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In its childish, impenitent comment (login: grauniad@stereo.lu, password: grauniad) – so dreadful that it seems no one on the Guardian staff wished to have the byline attributed to them – on having to sack a terror-supporting reporter, the newspaper attempts to portray blogger Scott Burgess as a disgruntled, rejected applicant for its trainee program. Burgess is the man who broke the story of Dilpazier Aslam’s background, and instead of being thankful to him for helping to rid their newspaper of a cancer, the Guardian is instead trying to damage his credibility.
Except, of course, that the Guardian is fudging on this one. And they know they are doing it in full view of the network that brought about Aslam’s downfall in the first place. Have they learned nothing?
First, check out the first instance on his blog where Burgess mentions applying for the Guardian’s trainee program. On June 1, 2004, he wrote:
Regular readers may be interested to know that I am applying for this job. As I’ll almost certainly be hired, readers are advised to quickly inform me of any competing employment opportunities they’d like me to consider.
Perhaps the Guardian’s journalists do not do irony, and so took this comment by Burgess at face value. But they had another chance to catch the joke, two days later, when Burgess submitted his application:
… I thought that perhaps my responses to these two consecutive questions might raise a chuckle:
“What would you add to The Guardian newsroom?”
Ideological balance and accurate research.
“Please describe issues of the moment in Britain and the world that most interest you. Why?”
…As an American living in Britain, I can’t help but also be interested in the way in which Americans, their society and their government are perceived – not only in Britain, but throughout Europe. While many of the negative opinions expressed by Europeans are no doubt valid, others seem to be based on crude stereotyping of the sort that is rightly condemned when applied to other national, ethnic or religious groups. I’d like to help bring some balance to the way Britain and the rest of Europe view my compatriots, not only through my writing, but also by presenting myself as an intelligent, articulate, and non-obese example.
Burgess ends his post with the question: When do you suppose they’ll be getting back to me? The answer seems to be: When you expose their wrongdoing, via an attempted smear on their website.
It will come as no surprise to anyone with a realistic view of how the media operate that the Guardian is in this instance less interested in the truth and more interested in limiting the damage to its own credibility. It is surprising and discouraging to see a media entity which claims to ‘get the blogosphere’ indulge in such shameless dishonesty, knowing full well that the evidence of the truth is public, permanent, searchable, and so easily passed along this network.
If the Guardian is as committed to the truth as it claims to be – more, as it is supposed to be – it will issue a correction and clarification of its disgraceful comments about Scott Burgess.
To run from armed police who are shouting at you (rather than shooting at you) at any time is an extremely bad idea… to do so at a time like this in London is utter madness.
Anyone running from armed cops who have challenged them first in London today should expect to get shot dead given the clear and present danger we are in… but that does not makes this any less of a horror. If Jean Charles de Menezes just reacted idiotically to the situation he found himself in, that does not mean we should feel distain for him.
We really need to know exactly what happened and why, but shooting a man dead who is suspected of being a suicide bomber and who is running away and trying to board a train(!) when being called on to stop is not the incorrect response. It was a tragedy of execution (in ever sense of the word) but not an incorrect policy.
If anything, it is the failure of multiculturalism to generate real reciprocal respect and provide legitimate avenues to social participation that provides the psychotic self-justification the murderers indulge in as part of their vision of nirvana.
– Andrew Jakubowicz, a sociology professor, explains to Australian newspaper readers that suicide bombers have nothing to do with Islam.
I know this post is not ‘on topic’ in these days of Islam casting its shadow over the Western society but it is tonight I am watching Doctor Zhivago.
I remember reading the book by Boris Pasternak in 1980s, as a teenager. I got only about 70% of it because I was too young. Despite the fact that I was living in deep communism. I guess that was the reason I understood even that much of the story, at the tender age of 14… Never mind the love story – it is the backdrop that interests me. The Russian Revolution of 1918.
