I’m sure you’ve encountered the Drink-soaked Trotskyite Popinjays for WAR elsewhere under different names – the group blog’s membership is made up of the usual suspects from the We’re Still On The Left, That’s Why We Support Bush And Blair And Right Wing Stuff brigade.
Their ideology may be suspect, but they can write well, and are worth bookmarking.
I’m a little concerned about the levels of personal vitrol they display against harmless hello-clouds hello-sky lefties, though. At SBBS, we only hate and threaten to kill the total bastards who would take away your freedom, but the Popinjays seem to direct their ire mostly at the ‘why can’t we all just get along’-ites. I guess it’s hard for ex-Students With Placards to escape their People’s Front of Judea tendencies.
Update: Will Rubbish would like to point out that he’s never been a SWPer, but proudly remains a communist. And so would I (err, about him, not me).
Former trotskyite popinjay, wasn’t it?
British watered down neo-conservatism with selected chunks of reheated Marxism floating about in it.
Its a new project for these former Commies.
The Maoist variety of pro-war leftist is the oddest subspecies though.
I don’t know that Eric the Unread has ever been a Trotskyist or a popinjay, or that he’s even enjoyed an alcholic beverage. The Stockbroking in an Age of Waiting bunch probably were Trots at some time, and Hack Miaow might have been.
Frankly, however, I’m amazed to find myself dissenting from your post in one respect. They don’t write well at all. They are all, without exception, mind-numbingly tedious, repetitive and parasitic on other blogs. The vitriolic attacks on their largely uninterested foils are a symptom of the weakness and futility of their cause, if one could call it that. What they have collectively spawned is an angry, mewling, dribbling younger brother to Harry’s Place.
Suffice to say, I personally won’t be bookmarking them or satisfying their attention-seeking, seat-sniffing proclivities by responding directly to any of their sad provocations. Splitters.
I forgot to mention the bouts of mindless moralising which sprout from these Decent Left blogs like acne from a teenager’s face.
You’re not exactly a stranger to mindless moralising yourself, Len!
You’re going the right way for a spanked bottom, young man.
It reminds me of something I read about Anne Widdecombe,
"the easy prey to every reactionary truism, believing always that she had discovered it for the first time"
Incidentally, have Eric (the Unread) and Harry (of his Place) gone mad recently. We’ve had a sudden surge of banning and the like from Harry, while accepting the comments of LGF-style Islamophobes (often from the far-right, not even simply the converted leftists). Eric meanwhile links to a site claiming to dissect the ‘Cretino-Left’ – which, despite being written by a philsoophy lecturer in defence of ‘reason’, is remarkably incoherent – and jokes about setting up a list of ‘Islamofascist fellow travellors (sic)’. Harry’s place then, after fantasising about bombing Syria, then cheerleads the introduction of mercenaries, paid to deliver personal vengeance, into the Iraq war.
These people have no claim to be on the left. And little greater claim to being ‘good writers’.
To clarify – Will and Hak are good polemicists, which makes them worth a link in my book. SIAW is insufferably pretentious, Eric is Blimpishly self-righteous, and I’ve never heard of the other collaborators.
john – I’m very unhappy with Will Rubbish at the moment – actually, ever since he stole my Blogger picture and stuck a Nazi hat on it. A very rude young man, and I will punish him in good time.
Andrew – Harry does seem to have gone quite bonkers recently. He hardly had it all together at the beginning, but he seems to have dropped the pills since then and is exhibiting worrying signs of having bipolar disorder. As a consequence of which, it’s almost become entertaining to read his blog.
Glad we are getting under your skin.
If Harry actually has a mental health problem it is in very poor taste to mock it here; if he doesn’t then it is equally insulting to trivialise the issue. It is perfectly possible to carry on a blog war as vicious as you like without stooping to this level (ask me how) and there is really no excuse.
Eric, dear, you’re not under anyone’s skin, you’re just gnawing into it in a minute way like the average gnat.
dsquared – what was that you were saying about mindless moralising?
I think that colloquiually describing someone’s behaviour as ‘mad’ is quite tame compared to the idiocy of suggesting drawing up a list of ‘fellow travellors’ and describing your oppenents as the ‘Cretino-Left’. Incidentally, ‘cretin’ has an (outdated) medical meaning, and as such is the equivalent of calling your oppenents ‘spazzers’, and is thus entirely comparable to calling someone ‘mad’, excepting that mad is acceptable vernacular while cretin really isn’t.
