Back in the UN/UK

Richard Littlejohn of the Daily Mail takes no prisoners:

... I don't hold the hostages responsible for what happened to them, or how they responded while in captivity. They and thousands more like them do a brave, thankless job on our behalf.

But I despair at what their ordeal and the response to it tells us about the kind of country we have become.

After ten years of Tony Blair, Britain is now a neutered, international laughing stock. The United Nations and our EU 'partners' hold us in contempt.

The feminisation of our entire society has utterly destroyed whatever credibility and moral fibre we ever had. The emotional incontinence which flooded the country at the time Lady Di popped her Jimmy Choos is now our stock in trade.

I wanted to retch when I saw the father of one of the captured marines cuddling his wife and sobbing on live television in front of a tree festooned with yellow ribbons.

Of course he's got every right to be upset, but he shouldn't be sharing it with Sky News. His other son looked deeply embarrassed, as if a dog had just peed up against his leg. It was the most skin-crawling moment I have seen since The Mellorphant Man paraded his family in front of a five-bar gate.

And What about the outside broadcasts from assorted pubs around the country, as various friends and relatives showed their solidarity by drinking themselves senseless?

...

The broadcast media covered the whole affair as if it were an episode of Big Brother. Gormless women cackled away about the hostages in the same silly psychobabble as they discuss 'relationship ishoos'.

I'd add that the British were right to surrender to overwhelming and unstable forces. The mock execution by the Iranians was a nice touch. Thanks. We'll remember.

And this in case you think Littlejohn's exaggerating:

As for Britain's government, perhaps the harshest comments issued during the entire fiasco came from British Health Secretary Patricia Hewitt. The object of her ire? Prisoner Turney's smoking. "It was deplorable," Hewitt tut-tutted. "This sends completely the wrong message to our young people."
..
But the fatuousness of Hewitt's comment perfectly echoed that of new U.N. chief Ban Ki-moon, who also "thanked" Ahmadinejad.

We salute you

In 1938 the English football side, including the great Stanley Matthews, gave the Nazi salute in Berlin as instructed by the Foreign Office. Now British Royal Marines apologize and smile to the Iranian hostage-taker-in-chief. In 1939 war broke out.

Update: A different angle -

The Falstaff Doctrine..

..in modern British Military training:

The one female crew member, Faye Turney, wore a blue headscarf and jacket.

An unidentified crew member said: "I'd like to say that myself and my whole team are very grateful for your forgiveness. I'd like to thank yourself and the Iranian people... Thank you very much, sir."

Falstaff:

What is honour? A word. What is in that word honour? What is that honour? Air - a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it.

England expects every man to do his duty

Puerile

..eight American boys were wounded
- CNN Iraq reporter

They are not boys. They are volunteer soldiers, men, doing their duty to defend Americans, even 4th estate 5th columnists.

How Liberals think

Evan Sayet's speech is terrific but 47 minutes long. 5-15 minutes will cheer you up.

His subject is that since Liberals aren't all evil and aren't all stupid, how come they're 180 degrees from right about everything? They can't be stupid because then they'd be right some of the time. They can't be evil because we all know good Liberals, eg his sister.

Weeell, I say that morally speaking you are what you do, not what you think of yourself as you're doing it (given foreseeable consequences), so nice abortionists, well-meaning appeasers and so on are not excused judgement in my sci-fi heaven, tho Lord knows it won't be me doing the judging.

Degradation by degree

Jeb Bush, join the club.
Al Gore, join the club.

Obvious, doable

Here's a family friendly policy for Mitt Romney to flesh out:

Utah's governor and state legislature has lent its weight to efforts to persuade Congress to pass laws requiring adult content providers to stay off port 80, which generally carries HTTP web surfing traffic......

Censorware, or internet-filtering software, is supposed to achieve the same results. But port-exile advocates say their way of blocking internet porn is better.

The technical obstacles to implement CP80 are considerable, and the scheme calls for an arbiter of public taste (i.e. a censor) to decide what kind of content is fit for inclusion of the mainstream internet. The difficulties of getting the .xxx top level domain established also point to another set of potential problems.