The film shows the destraction of an individual, educated and sensitive, a doctor and a poet. Not a perfect human being by far, who loved his country and saw it and his life rent apart by a brutal change, his loved ones in danger and all he treasured destroyed.
Let me relay some snippets that I found memorable.
Zhivago’s house in Moscow has been taken over by the local Soviet run by two sour-faced comrades. They tell him, reproachfully, that there is room for 13 families there. He says: In that case, this is a better arrangement. More just…
Doctor Yuri Zhivago was a member of the Russian intelligentsia and believed that there was a need for reform of the country. At the start, he saw the Communist Party as performing a deep operation cutting out a cancerous tumour. Today he probably would be reading the Guardian or the New York Times calling himself a progressive. A bleeding heart liberal, perhaps. But Pasternak puts the Zhivago character through the reality of a dystopia coming true.
There is a conversation between Doctor Zhivago and Strelnikov, a commander of the Red Guard of legendary reputation, the scourge of the country.
Strelnikov: Are you the poet? I used to admire poetry, it’s so personal, the flight of affections and humanity. Personal life is dead in Russia. I can see how you could hate me.
Zhivago: The fact I hate you, does not mean I want to kill you.
And later in the same conversation:
Zhivago: You burnt the wrong village.
Strelnikov [agitated]: A village is burnt, the point is made.
Yes, I remember the stern self-righteousness (or more accurately a psychotic moral high-ground), the fragile power that many experienced until they were the next batch to be devoured by the monstrous system. The glorious Party, the Workers, the Justice, Equality and the Better Tomorrow… airbrush the Gulags and you have the Guardianistas…
And then there is the nihilism of the ‘revolutionaries’.
Tonya’s (Zhivago’s wife) father: They shot the czar and all his family… [exclaims] What’s it for?
Zhivago: To show that there is no going back…
A young boy is found dying in the field after the attack of the partisans who kidnapped Zhivago for his medical expertise. The boy dies while Zhivago looks sadly on unable to save him. A partisan says:
It does not matter.
Zhivago: Did you ever have any children?
Partisan: I once had a wife and four children. None of this matters.
Zhivago: What matters, commander?
Partisan: Tell me, I have forgotten.
Towards the end of the film, Zhivago’s brother says of Lara, his lover:
She vanished and died somewhere in one of the labour camps. A nameless number on a list that was afterwards mislaid…
Watching the film reminds me of what an unqualified and unchecked evil the Soviet Revolution and communism was. Horrific in its suppression of the individual, ruthless in its ritual extinguishing of the human spirit and freedom, terrifying in its imposition of the most toxic variety of dystopia, arrogant in its denial of reality and brutal in the execution of those who dared even breathe against it. Evil, pure evil that will never be fully understood by those who have not experienced it.
Yeah, I should have gone out on Saturday night…
It appears that the ‘bomber’ who was shot by the police yesterday was just in the wrong place at the wrong time. This is horrendous news.
“From a certain point of view, the journalist, the politician, the police chief, and the terrorist can be seen as locked in a macabre waltz of the mind, no less distorting for being unconscious. We should not join that dance.”
– Matthew Parris in The Times
Indeed. What is it that causes skepticism here about the motives of the state and its agents to collapse as soon as Islamist violence is involved? I really want to know.
Most magazines and newspapers employ “fact checkers”, whose job it is supposedly to ensure that the content of articles is accurate and truthful. The nasty little secret however, is that the purpose of such people is not so much to ensure that the readers of the magazine receive articles that are accurate, but to protect the editors and owners of the magazine from libel law. Therefore, a lot of the time what is actually checked is the accuracy of human sources rather than the accuracy of facts and the internal consistency of articles. If an article says that “Joe Bloggs said that the moon is made of blue cheese” then it is likely to be checked that Joe Bloggs actually said this. If it is merely stated that “The moon is made of blue cheese” then this is less likely to be checked. After all, the moon is unlikely to sue.
