In Defense of Giving Offense

Sticks and stones...

Last week, Andrew Neill (who looks ever more like two testicles wrestling over a tumour in an unhappy scrotum) interviewed Chris Mounsey of the often-wrong but always entertaining Devil's Kitchen blog, in his capacity as leader of the Libertarian Party UK (LPUK).

This has had a couple of results. First, it has enabled me to stop wondering what DK looked like (my earlier speculations are in this post here). Second, it has revealed an oddly puritan tendency in certain other bloggers.

Whilst it's clear from the clip above that Chris was not prepared for the kind of interview that was conducted (perhaps he was labouring under the misapprehension that the BBC would use their four minutes with the smaller parties to try to find out a little of what their policies were, or to attack the philisophical underpinnings of them), I have to admit to being quite baffled by the glee some people seem to be taking in the episode.

I suppose some of this is the sort of smug grin we're all allowed when we see one right-wing cunt monstering another. Except I can't help feeling that using the license fee to sponsor one hideous, authoritarian, Thatcherite grotesque putting a less-hideous, non-authoritarian puppy in its place is not necessarily the sort of thing we should be applauding.

The most worrying strand, to my mind, is that this exposed the author of Devil's Kitchen as a 'nasty person' and showed up his revelling in perverse scatological pornography as being outside acceptable thought. Which would be fine if those people expressed any of the same concerns about Hunter S Thompson, H.L. Mencken, Martin Rowson, Steve Bell, Mark Twain*, Jonathan Swift, Tom Paine, Charlie Brooker, or James Gillray.

There is a long history of utterly unjustified invective, full of imagery that is patently repougnant to normal minds. But it is some of our best political writing, it shows is some essential truths.

Yes, being on the receiving end of invective, and invective, can be painful (I was in Tonightly, I know how vicious some Internet forums can be), especially if it is undeserved (ah...). However, bile, vitriol, anger, well-worded invective, inveighing against what we see to be evil, these are vital parts of our political culture. If we dilute our imagery until it is all acceptable to a consensus of reasonable-minded people then we are condemning it to sterility.

Ah yes, but he is leading a political party, he should be prepared to answer for what he has said, the argument runs, and that is not one I should disagree with. When Hunter Thompson ran for Sheriff of Aspen County (admittedly his most famous invective was yet to come in Fear And Loathing On The Campaign Trail '72 and the political journalism after that) he refused to apologise for anything he had said in print. Instead, he revelled in it, and only didn't win because the Republicans all (apart from 150 of them) switched their votes to the Democratic candidate to keep him out. And his manifesto included changing the name of Aspen to Fat City and ripping up the city streets and replacing them with turf.

Chris Mounsey was almost criminally stupid in not being better prepared to stand up for what he had said, either by defining it as valid comment, or satire, or concentrating on the substance of what he had said. More worryingly, this appeared to be the first time that it had occurred to him that things he types might be hurtful to the people they were typed about. Indeed, he seemed embarrassed into apologising. Chris Mounsey didn't look bad because he was too nasty, but because he was too nice, too unprepared to continue saying outrageous things in the face of someone upset by them.

Maybe that's one of the problems. DK occasionally feels like it's vitriol-by-numbers, that it's not motivated by true rage because if it was, he wouldn't hesitate to say it to their faces. At its best it is a howl of excoriation; at its worst: a clumsy collection of right-wing venom stapled together for attention.

The Devil is not a writer or creator of offensive imagery on a par with any of those listed above. Of course, he's also part-time. He has a tendency to reach for the easiest and most tired of offensive cliches, and rarely takes the time to construct an image that is apt and shocking and delightful precisely because we haven't seen it before, preferring tired torysphere usages like 'monocular cunt Gordon Brown'. When he does, however, it's worth waiting for. That's why (along with Justin McKeating, Unity, and Anton Vowl) he's one of the few UK political bloggers whose posts I always try to read.

I've done live television a few times, and the moment that the floor manager counts you in both moves bowels and emblankens minds. I'm prepared to believe that Chris was prepared to give a fluent and convincing account of the policies and beliefs of the LPUK. The fact remains that he wasn't given a chance.

