Pigdogfucker

The Editors make sense:

THOU SHALT NOT PICK FIGHTS THOU CAN NOT POSSIBLY WIN is a fundamental precept one needs to appreciate before any thrilling arguments about how things ought to be, because if your wrong about those noble thing you’re just wrong! wrong! wrong!; but if you’re wrong on the fundamentals you are (right! / wrong!) (x3) AND you have a huge boot jammed up your ass, which is arguably more significant, especially for your ass.

Also, can all the gibbering “oh noes! new Evil Empire” lunatics (notably this lot, unsurprisingly enough [*]) note that Russia is pulling its troops out of the border bits of Georgia that they briefly occupied, and that the temporary occupation of proper Georgian territory was driven by the fact that it was a tactical necessity rather than Evil Sinister Machinations.

[*] see, I completely appreciate that the EU is full of corrupt idiots and wastes large amounts of money. I suspect that its existence and our membership are nonetheless positive in aggregate – but even if they weren’t, the fact that the people who oppose it subscribe to more or less every other cretinous political conspiracy theory going (for fuck’s sake, how double-standards-tastic do you have to be to actively support Israel’s invasion of Lebanon and still think that Russia’s actions this week are unspeakably evil?)...

Since Decent-ists like to demand that everybody condemns everything, I thorougly condemn Georgia’s occupation of Ossetia, and Russia’s invasion thereof.

If either of said acts were being done in the name of the UK, using UK soldiers, directly or tacitly approved by our leaders, then I’d be equally disapproving but spend more time condemning them because then they’d be our fucking fault.

(note: this also applies to pretty much every fucking ‘why do you condemn X and not Y’ thing: it’s because either it’s us, or the Yanks who’re basically us; or the Israelis who’re basically the Yanks. Of course we’re going to condemn them more than the latest doings of some random maniacs wherever – even before we get onto the question of who armed whom in the first place. And yes, I know we armed the Georgians…)

Yes, I know I’m late on this one.

Uzbek tycoon Alisher Usmanov, who may or may not be a wobber, a wapist and a pickpocket, is looking to buy Arsenal Football Club. Craig Murray, the former British ambassador to Uzbekistan, doesn’t think Mr Usmanov is a fit and proper man to do such a thing, and published an article to that effect (Indymedia mirror) on his website.

Mr Usmanov, following in the proud tradition of fine characters such as James Goldsmith, Jeffrey Archer, Robert Maxwell and Sonia Sutcliffe, immediately hired expensive libel lawyers to threaten Mr Murray with Dire Consequences unless he expunged the article forthwith. Mr Murray’s response was that the article was true, and that he’d happily see Mr Usmanov in court (this is also known as an ‘Arkell versus Pressdram’ moment).

If the British libel laws weren’t appallingly stupid, that would have been the end of the matter. Unfortunately, they are, and anyone who distributes a libel, knowingly or unknowingly and on a ridiculously wide definition of ‘distributes’ (legally, a paperboy delivering a newspaper with a libel on p24 would count…) is also liable to be sued. So Mr Usmanov’s lawyers also threatened the hosting company for Mr Murray’s site with a libel writ, and cravenly-but-understandably they backed down and pulled the plug.

[understandably because it’s not their fight; it’s not reasonable to expect the directors of a small web hosting firm to potentially lose their livelihood because the law is an ass, even if fighting for truth would be the morally courageous thing for them to do]

The good news is that, via a massive blog campaign, Mr Murray’s article has now achieved a far larger readership than it would ever otherwise have done, that Mr Usmanov’s past is now on the agenda for mainstream news organisations – and more generally, that the existence of the Internet has reduced the extent to which corrupt and powerful men can cheat and bully critics into silence. And who knows – maybe their demonstrable futility will actually lead to the reform of the UK’s libel laws to become more sane.

Personally, I don’t believe there should be libel laws at all: if people want to tell lies about me, that should be their prerogative, just as it should be mine to tell the world that the people lying about me are a shower of despicable cunts.

When I’ve raised this to people, they’ve tended to suggest that their abolition would harm innocent people wronged by the evil press. I’m sceptical that’s the case, though: I can’t think of a single libel case ever that wasn’t either over something so trivial that it’s frankly an insult to drag it into the courts (“Ugly single middle-aged rich man pays for sex! Bottle-blond pop star is gay!”), or brought by someone so despicable that – even if the story were false – the most appropriate resolution to the case would still have been to sandpaper the litigant to death.

If anyone knows of a libel case where a genuinely malicious press organ was held to account for publishing a seriously damaging and false story about someone who wasn’t a vile cunt, please post details in the comments – you might even change my mind…

The Daily Express are an evil bunch of cunts. They say:

Around 112,000 [Eastern European] migrants who came to Britain to work are now claiming state handouts – the equivalent of one in six of those who have headed here since the EU expanded

However, this is grossly misleading.

That includes some 68,927 receiving child benefit of up to £17.45 a week and 38,578 in receipt of tax credits that range between £1,365 and £5,300-a-year. There are also 3,600 claiming job-seeker’s allowance, income support or pension credit and another 803 approved for local authority housing assistance.

In other words, 3,600, or one in 180, of the Eastern European migrants who’ve come to Britain – including pensioners – are claiming benefits rather than financially contributing to society. The others are working full-time; some of these are being let off some of their tax payments and others of these are receiving small sums to help them raise the children who they are working to support.