As a consequence of this, one finds a great many factual errors in the general media, particularly about scientific and technical information. And one finds dreadful innumeracy – which is a shame given the fact that a basic knowledge of the modern world is pretty much impossible without a decent understanding of the workings of the modern world and a basic understanding of the modern world.
However, this varies by publication, or course. In the British media, The Guardian is far better at getting factual information on technical subjects right than any other paper with the possible exception of the BBC. The Times and Telegraph are worse, and in the electronic media the BBC is usually dreadful. (This wasn’t always so. There used to be a strong pro-enlightenment wing of the BBC, but the decline of this is just one general symptom in the moonbat ascendancy in the BBC that has happened in recent decades).
In any event, an example. Last week I had a long flight in front of me, and as a consequence I grabbed a couple of magazines to get me through the flight. The July/August edition of Foreign Affairs had series of articles entitled “The Next Pandemic”, which considered the possibilities as to what might happen if the world faced an outbreak of a new, nasty, influenza strain. Foreign Affairs is the trade journal of a certain kind of pompous, overly statist Washington D.C. Policy wonk. In any event, it is read by what in D.C terms are “serious” people. I find this slightly distasteful, but I have a certain morbid fascination for the subject of contagious diseases and ways of coping with them, so I bought the magazine.
The lead article in the section (and one of the others) was written by Laurie Garrett, author of The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance and Betrayal of Trust: : The Collapse of Global Public Health”. I have read the first of these books but not the second. I found it interesting in that it gave lots of historical information that I was not previously aware of, but I found its central argument – that standards of public health in the world is in decline and a consequence we are newly vulnerable to emerging diseases – to be unconvincing. I particularly disagree with the semi-stated corollary that the solution is the expenditure of vast amounts of public money. Certainly there are places in the world where standards of public health have declined (eg in British and Canadian public hospitals) but in a global sense sanitation has never been better, and global best practice (ie that of the United States) has clearly improved. On top of this we are in the midst of a biotechnology revolution of astonishing speed. Fifty years ago biology was largely taxonomy and medicine was largely “Try this and see if it work”, whereas today we have real understanding of how biological systems works and how diseases work, and as a consequence a much more basic understanding of how to attack them. → Continue reading: And you believe I should take you seriously?
It is easy, with all the terrible events going on in London at the moment, to let other significant stories slip under the radar. However, last week the UK senior finance minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer Gordon Brown, tweaked the rules of UK budget policy in an offhand manner that takes the breath away for sheer barefaced cheek.
Brown has a so-called “Golden Rule” that stipulates that the government’s books must be in balance over the course of the economic cycle. The books are currently seriously in the red at the moment, which would appear alarming given that we have had a relatively decent period of economic growth recently. So what does the gloomy Scot do? He shifts the year in which a key part of the economic cycle is supposed to have started by two years, the effect of which is supposed to show that the Golden Rule has not been broken. This sleight of hand produced fairly scant coverage outside the business sections, but in its own little way illustrates the utter contempt this government has for the financial markets, or the general public.
Brown has done this sort of thing before. And it makes one wonder just how long Brown can go on before the economy, supposedly Labour’s strongest card in the last election, turns south.
I never bought the argument that Brown was a great Chancellor, as, with all his faults, was Nigel Lawson, for example. Brown has been enormously lucky to inherit an economy left in fine fettle by the previous Conservative government, and apart from his wise move of making the Bank of England independent, has done precious little right since. He is an ardent meddler and micro-manager, making the tax code into a hideously complex morass that does precious little for growth apart from make lots of jobs for tax accountants.
How the world changes. A few weeks ago the political trainspotters were wondering how soon Brown would take over from Blair. I suspect the likelihood of that happening has been pushed away by quite a distance.
The Guardian has finally got rid of the anti-Semitic, terror-endorsing Dilpazier Aslam from its staff. But that does not stop them from pouting about having to do so (login: grauniad@stereo.lu, password: grauniad).
