According to the font of all wisdom, all Mainstream BBC-ite Liberal Lefties must like people in this order, and ignore all abuses committed by groups higher up the scale towards groups lower down the scale:
1) Muslims
2) Blacks
3) Gays
4) Women
5) Jews
6) Christians
This would be why nobody on the Mainstream BBC-ite Liberal Left ever criticises Darfur (1 on 2), dancehall reggae twats (2 on 3 and 4) or Islamic states’ myriad womens’ rights abuses (1 and 2 on 4), then.
Oh, classicness from the same thread: "I recommend jihadwatch.org generally as a forum for people who are afraid that their heads are going to be cut off in the long run". I wholeheartedly agree, although I’d add "and for people who like to marvel at aforementioned paranoid crazyloons".
Does one need one’s brain removed to hold the opinions of the ‘dhimmitude’-spouting right, or merely one’s eyes and ears?
Surely the best thing about that rant is that it begins by chiding another commentator for their over-the-top comments!
Thank you, John, for making "crazyloon" one word. I think that’s a trend we should all follow.
B-BBC continues to jump whole packs of sharks. The comments section seems to have turned into a circle jerk of half-brained libertarians who believe that the BBC is DESTROYING THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY with a neat dash of LGF lite sentiments along the lines of "why can’t the BBC show the truth that all muslims want to behead our sons and daughters."
Some of the most vocal posters don’t even seem to live in the UK, and regularly rip into the BBC because they get the true story from Fox News, that paragon of objectivity.
Their basic grasp of some straightforward facts are up the swanny too. If you relied on the comments section for your guide: global warming would be a myth, problems in Iraq would be directly related to media reporting, and whole coteries of BBC staff have conspired to bring about a neo-Islamic state in Croydon to be run by Abu Hamza, providing he improves on his hardline stalinist credentials.
It’s somewhat ironic that a site dedicated to exposing failures in objectivity is populated by so many people with such a tenuous grip on reality.
I like the BBC more with every passing day.
> It’s somewhat ironic that a site dedicated to exposing failures in objectivity is populated by so many people with such a tenuous grip on reality.
As the editors have repeatedly pointed out, if you don’t like their opinions, you are legally allowed not to give them money. Which I always think is a good point.
Um… You could get rid of your telly…
"Um… You could get rid of your telly…"
If B-BBC adopted auntie’s legally enforced policy, you’d have to pay them to look at any blog, even if you never read theirs. Or you could, of course, get rid of your computer…
Very true. Blogs are shit though, just like the telly.
And yet … here we are.
And no doubt I’ll be watching Big Brother later.
Mind… Going… Numb…
I’d pay £106 a year if it meant B-BBC disappearing.
It really is a dreadful site. I couldn’t say I was a regular reader, so maybe it’s improved, but I once drifted over there to find one of the main contributers (Crozier) fantasising about journalists being tortured. Which is all you really need to know about the kind of journalism they want to see.
Ah yes, here we go, I’ve found the quote. "Bastards. I want these people to feel pain. I mean real pain. The sort of thing only a professional torturer can dole out. It’s the only thing I think that will ever wake them up to reality and the responsibilities of their offices."
Remarkably it wasn’t even about a BBC story but one on Channel Four.
Hey john b why don’t you go fuck yourself you marxist a-hole! Your’e everything you pretend to be against. In other words you are a bigoted, rascist, sexist, wanker of a Pom!
I’m certainly a wanker and a Pom. However, would appreciate evidence of my bigotry, sexism and racism (NB posting pictures of hot women does *not* count as sexism; using words such as "coons", "wogs" and "niggers" when satirising right-wing attitudes towards ethnic minorities does *not* count as racism).
And I certainly don’t accept the labour theory of value, which would make me a very strange Marxist.
Quite a few Marxists reject the labour theory of value, in fact – see e.g. the work of ‘market socialist’ Oskar Lange, or Ian Steedman. If you really want to be a non-Marxist, say something rude about historical materialism.
Historical materialism is a bigoted, sexist, racist, wanker of a Pom, who steals handicapped parking spaces and peeps in my bathroom window.
Matthew,
> Bastards. I want these people to feel pain.
What’s your objection? Breach of John Band’s copyright?
You see nothing wrong with someone fantasising about the torture of journalists (and he wasn’t joking, subsequent comments showed that if you do a google search)?
I think I would also be prepared to contribute £106 for Biased BBC to disappear from the web. How much do you think we would have to raise?
Actually, I’ve slept on this one and I’d now like to point out that in order to have ADSL I have to rent a phone line from BT and that costs more than £106 a year.
I could always get Telewest cable, but that would involve moving house. Or use some harebrained satellite or mobile internet ‘solution’ which would just be crap.
So, yeah, whatever happened to the local loop unbundling thing? If they do that, I’ll let them sell of the BBC.
I’d pay £106 for B-BBC disappear, or even to get a decent editor so that it could do its research properly and objectively – which would pretty much make it disappear.
B-BBC rationale:
"As a libertarian/right wing US blog wannabee I disagree with this story, therefore the whole of the BBC is a marxist conspiracy designed to bring down democracy."