I have no intention of starting a ‘blog war’ – but don’t lecture me on ‘good taste’. I think staring at ‘the shining city of the hill’ has dazzled your senses.
Sorry dsquared, I thought Eric had written your comment. The meat of the comment stands, mind.
Andrew,
I think it is hilarious that you took the list thing so seriously. Do you really think I have a leather bound book of names, which I hope to pass over to MI5?
I didn’t take it as a ‘serious’ proposal, anymore than I take the comments on LGF as ‘serious’. But I do think that, over the past few months, both you and the bloggers at Harry’s Place have moved from being pro-war left to someone further out there. The ‘list’ post was indicative of this shift, for me.
Eric, sweetheart, no one has suggested that you were seriously intending on spying on the Left. Most spies don’t brag about it in their blogs. I think what Andrew may be getting at is the particular use of language that has been aroused since a section of the liberal-left decided to follow Hitchens’ lead when he denounced his former comrades as apologists for "Islamofascism". Even making allowance for a poorly conceived attempt at irony, you nevertheless appear to believe that the antiwar Left, particularly those of a more radical hue, are "fellow travellers" and that they are auxilliaries of something called "Islamofascism".
The vitriolic attacks on their largely uninterested foils
You know, the fact that you’re posting about this on another blog suggests you aren’t really ‘largely uninterested’…
Startling insight, but I wasn’t referring only to myself, and I did genuinely find the blog a crashing bore. On the other hand, I like this site, so I’m commenting here. Mystery solved?
‘Largely uninterested’ is true, relatively. Take a look at drink-soaked… or Harry’s Place. A tremendous number of posts are an attack on some other part of the left, and even those that are not attract commentators of the left-wing = fascism school of thought that is cultured over at LGF.
Why claim to be on the left when those are your foes and audience. The pro-war left seems to be slipping into a Horowitz position. Now there IS a cretin (actually, he is a very clever propagandist, but to the relatively well-informed his analysis of the leftwing-islamist-terrorist-facsist-ACLU-academia axis is incoherent – but it might convince enough people, as dumb ideas have the capacity to do).
My view on this is that "mad", "mentalist", "insane", "cretin", etc are more or less acceptable ("cretin" less so as it refers to a developmental disorder of children), but claiming that someone has a bipolar disorder which needs to be treated with pills is a specific claim; some people do have bipolar disorders and do need to be treated with pills. Some of them even have blogs (ironically, the ones I know of tend to run blogs which are substantially less aggressive and dogmatic than Harry’s Place and wouldn’t appreciate the implicit suggestion that having BPD makes you behave like the stereotypic Little Green Soccer Balls commenter.
In related news, "Spazzer" has never been acceptable to use, even in playgrounds, I dislike it when John uses it and probably ought to say so a lot more often. Do we really have to refight the PC battles of the 1980s now?
Re my alleged use of ‘spazzer’ – say what now?
I’m highly up for refighting the PC battles of the 1980s, though. And my C64 can kick your BBC Micro any day of the week.
Sorry, I din’t mean to imply that ‘spazzer’ was an acceptable term to use. I was trying to suggest that it was analogous with accusations of ‘cretinism’ that have been made, and that these two, with a very specific and discriminatory medical history, are much further beyond the pale that simply describing someone’s actions as ‘mad’, which is colloquially acceptable. For the record, I was using ‘mad’ to describe what seems to be a sudden upsurge in increasingly violent (and violently worded) comments and posts by Harry.
I understand what you are saying about the more specific claim that Harry suffers from BPD.
My Oric-1 is underrated, but like James ‘Buster’ Douglas, it will catch your Tysonesque-titans of the PC scene on the hop.
http://www.old-computers.com/museum/computer.asp?st=1&c=180
I unreservedly apologise to John, at least for the time being until I can find some trumped up charge. At the very least he has so far conspicuously failed to disassociate himself from the rabble and shower who post in his comments boxes.
I loved the idea of the BBC micro. It all seems so quaint and innocent now; a whole generation of the British middle class thinking "Building a mass market computer? That’s a job much too important to be left to mere private enterprise! We ought to buy one that’s made by an arm of the British government!".
