Back? - 1 comment

Well my 6 weeks of work training is over, so I'll be returning to more normal hours. Unfortunately you should be suspicious whenever you read statements like "I might make a full return to blogging this week...", recognising a symptom of blog-tiredness when you see one.

Not tiredness with Bloggers4Labour itself, or necessarily with what the most interesting bloggers are writing about politics, it's just that I can't bring myself to blog about it at the moment. Not national politics anyway, and certainly not via the regular route of pouncing on something stupid (and quite possibly misrepresented, misinterpreted, or only 'floated' in the first place for the benefit of the Sunday papers) at the BBC or Comment Is Free.

Perhaps I need a holiday - I can't remember the last time I had one. Alternatively, I could look for the practical benefits of political policies rather than fall into the trap of becoming the kind of hack content to write solely off the top of their head, or on the basis of what someone told them over dinner.

Update: Sorry, I will be trying to answer emails, but I still have 22 drafts to work through. The general rule is that I'm not ignoring you, and not trying to snub you, I just can't think what to say/what the answer is, at present.

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I wonder if a lot of time and intellectual effort wouldn't be saved by devising a kind of "automatic Fisking device" that could be deployed by bloggers against potentially offending articles, emitting a factual/logical demolition of the article within seconds. Perhaps the device/program could also be trained by experts with a dictionary of offending terms and phrases that mark the author and article as a potential offender (e.g. "Turbo-consumerism", "... the language of the BNP", "political legacy", "a time of change" - I'm sure you can improve on this list). Perhaps this way the "village idiots" (the Lawsons, Buntings, Clarks, Murrays, and Galloways of this world) can be dealt with swiftly, but not gratuitously, so we can be the more confident that serial critics really do have positive points of their own to make.

No fisking required - no comments

News from the front in the War Against The Middle Class Motorists Grammar Schools Secularism Religion [via]:

There's an aspiring totalitarianism in Britain which is brilliantly disguised. It's disguised because the would-be dictators - and there are many of them - all pretend to be more tolerant than thou. They hide alongside the anti-racists, the anti-homophobes and anti-sexists. But what they are really against is something very different. They - call them secular fundamentalists - are anti-God, and what they really want is the eradication of religion, and all believers, from the face of the earth.

It's so brilliantly disguised that author, Tobias Jones, is unable to provide the slightest bit of evidence to support his claims. Honestly, I've read it all, and it's pure conjecture - like The Evening Standard for pseuds:

There's also the fact that we live in a cultural milieu dominated by postmodernism.

It's a fact, so it's no use you denying it. The brilliance of the disguise is probably why you can't see that this is true.

These new militants, however, believe themselves to be the only arbiters of taste; they want to eradicate the root and cause. They will dictate what you can wear and what you can say. That, after all, is what totalitarians do.

Oh shut up already. I think the message is clear: stay away from CiF if you want to hear thoughtful people discussing moral or religious issues.