Links via Marcus at Harry’s Place
Robert Alderson writes about what Islam really needs and has an interesting idea how to nudge things along
In some ways Islam is at the stage that Christianity was centuries ago. Religious texts and debates are in classical Arabic, a language which most Muslims can not understand – just like medieval European peasants could not understand Latin but were still expected to live by the Latin version of the bible.
I have not read the Koran or the Bible but from excerpts and quotations I have seen it would be perfectly possible to justify anything you wanted with selective quotations from either work; suicide bombings, slavery, non-tolerance of homosexuality, wearing a veil, whatever. The Christian Bible has at least been translated into most European languages and interested parties can refer to the source text and argue things out. The Koran has, by and large, not been translated into local Arabic languages and is therefore beyond the practical understanding of the ‘Arab Street’ The interpreters of the Koran are those scholars who have taken the time to learn classical Arabic and therefore may tend to have a different outlook on life than people who have to earn the money that pays for them.
The other point is that Koranic scholarship still regards the Koran as the literal word of God, no metaphors, no allusions – straight word of God no dispute allowed. This type of fundamental literalism was abandoned by mainstream Christian theologians a long time ago.
The West could do worse than translate the Koran into local dialects and publish it on the Internet or even drop it from airplanes! We need an Islamic Martin Luther to open up the religion.
Let us listen to what Dr. Azzam Tamimi of the Muslim Association of Britain is saying:
Senior Muslims have warned the Government that it needed to revise British foreign policy if it wants to put an end to the violence. Dr Azzam Tamimi, from the Muslim Association of Britain, said the country was in real danger and that this would continue so long as British forces remained in Iraq. He described the July 7 bombings and the attempted attacks in London on Thursday as “horrifying” but said it was not enough to simply unite in condemnation of the bombers.
People reading this blog may or may not share my enthusiasm for the war in Iraq, but even if you were an ‘anti’, make no mistake, what these ‘senior Muslims’ are demanding is nothing less that capitulation to terrorism. Dr. Tamimi is quite unequivocal: change your foreign policy or these people will continue to blow you up.
And when Massoud Shadjareh, chairman the Islamic Human Rights Commission, says:
we know this wasn’t a one-off, we need to look at ways of addressing the underlying factors that created it. I feel it’s urgent to start addressing these before there is further loss of life.
He had better think deeply before making such statements again or an increasing number of British people may start concluding that the ‘underlying factor’ that needs the most urgent action is the existence of his community in Britain. I look forward to the large body of ‘moderate’ Muslim leaders that is allegedly out there to unequivocally damn Al Qaeda and all their works (and that means not a single use of the word ‘but…’). It is becoming increasingly urgent that this occurs soon and over a sustained period.
Until that happens, I suspect the majority of British people who do not live in Islington will see people like Azzam Tamimi and Massoud Shadjareh as part of the problem rather than part of the solution.
British police shot dead a man strongly suspected to have been one of yesterday’s would-be suicide bombers as he tried to board a train full of people at Stockwell Tube station.
It has also been reported that British Muslims are worried there is a ‘shoot to kill’ policy in force. However contrary to what Hollywood would have you believe, anytime a policeman shoots someone, they are prepared to kill them (the usual policy is to shoot at the ‘centre of mass’). Technically they are ‘shooting to incapacitate’ and that often means killing the target. If a person who has been shot and incapacitated subsequently survives, that is a bonus.
However in the case of a suspected suicide bomber, once the decision to shoot has been made, taking the extra step of a bullet through the brain of a fallen suspect who under other circumstances would not be shot again may well be justified, given that the ability to so much as touch a button makes them a continued threat. This is particularly true if they have gone down near a number of civilians as was indeed the case this morning.
I am only surprised it has taken Al Qaeda this long to get around to attacking us here in London, given that they thought nothing of slaughtering hundreds of African civilians in Kenya and Tanzania and dozens of Australian civilians in Bali over the last few years since 9/11. We are in a war against an implacable enemy and although we have every right to demand our security services only use appropriate force in our defence, unless the facts turn out to be quite different than so far reported, this looks like it was a ‘clean shoot’.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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