I had a Spectrum myself; all the BBC Micro games seemed to consist of the letter "M" chasing a letter "B" around a maze made out of the letter "i".
Frankly I’d like to see terms like ‘bedlam’, ‘faggot’, ‘virago’ and ‘whirling dervish’ reintroduced to everyday speech, the Victorians had a great way with words that has been lost through the years……
Other terms I’d like to see more use of in the mainstream press (ideally the Guardian) are: Rag-head, Camel Jockey, Chinkey, Yellow skinned brethren, Uncle Tom’s, Colonial Masters & Betters, Shite (sic) Muslims, Catholic fudge packers, Holocaust celebratoristes, Jam Rags, Jungle Bunnies, skiddies, CofE donut punchers, Kensington & Chelsea WASP knobs and finally carpet munchers. Anyone I haven’t managed to offend so far, terribly sorry I’ll have a think and get back to you…..
I generally hate all Politically Correct bullshit; why not just call a spade a spade and a wog a wog?
To any non-English (especially Yanks / Septics) reading take note: English people make ironic vitriol a form of comedy, don’t take it literally and try and invade my country……
Dsquared,
Happy Christmas
Well, Chris, cretin appears to be derived from the late latin for Christian so ease up on that or the septics will invade us.
"Eric meanwhile links to a site claiming to dissect the ‘Cretino-Left’ – which, despite being written by a philsoophy lecturer in defence of ‘reason’, is remarkably incoherent – and jokes about setting up a list of ‘Islamofascist fellow travellors (sic)’."
To that list I would add that he accused me of ‘supporting murderers’ on Harry’s Place the other week, apparently on the sole basis that I was against the war. He seems like an angry man.
Thanks very much Larry. My thanks would be unbounded if anyone could come up with a post where John uses the word "Spazzer" which doesn’t have a jokey comment from me attached as this would make me look less of a hypocrite and more consistent in my moralising.
Re cretin: cleft palate was at one time particularly prevalent in mountain villages in Savoy. Children suffering from it became popularly known as ‘cretiens’ (‘Christians’) because this signified that in spite of their disability they were regarded as Christians – i.e. equal before God & sharing in the human condition. So ‘cretin’ is, ironically, an early example of a PC-term emphasising the integration & acceptance of disability in ablebodied society . . . (end of long boring ‘I think you’ll find . .’ comment).
Harry’s is increasingly batting on a sticky wicket regarding the whole war thing.
To defend his position he’s entering the realms of self satire and is now hardly bothering with even the mildest criticism of the Bush position.
He’s even defending Bush’s latest speech in comments on his blog, without (he admits) haven’t seen it or read it.
So he battles on, calling people who oppose the whole charade supporters of terrorism, or deleting or changing comments, and banning commenters.
The reality is he can’t have open comments anymore and simultaneously maintain the illusion that his position garners widespread support. Support for the war is dropping like a stone accross the political spectrum. Just don’t expect that to be reflected in comments at that Labour supporting blog.
"The reality is he can’t have open comments anymore and simultaneously maintain the illusion that his position garners widespread support."
Well he can, it’s just that the widespread support comes from the Bat Ye’or/LGF crowd.
I know this is going off topic, but Dan, your comment on the BBC micro. Never heard of Bletchley Park? Great wodge of state-funding there. And private enterprise and competition have given us triumphs like VHS over BetaMax, so no, it wasn’t as daft as all that.
Besides that I agree with you, dear boy.
Oh yeh, governments have produced some excellent computers. I was just interested that the "bruschetta orthodoxy" has done a 180 degree flip since the Thatcher years; these days if the BBC announced that it was producing a special BBC-branded games console to go with a new TV show, everyone would just react with stunned incomprehension.
(Acorn, makers of the BBC Micro, are now called "ARM Holdings" and fly the flag for British computing by doing all sorts of funky things with mobile phones I think).
Do you remember when Sir Clive Sinclair punched the head of Acorn (at the time) Chris Curry in the Baron of the Beef pub in Cambridge? [I don’t mean literally — I remember it on the front page of the Daily Mail].
You don’t see Bill Gates and Steve Jobs doing that, more’s the pity.