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This, by Charles Spencer in the latest Spectator, made me smile:
“This is a time for making the most of small mercies. One of the greatest of these, as the financial system collapses around us, is the splendid joke that is Robert Peston of the BBC. His extraordinarily camp, over-emphatic delivery would be perfect for reporting glitzy Broadway first nights but seems hilariously at odds with worldwide economic catastrophe. Peston has all the glee of the callow cub reporter rejoicing in the size of his scoop while lacking the imagination to understand the anxiety his excitable tales of doom-and-gloom might be causing others.”
I admire the scoop-getting skills of Mr Peston, if not always his analytical skills. Anyway, as Mr Spencer continues:
“Like poor Mr and Mrs Spencer of Claygate, Surrey, for instance, who somehow managed to commit themselves to £40,000 worth of home improvements (double glazing and a new kitchen) just before the current crisis went big time. As I do my lengths at the swimming pool, I sometimes experience a knot of fear forming in my guts. Mercifully, thinking of Peston, an egregious character both Jane Austen and P.G. Wodehouse would have been proud to have invented, makes me laugh and my panic disperses.”
On a nicer note to Robert Peston, however, he has put economics at the top of the BBC news agenda in a way that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Part of this is down to simple events, but part of it is due to Peston’s skills in ferreting out the news, not to mention his status as a friendly journalist to NuLab. Whether this continues if the current bunch get kicked out of Westminster is a moot point.
I guess the Bloomberg editor who transmitted this story in error has suffered the equivalent of being thrown into a pool of sharks, as happened to a baddie who got on the wrong side of Largo in Thunderball. There has always been a Spectre-like feel about the Bloomberg news operation, not to mention a cultish aspect, even. In their London office, there are lots of fish-tanks dotted about, presumably designed to make the staff feel calmer, but you never know what sort of beasties might lurk.
There is this wonderful story – I am not sure if it is totally accurate, though – about how an employee who fell out with a notorious Bloomberg editor, called Matt Winkler, managed to transmit headlines on the service that repeated for hours, with the words: “Winkler is a Wanker – Official”.
I just love the news business.
I am getting used to finding nonsense in the Daily Telegraph – when I still look at it.
Whether it is an absurd claim that the Rosenbergs were innocent – a claim made in an obituary of someone who was involved with them, and based upon the sainted authority of the New York Times of all people. Or a claim that Fox News (amongst other wicked things) characterizes Mrs Obama as a “golliwog”, a claim based on a far left smear site – as actually watching Fox News before writing about it would be beneath the dignity of the correspondents the Daily Telegraph sends to the United States.
And, of course, the endless favourable coverage for Comrade Senator Obama himself.
However, I am still capable of being shocked and I was shocked by Andrew O’Hagan’s despicable article on Solzhenitsyn in the same issue of the Daily Telegraph (Tuesday, August 5th) that carried Solzhenitsyn’s obituary – indeed on the very page before the obituary.
No doubt O’Hagan would defend his article (if he bothered to defend it) as light-hearted and basically supportive.
“Light-hearted” being English in this part of the world for “I can get away with being a swine, if I pretend it is all a joke” and “basically supportive” meaning kicking someone when he is down. The reader is told that Solzhenitsyn was not a great writer. Well Mr O’Hagan is entitled to his opinion, although it was odd day to choose to state it – with the man not even being buried yet. But the article went a lot further than that.
The reader is told that it is impossible to read the works of Solzhenitsyn – not just the very late works, but any of them. And then there is weird rant that trying to read Solzhenitsyn drives people to “banjo playing, feeling sympathy for Stalin” and various other stuff. No doubt this would be defended as being “amusing”.
Almost needless to say there was no mention of the tens of millions of people murdered by the Marxist/Leninists in what was then the Soviet Union, or the tens of millions of people the Marxists (the side of such people as the Rosenbergs and Saul Alinsky and his modern followers) have murdered in other parts of the world.
Instead Mr Andrew O’Hagan says that “We didn’t read him, but his thinking changed ours”.
Who “we” might be is not explained (although I think I know), as for “his thinking changed ours”, I have seen no sign of that in Mr O’Hagan himself.
Solzhenitsyn had flaws (as all human beings do), but he had a great respect for truth and Mr O’Hagan has no respect for truth at all. He, like so many at the Telegraph group now, sees his role as pushing ‘progressive’ propaganda at a once conservative newspaper – and if the truth does not fit the propaganda line, too bad for the truth.