We absolutely have a right to know what those who would try to lead us have written in the past. We should be prepared to allow them to complete a sentence in response. It's also important to establish what they are planning to do, what they think, and why. I agree entirely with the commenter on one site who said that it made no sense for Andrew Neil to introduce part of the show looking at smaller parties, and then to spend a third of the interview mocking their being a small party, no matter what one thinks of them.

Do I think the question shouldn't have been asked? No. Do I think it should have been the subject of most of the interview? No. Do I think Chris should have been able to answer questions about it succinctly? Definitely.

As a result of this interview and the publicity it received, Chris has decided to change the way in which he blogs. In his post about this he makes it very clear that the fact that his boss phoned him to express concern about his blogging did not amount to any pressure being put on him to stop blogging in the way he did. Although he did.

Which is an interesting argument for a vulgar libertarian to make because, presumably, there would be nothing wrong with an employer dismissing an employee for blogging something they didn't like. Or marrying someone they didn't like. Or wearing something they didn't like. That is entirely the province of the employer. And, presumably, talented people who want to write, marry, or wear whatever they like will find other, less-restrictive places to work. Unless, of course, they also happen to like their jobs.

So, Chris is at pains to point out that it is his choice to curtail his blogging. It is his choice, and our loss; because, agree with him or not, he wrote some very funny, very horrible things. The Devil is dead. Long live some other cunt.

* On Jane Austen: "Every time I read Pride And Prejudice I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone."

Sometimes...

Sometimes, Hitchens still gets it absolutely right: "Once again, one is compelled to ask which would be worse: a Sarah Palin who really meant what she merely seemed to say, or a Sarah Palin who would say anything at all for a cheap burst of applause."

Why They Call Us The Blues

In honour of the Conservative Party conference (and because Comedybox have apparently lost last year's version down the back of the Internet), here's my little tribute from 2007:

It's a shame when people you like turn out to be profoundly retarded. There you are, introducing them to your parents and friends, when they run to the buffet and start shoving prawns up their noses, rubbing their bare chests on the pate, and trying to make sweet, sweet love to the skirting board.

Devil's Kitchen, as delightful and entertaining as he usually is, has become that pate-rubber.

In a fit of what I can only describe at shit-minded, smug, awfulness (note: I could describe it as other things. But I'm not going to), he has subscribed to the meme du jour of simpletons everywhere. To wit: everything bad in the world? That's left wing. Everything good? Is right.

What started as a piece of contrarianism from the idiot son of American conservatism has become a bog-standard piece of ill-thought-through conservative nonsense. It's quite possible, and I'm quite desperate to hope that DK meant this as nothing more than a piece of cunt-baiting mischief.

If so, consider me baited...

Let's consider this late-term abortion of a phrase: "collectivist policies—and thus of the Left."

To which I can only respond: since fucking when? Since actually fucking when? Since when have the monarchy and the armed forces and police, the most aggressively collectivist organisations we've yet to come up with, looked to the Left for their support?

The fact that some bloated, corporate imbeciles call themselves socialists whilst being authoriatarian, collectivist morons, doesn't mean that a state of being an authoritarian collectivist moron makes you a socialist. Quite the reverse. Just like being a rancid twat doesn't necessarily make you a conservative. Although it's a pretty good indicator.

The Left has been the home of Tom Paine, Benjamin Tucker, the Anti-Corn Law Leagues, the Chartists, the Suffragettes, Proudhon, Saint Simon, the Levellers, and those who have been fighting the State for hundreds of years. The Left has been anti-authoritarian for centuries, and we're meant to admire the Right for working out that the State wasn't particularly wonderful in the 1970s?

Unless it was Pinochet's state.

And, yes, I'll hold my hands up: my identification of myself as 'left' is deeply ingrained. No matter how interested in libertarianism or anarchism I am, I know whence I've come, and that's from the left. I am a creature of the left. A creature of anti-authoritarian, non-conformist politics; interested in raising the lot of each and every one of us. That's my emotional core. It's instinctive, and no matter where I end up, it will be for the left reasons.