This was one of my favourite B-BBC posts:
—————
Headlining Tragedy
The difference between the headline sequence on CNN and BBC is stark.
Here is the BBC approach at 8.40 UK time:
‘Bombs rock central Baghdad’
‘At least 18 people are reported killed as the Red Cross headquarters and other buildings come under attack.’
Here is the CNN at the same time:
‘Explosions rock Baghdad’
‘At least 10 people have been killed and several injured following three explosions in the space of an hour in the Iraqi capital.
The first blast, believed caused by a suicide car bomb, struck early in the morning outside the Red Cross headquarters in the city leaving several vehicles ablaze and huge plumes of smoke rising into the air.’
Can anyone apart from me see hysteria in the one and sanity in the other, even if, as I suspect, the BBC usually gets casualty figures right?
Out of interest, which one do you think is hysterical?
I’m guessing they mean the BBC one, but they think CNN is a liberal oasis of commie ne’r do wells too.
The entire quote is from Biased BBC. The poster thought the BBC hysterical, and the CNN one sane. I don’t know why.
I suppose the bit about "other buildings come under attack" could sound vaguely sinister, but come on. I’d hardly say the difference is "stark."
If the entire quote is from Biased BBC, where’s the bit about one quote being hysterical?
I don’t think one’s hysterical. I do think that CCN’s mentions who did the bombing while the BBC’s presents an ambiguous report which could be misconstrued as meaning that the US were attacking the Red Cross. I also think that that kind of mistake is forgivable once, but that the BBC do it rather a lot. (Note for Larry: I am not saying here that the BBC regularly accuse the US of attacking the Red Cross. The pronoun "it" in the last sentence before the brackets refers to "that kind of mistake".)
Funny thing about the License Fee: when the same scheme was introduced for collecting council tax, left-wingers rioted against it. At no point did they claim that local councils weren’t biased or that local councils provided crap services that the rioters didn’t want to use. Both of those arguments would have been regarded, had anyone made them, as entirely irrelevent. (Note to Larry: I am not saying here that I supported Thatcher, which I didn’t, or the Poll Tax, which I didn’t.)
The "Can anyone apart from me see hysteria in the one and sanity in the other, even if, as I suspect, the BBC usually gets casualty figures right?" at the end was from the original B-BBC post, rather than from Matthew.
Not sure your point about whodunnit works, either – note that the B-BBCer quoted only the first two lines of the Beeb report, and the first two lines from CNN also didn’t mention who the attackers were.
The crucial difference between the license fee and the poll tax is that you can very easily and legally avoid the former without majorly impairing your life (ie by watching DVDs, reading books, going out, etc), whereas you can’t really opt out of living somewhere without that having a significant knock-on impact on your life…
Ah, right. I got thrown by the quotes within quotes within quotes. Doh.
Matthew hasn’t provided a link, but, since the post is about the "headline sequence", I assumed that it was referring either to the story snippet that goes on the front page or the bit that’s in bold at the top of the report. Both of those are supposed to contain a fair summing-up of the story. If it’s just the first few lines of each report that BBC are discussing, then they’re talking bollocks.
You are right about the difference between the License Fee and the Poll Tax, but, since that difference applies just as much to the new Council Tax and the old Rates and neither of them led to riots or widespread civil disobedience, I don’t think that was the protestors’ problem with it. All I mean is that, in amongst the fierce defense of the License Fee, I never see anyone say "The BBC should be publicy funded, but with a fair income-based tax," which I think is odd.
I’d say that (or something very similar). The problem is that political debate does not work as some kind of abstracted philosophical debate. Who is speaking and why they are saying what they do does matter. I am suspicious of those that suggest changing the way that the BBC is funded as there are very powerful interested bodies lurking just off the stage of this debate hoping to do away with the idea of the BBC altogether.
Unless they can turn it into a cash cow for themselves. See, for example, the Murdoch executives idea of having a system by which the BBC gives its best products to commercial broadcasters (i.e. public money is used to develop products which are then exploited for private gain). Or the recent hollowing out of the BBC, outsourcing its programme production to commercial organisations, which has a knock on effect in terms of quality (full-time researchers and archivists, for example, are an ‘unaffordable’ luxury in the private sector) if these private interests are to make a profit. Well, either that or wages and conditions are squeezed to make the profit, or perhaps the price of programmes rises – perhaps all three.
I’m not so sure the poll tax, if it had been £78 a household, or £35 per person, which is about what the licence fee was back then, wouldn’t have worked.
It was the fact that it was approaching £400 each (equivalent to £600 to £800 each in today’s terms) that really did for it.
On the licence fee people do argue that the BBC should be funded by an income-based levy, i.e. income tax. Every time it is discussed that argument is had.
Really? OK. I’ve just never seen it.
Every Charter renewal raises it as a possibility, for example http://www.bbccharterreview.org.uk/have_your_say/green_paper/gp_funding.pdf
Has anyone here ever actually met anyone in real life with views like those of that guy with odd ideas about "liberals"?