Somewhat better than the natives, no?

I like ranty libertarian Devil’s Kitchen. However, this may be the most inaccurate statement ever:

The EU isn’t a side issue: it is the only truly important issue in politics right now.

Now, let’s have a brief think about what happens in politics that actually fucking matters. I’m going to try and be impartial about this:

• Crime and justice. Whether you think politicians are destroying innocent lives by not hanging and jailing enough of our out-of-control youth, or whether you think that politicians and the media are making people paranoid about paedos and cutthroats lurking everywhere despite falling overall crime, or anywhere in between, you can’t deny it’s an important determinant of quality of life.

• Islamist terrorism, and the war on it. Whether you think that all Muslims need to be interred or they’ll rise up and slaughter us in our beds, or whether you think Tony Blair personally murders Iraqi children, or anywhere in between, you can’t deny that there are vitally important moral and politial issues to be resolved.

• Peak oil and climate change. Whether you believe that every single climatologist has lied about man-made global warming as part of a sinister plan to destroy the global economy, or whether you believe that we all need to return to the trees more or less right away before we die (and that we’ll probably die anyway), you can’t deny that this is going to have a huge impact on all of our lives.

What about the EU, then? Just for the sake of argument, I’ll accept UKIP’s contention that the EU costs us £40bn a year, or 3% of GDP - under their own estimation, this covers everything from direct transfer payments to “over-regulation”. I’ll also accept the point that – at least among some EU lawmakers – there is a drive to establish certain things that are legal in the UK at present and should remain so (e.g. Holocaust denial) as EU-wide crimes.

So, bending over backwards to paint the most damaging picture of the EU that I can, we’ve got something which makes us 3% less rich than we should be and that might exacerbate our own government’s attempts at restricting free speech.

If you accept those premises, then the EU is a bad thing – it would be nice if everyone were 3% richer and x% freer. But it’s still fucking trivial compared with any of the issues above (and they’re just a starting point of non-EU things that, as far as I can make out, everyone cares about…)

If you were trying to identify a person unlikely to be a cunt, then probably the phrase “formerly Chief of Staff to David Cameron” would encourage you to look elsewhere. Reading Alex Deane’s work would tend to confirm your original prejudices.

According to Mr Deane:

[the death of Alexander Litvinenko] has also prompted some of the worst, most irritating dinner party chat I’ve ever been subjected to – and I say that after normally being the lone pro-Bush, pro-Iraq war voice at the table for the last three years.

So, he starts off with the admission that he normally spoils dinner parties by being a stupid, bloodthirsty cunt. He goes on to outline the various, more plausible and less plausible theories about what happened in the case, and concludes that:

It’s like the moon landing conspiracy – no matter how stupid, its proponents keep obstinately at it, until you’re at the dinner table bleeding from the eyeballs, wanting to run out into the streets, screaming the obvious and absolute truth – “The Russians did it! The Russians did it! The Russians did it!”

Either Mr Deane has access to some top-secret government files confirming what the fuck happened, or he’s an absolute dickhead. There are any number of plausible non-the-Russians-doing-it explanations that might be true and don’t include anything outrageously implausible (most obviously, the murder being done by a corrupt oligarch to make the Russians look bad and encourage Britain to not extradite him).
If I had to guess at this stage, I’d say that it seems most probably that the Russians did do it. But it’s not a case like the moon landings, where the evidence in favour is so overwhelming that only a drooling dope-addled clown could possibly doubt that they happened. Rather, it’s a case where we’re conducting a detailed investigation to find out what happened…

As it happens, I’ve managed to find a quote from Alex Deane’s great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, writing in 1692:

No matter how stupid, the trials’ opponents keep obstinately at it, until you’re at the dinner table bleeding from the eyeballs, wanting to run out into the streets, screaming the obvious and absolute truth – “They’re witches! All of them! And anyone who disagrees is a witch too!”.

Jokes about polonium will only be half as funny in 138 days’ time.

Dsquared has an interesting point on the Litvinenko affair: the conventionally accepted wisdom about the plot, in almost all other contexts, would look like a Crazy Conspiracy Theory and therefore be rejected.

This is true-ish, although I think the Russian connection makes the perception a little different – the public ‘know’ that Russia assassinates people helter-skelter, whereas the public ‘know’ that our elected leaders would never do such a thing. Equally, Ajay in the comments mentions a powerful reason why – unlike most conspiracy theories – this one could be quite easy to maintain the cover-up:

It’s worth pointing out that, personally, if I were involved in a plot whose object was the long and painful death of someone who snitched about plots, I myself would be highly motivated not to snitch about that particular plot, for very obvious reasons.

Sometimes it takes the child of a Russian dissident to point out the obvious:

There were other surprises ahead when she reached the UK… Why, when there were no food shortages, were people eating muesli?

Remember the terrible events in Beslan two years ago, when evil Muslim terrorists callously blew up and gunned down a school full of children after taking them hostage?

According to the Russian expert investigating the case, the explosions were all caused by Russian grenades, with the gunmen only opening fire in response to the Russian attack.

I’m sure that all those people who opined on the gunmen’s great evil at the time will now apologise…