It doesn't mean that I sit around wanking over pictures of Pol Pot, and thinking that Stalin was right - but he didn't go far enough, any more than I imagine DK licks chocolate spread off large monochrome posters of Mussolini, humming the Horst Wessel Song as he does. (Actually I would have just imagined that, but I don't know what DK looks like. I'm imagining Dustin Hoffman, but shorter, with Joe Pesci's crazed rat-eyes. Yeah. He'll fuck you up.)

I would imagine DK's instinctive association with the right, despite their history of being murdering, fascist, collectivist bastards is something to do with his upbringing as well. Something terribly wrong in his upbringing. The idea that any contemporary of mine can have lived through the early 1990s, and thought: "You know, these Conservatives are pretty good. When I can vote, it will certainly be for people like them." is frankly appalling.

I appear to have ranted, drifted.

The post DK cites is a lazy in its thinking as it is turgid in its prose. When attempting, loudly yet feebly, like a toddler insisting they haven't had dessert whilst wiping chocolate mousse from their bottom lip, to show that the BNP's policies are left-wing, Dizzy says:

The raising of the inheritance tax threshold to £1 million; - utterly
meanigless given that the economic will be in the shit and no one will
have that much to give away because of the socialist protectionism. A
dog whistle policy that is total inconsistent with the socialism
already laid out.

It also happens to be one of the Tories' key pledges. Heaven forfend that anyone notice that the language, and actually some of the policies of the BNP, much as he might like to describe them as left-wing, are those of the Conservative Party.

But that's nit-picking. It's playing their game.

It is a shame that there isn't a better showing for left-libertarianism in the British blogosphere. America has Kevin Carson, Rad Geek, In The Libertarian Labyrinth, and the Center for a Stateless Society; while we just have the bores at Samizdata and Devil's Kitchen, who at least possesses both a brain and some wit.

It's a shame that British libertarianism is so kneejerk and in many ways backwards in its online presence. It's a shame that some libertarians, so wedded to their 'right-wing' identity still feel the need to try to whitewash Pinochet whilst keeping their ideological skirts dry ('Pinochet was slightly not nice, but much, much better than any other conceivable thing, including the elected president, and he remained sexy to the end') or, and this is an absolute classic - fuck it, he can say it in his own words. This is a comment by The Wobbly Guy on a Samizdata post bemoaning the election of Obama:

"That's it. I'm pinning my hopes on China. I don't care if the Chinese
are authoritarians. They believe in capitalism, and I'm throwing in
with them."

And it's unfortunate that there aren't really any libertarians in the UK, just weapons fetishists, and plump men approaching 40, whose heads all look as if they have been boiled. And their refusal to engage with either the history or philiosophy of anti-statist thought (unless reading Ayn Rand counts) ensures that the LPUK will forever be a fringe party, a party to which thinking people are not invited.

If 'libertarians' could start being libertarians, and stop being 'right-wingers', however, that might not be the case...

(Full disclosure: This post was written when I was 63% drunk. The views expressed may not even be mine.)

Every now and again, Hazel Blears does something to remind me why I hate her more than any other MP. Most are just misguided, venal, cowardly idiots. She, however, is something special, a ball of uncorrupted evil, deserving of nothing more than vivisection so that we can find out how a creature with neither a brain nor a heart can display all of the outward symptoms of life.

This time, she done give a speech. In which she says the following:

"And in recent years commentary has taken over from investigation or news reporting, to the point where commentators are viewed by some as every bit as important as elected politicians, with views as valid as cabinet ministers."

Because no one has views as 'valid' as those of cabinet ministers. It's an impossibility.

She doesn't stop at suggesting that cabinet ministers might be better-informed on certain issues, she asserts (and she elaborates in her next sentence) that unless you are an MP, or, more properly, a member of the ruling party so spineless that you have a cabinet position, your opinions aren't even valid. She goes on:

"You fucking idiots. How dare you presume to be able to give anything like the appropriate quality of thought to issues that might affect your life? Do you have a badge that makes you an approved thinker? Has anyone ever voted for you in the misguided belief that you were going to represent their views? Are you one of the 646 people in this country with valid opinions? No? Then shut up. Pricks. You people make me sick."

