almost every cardinal and bishop in the Roman Catholic Church, and probably every bishop in the Anglican Church, is a socialist. They are socialists in the same sense as Tony Blair, or Gerhard Schröder, or Jacques Chirac, or Bill Clinton. They are all socialists because they have never studied the liberal argument. That is a pity; liberalism may not be enough, but it is the basis of our culture."

Clearly, the only reason Mr Rees-Mogg is not a Maoist is because he’s never studied the Maoist argument. It’s not even possible that he could have studied Maoism and rejected it…

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Things to do today

Read Wall Street, the book for free, and find out how financial markets work. Then read Michael Howard’s blog for insight into the Tory hive-mind. Speaking of Mr Howard, you should also read this article on how hard it is to keep a hospital clean (unsurprisingly, very).

Join Richard Herring in attempting to revive a fine English Saint’s Day tradition. No, not the apocryphal Turkish reptile-slaughterer: "Nowadays, thanks to political correctness gone mad, attacking students is against the law, but I believe in honour of this historical event we should make an exception for St Scholastica’s Day.

"On this occasion all decent, ordinary, hard-working normal people are allowed to absent themselves from their place of labour and search out University students. If they discover any they must playfully batter them round the head with twigs, branches or iron bars, but the beating MUST STOP once the student is dead."

And finally, if you encounter anyone who uses the phrase "pie in the sky" or the word "gaffe" in any context whatsoever [*], you should puncture their eyes with compasses.

[*] Other than in the context of suggesting horrible punishments for people who use it in other contexts, obviously.

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Andrea Dworkin, thinker, dies

Feminist writer Andrea Dworkin has died at the rather young age of 58. As a man who enjoys sex and pornography, I never quite shared Ms Dworkin’s political views.

However, the pro-sex-feminist backlash couldn’t have happened without the previous generation’s efforts: the first lot pointed out that the 1970s paradigms (for porn and, to some extent, relationships) were fundamentally misogynistic; the second lot redefined porn and relationships so that they *weren’t* fundamentally misogynistic. Ms Dworkin even changed her tack on porn in later years, as it became clear that obscenity laws were being used more to harrass gays and lesbians than to protect women. Good call.

Society still needs a great many more Ms Dworkins before we reach anything approaching gender equality, however. Can you imagine a major newspaper running an article on Bertrand Russell’s death headlined "Lord Russell, anti-nuclear campaigner, dies"? Or one on Richard Feynmann, "Richard Feynmann, humorist, dies"? No.

(David T and Susie Bright also have interesting things to say on the subject)

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Chavez and land reform

Victor the Apostate Windbag has some sensible thoughts on Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez: "Chavez is no socialist, his land reform strategy… may have provoked the ire of the US and even absent landholders in the UK, but has, if we are honest, more in common with the land reform of Lincoln, than that of Lenin…"

He may, possibly, be going a bit far with "quite objectively, there is no better government on the Earth today than that of Hugo Chavez Frias". But the land reform thing is an extremely annoying point, and one well worth dwelling on.

Robert Mugabe’s land reforms in Zimbabwe are bad, not because they involve expropriating land from foreigners who stole it in the first place [*], but because they involve taking the country’s most productive land and giving it to corrupt murdering thugs to fuck up (and because said corrupt murdering thugs frequently murder the relevant foreigners).

Crooks like Mugabe have given a bad name to land reform. But it’s an essential step if we want to see market economies in the developing world: effectively, we need to replace the feudal system that prevailed in colonial Africa and South America with one based on individual property rights for the people.

[*] I find it hard to get terribly excised about what Robert Mugabe has done to wealthy Europeans, who either have or are eligible for developed-world passports anyway. The reason he’s one of the worse men alive is because of the appalling suffering he’s inflicted on vast numbers of poor Zimbabweans, who don’t have the same opportunity to flee.

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Unseen publications act

Primary research is overrated, in journalism and in general. Unseen Movies provides strong evidence for this: it’s a selection of movie reviews, written by someone who hasn’t seen any of the relevant movies.

As far as I can make out, there is no way in which any observer, no matter how well-informed, could tell the difference between these reviews and genuine press movie criticism.

If I’d’ve thought of it before now, I’d’ve reviewed the site before actually reading any of the reviews. Damn, I hate missing opportunities for cheap gags… (via Nosemonkey)

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Appeasing the chavs

Guido has a grimly amusing summary of Labour’s immigration plans, which are aimed squarely at winning the votes of racist scumbags. The Tory plans are even worse. The Lib Dem ones aren’t, which is another reason to vote for them.

Many people – most recently Julie Burchill, who is mad, but also some who aren’t – have been claiming that just because a certain unpleasant subset of white working class people want foreigners to fuck off back to their own countries and stop coming here, doesn’t mean we should condemn them. After all, non-racists are all middle class poseurs who live in Islington (where there are no immigrants), sip lattes, and don’t understand what it’s like to be poor.

This sounds remarkably like the alleged Guardian logic about crime, which nobody actually believes but which authoritarians like to use to stereotype liberal views: "it’s not the criminal’s fault; they had a hard time of it and we shouldn’t blame them". It’s bollocks when applied to crime, and it’s bollocks when applied to immigration too.

I have a preferred solution to offset any concerns about overcrowding: for each immigrant we take in, we kick out a native Brit who’s worse than them. With net migration running at 150,000ish per year, this shouldn’t be a major problem: the 186,701 people in Portsmouth alone would keep us going for a good 14 months [*].

[*] This is a joke. I’m sure there are at least a hundred people in Portsmouth who deserve to stay in the country.

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Speaking of tolerance…

"I’d like to have seen the world’s billion or so Catholics wake as if from a dream and say "Damn! The man was a fraud!" They could have run through the streets of Italy kicking his head along like a football, singing "that’s the end of all that bullshit!". Better that than all this inane reverence." – Ryan at Full Spectrum Democracy

No, Ryan’s post isn’t ignorantly anti-religious: it’s polemically anti-clerical, which is a fine English tradition.

Meanwhile, normally-sane-ish Non-Trivial Solutions has a spectacularly wrong-headed post. Upsettingly, he’s attacking a halfway sane article by Stephen Pollard, who is usually a twat.

"Anti-Catholicism good. Anti-Semitism bad. Right, got it, Stephen…", says NTS. Well, yes. Antisemitism is about hating people of the Jewish race; anti-Catholicism is about hating the institutions and leaders of the Catholic Church. The former is indefensible; the latter is perfectly defensible; and the difference is sufficiently obvious that one could only fail to grasp it if one were being deliberately obtuse.

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