Supporters of Internet Community Ports Act argue that the approach preserves all current URLs and current naming conventions, unlike the .xxx top level domain plan.

I'd deal with the censorship issue by first making the scheme voluntary. My guess is that would knock out 75-95% of salacious websites from inadvertent viewing. If there's still a severe residual problem, sure consider 'censorship', but it really isn't censorship if adults are free to access it. It's child protection. If we can forbid plying children with legal drugs, we can forbid sliming them with porn.

When you wish upon a star..

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs: Watch me make an options scandal disappear!

Disney's official report is out. The verdict: I'm innocent. No harm, no foul. Were options backdated? Yes. Was I the largest shareholder? Yes. Was I running the company? Yes. Am I to blame? No. Does this make sense? Absolutely.

Another view.

Little big lies

I agree with Hitler that the power of "the big lie" is that the lie is so colossal that no one would believe anyone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously."

A couple of elisions that make my eyeballs bleed:

"Climate change is more dangerous than terrorism." Maybe, maybe not. The issue is the materiality of manmade climate change.

"Stem-cell research should be funded by the government." Maybe, maybe not. The issue is the morality of killing foetuses to obtain the cells.

These little big lies have the merit of slipperiness and a kind of lazy deniability. For discriminating minds it's hard to credit the mental sloppiness of the swallowers of these lies, but you can fool a hell of a lot of the people a hell of a lot of the time when you're spinning a web they want to get caught in. Fuhrerprinzip, scapegoatism, feminism, abortionism, hedonism, it-takes-a-village-ism, catastrophism and scientism succeed because they are ego-syntonic, they denote impulses consistent with self-conception.

What then must we do? Well, what we are doing. The World Wide Web allows truth and lies, science and scientism, to parade their beauty side-by-side before the whole human race. Little lies, big lies, little big lies - their facelifts, their cellulite, their sagging bums are mercilessly projected onto a giant screen and contrasted with the fresh good looks of simple truth.

Instance the Manmade Global Warming scam which recently peaked around Oscar time. The UN's decree that the debate was over has provoked a pushback that has publicly destroyed the scam's credentials. Imagine a virtuoso confidence trickster, revelling in his technique as he beguiles his grinning marks, who suddenly realizes the word "liar" has been pinned to his back, his toupee has slipped and his flies are open.The scammers are re-grouping, probing for a re-configuration of the scam that has more stickability, but "Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!"

"Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists - and politicians - must trade (normal) truth for influence."

3/10, I'd say, for a delicious recasting of "the" truth as either "normal" truth or "post-normal" truth, but "post-normal" suggests "post-modern" and "post-modern" won't stick these days. Maybe "paranormal" truth or "my" truth, as in "my truth is I'm a gay American".

Anyhoot, my Screwtapian ways with words aren't the real issue. The real issue is this: the spinners of little big lies need to control the World Wide Web itself. Governments must rescue the apparatus from US hegemony so that the minds of starving Africans and of our children and of starving African children cease to be infected with American consumerist trash and theocracy. Unesco would be a suitably democratic Lord Protector of the world's thought channels. The BBC (re-branded as The World Broadcasting Corporation) would be a suitably expert instrument for Philosopher Kings and then a Philosopher Fuhrer to shape information and ideas for the greater good. Then the little big lies can be consolidated into one big big lie - Liberalism, A Convenient Untruth - which is a ripe and rotten host for another big big lie - Islamofascism, An Incovenient Untruth.

Hip,hip,hip,hypocrisy

The dogmatic character of the Church of Manmade Global Warming makes it apt that carbon credits are thought of as ecological indulgences. Flatulent twerps like Al Gore can buy these waivers for their own colossal carbon footprints and incentivise the construction of exceptionally filthy power plant elsewhere which is most cheaply able to supply the carbon offsets. Perverse moralising meets perverse incentives. But what is really needed is hypocrisy credits to induce a vast transfer of wealth from Edwards and Gore to deserving right-wing bloggers.