She then lowered her pastel-coloured trousers and shat on the grateful face of one of her enraptured constituents. Said the constituent: "I'll never wash this face again. It's an honour and a privilege to have been used as a turd-basket by an illiberal harridan who came last in the first round of Labour's last deputy leadership election. The faeces that currently clogs my nostrils represents, in a very real sense, the views of the 11% of the Labour party who supported her."

In fact, as Hazel goes on to talk about how only thought sanctioned by having won an election is appropriate, valid, or useful, she must have as thoroughly rejected all of her own views as the Labour Party did last year.

She seems, as usual, to fundamentally not have any understanding of her job as an MP. Her job is to represent the views of her constituents in Parliament, not to have better ones (like her idea to 'rebrand' ethnic minorities) because the people in her constituency were too feckless and idle to have valid thoughts.

She doesn't even have the modicum of intelligence necessary to realise that - gasp! - you don't need to have been elected by anyone to be a cabinet member. Like Peter Mandelson. What, exactly, made the views of the never-elected Andrew Adonis more valid than anyone else's when it came to schools? The fact that he was in the cabinet. And thus, according to Hazel, we should all shut up.

She makes me physically ill, and Unity does a great job on her over at Ministry of Truth. I'm going to go and try to scrub the stench of Blears from my typing fingers...

They've managed to spell my name wrong on the graphic - but here are two aging slices of half-baked satire just in time for conference seaso... oh.

Oh well...

Singing the Blues - West side Tory


Brown Alert - It ain't easy being Gordon...

Election nights are wonderful. There are swings, exit polls, and reminders that these graphics are based on projected vote-shares. For about 15 years, I've sat up into the too, too early morning breathlessly awaiting results at every opportunity. I even sat up for the results of the referendums on Scottish and Welsh devolution. But not tonight. Tonight I realised that I actually don't care.

I don't care if the Tories take a council in the north. I don't care if Labour can hold Reading. I don't care what Worcester woman does. Unless it's porn. I might stay up if it's porn.

As the early results came in I settled in front of Dimbleby's massive face, surrounded myself with booze, and waited. And waited. And it never happened. The tingle, the odd squeeze of the gut as the Tories take a seat in Wyre Forest, the infintesimal thrill as they lose one somewhere else. It never happened. I just don't care any more.

It's taken a long time for me not to care. I've adopted a position of haughty indifference in public for as long as I can remember. "They're all the same," was a mantra to live by. I knew this. I'd go on at tedious length about it. They're all the same. But, of course, they aren't. Some of them are Blues and are thus hateful gutter-vermin, a black crust around the rim of humanity's toilet bowl, whose every misfortune makes the world a happier place.

And the others have been swaggering disappointment-hounds, urinating in the face of all that was good and decent, with Richard Branson holding their collective penis. From Clause IV to tuition fees, from the Terrorism Acts to Iraq, to the 10p rate of tax, to all my adult life they've... No. It doesn't matter. I don't care any more. And, nominally, I never have - but there was always a little smile of satisfaction when they won something. Because if they won, the others lost. And the only thing worse than them was the others.

Except it wasn't. Finally, my gut appears to have accepted what my brain claimed to know. They are no better than the others. That half-hope that it was all Tony Blair, and that once he was gone they might rediscover the principles you always hoped they had? The pipe-dream of a twatbasket. Nothing more. A towering, imaginary palace, constructed of dandelion seeds and fairy guff.

And tonight, watching the heads bray and bleat about what this means for who, finally, I truly did not care. And I shall go to bed and not care. I shan't care. It's over, at long last. I do not care.

Until tomorrow, when they count the votes for London Mayor...

This site is a wonderfully comprehensive look at the 'sexed-up' Iraq dossier. It tracks the document and its authors through time and space to show you what really happened. Sort of.

Still, I enjoyed poking around it...