I remember well him waxing with rage about how the wicked rightwing Bush and his evil cronies had denied New Orleans money after Katrina. One can rightly attack all layers of government for their messing up at the time of Katrina, and readers of this blog will know how much I despise George Walker Bush. But the O’Hagan picture of a skinflint Bush denying people money years after the event, did not fit well with my knowledge of President Bush as a spendthrift – so I checked. In reality, the Federal government had thrown billions of taxpayer Dollars at New Orleans and much of the money had vanished – as anyone who knows much about the place would have expected.
But O’Hagan had visited the place and so facts were not important – only his empathy with the suffering masses.
Solzhenitsyn would not have had the same opinion. He was no ardent friend of the West – but he was no lover of criminals either. Neither the ‘honest thieves’ (the open criminals with their ‘thieves law’ of the gang) or the ‘bitches’ – the trusties, or local government people and ‘community activists’.
“But the majority of the population are not thieves” – quite so, they are victims and will continue to be so whilst the criminals, both open criminals and government and community activists, continue to rule so many cities.
Lastly I apologize for any slight errors there may be in my account of Mr O’Hagan’s article – I am writing from memory [good thing you have an editor to embed the links for you, Ed.]. After looking at his article in the library I could not bring myself to buy the Daily Telegraph even to get the obituary of Solzhenitsyn – so I bought a copy of The Times instead.
It is unfair to expect writers to be consistent in their views from week to week. Consistency is the “hobgoblin of little minds” and all that. I am sure that if I wanted to, I could trawl back through this site and find something that jarred with what I write today, and I would not be at all surprised if that were to happen in the future. Even so, it does make me wonder when you read a comment like this, about a recent environmentalist doomongering film. The piece is by AA Gill, who is not exactly my favourite news columnist. The review is actually pretty good, to be fair. But then I remember that he writes that the only main benefit of the space race was to kindle interest in Green issues. So what gives?
It might be nice to think that he is learning that the Green movement, or at least its more militant parts, is in fact a menace. Maybe what is happening is that for a part of the London chattering classes, even that bit that likes to be thought of as “hip” and trendy, bashing Greenery is now socially acceptable, or at least no longer an activity that gets one sent into social oblivion. Maybe, just maybe Gill and his friends have picked this up during their dinner parties. “Oh, what about global warming darling?” is simply not clever any more. I bet he has poked fun at all those folk driving around in their Priuses and laughed himself hoarse at the motoring antics of popular TV shows like Top Gear and its merciless mockery of Green prudery.
Politics and culture can often shift in subtle ways. What is, and what is not, thought acceptable to mock often sets the tone for a few years. I get the impression, partly because of the darkening economic climate, that the Green movement has lost a little headway or may even be retreating in some respects.
Or perhaps I am reading too much into a few scraps of writings.
I do love Guido:
Knife crime is the media scare of the moment and on Sunday Jacqui Smith spun Sky News that “something would be done”. The knife carrying and stabbing classes would be taken to hospital A&Es to confront the results of their crimes.
See the snag? Sounds tough and progressive to triangulating wonks. Sounds more like adding insult to injury when you are lying on a trolley bleeding, hoping you won’t catch MRSA – “Here’s Wayne, he is very sorry he stabbed you”. Doctors and the opposition went ballistic. By lunchtime today the plan was dropped.
The official line here is that They’re As Bad As Each Other, but I actually think that the Cameron regime, as and when it materialises, might show real glimmerings of adequacy, at any rate compared to this lot. I realise that much of my optimism is based on believing David Cameron to be a liar, and not as bad as he says he will be about such things as the environment (which I am basically opposed to), and taxes (ditto), and EUrope (ditto again). But I think it is reasonable to hope for the best, as well as to fear that he might be telling the truth. Except re EUrope, about which I assume Cameron to be lying only in hinting that he might do a teensy bit of good.
Meanwhile, it says a great deal about the terminal state of this present government that they are now making such particular fools of themselves in the one solitary area that they used until a year or two ago to excel at, namely manipulating the contents of the newspapers and the television. They have taxed and regulated the British economy into stagnation and presided over the relentless decline of all public services except weather forecasts and cricket commentaries, and this process of degradation began, or rather continued, as soon as they were voted in in 1997. But they used at least to be able to boss the newspapers. Not any more.
John Redwood MP has a blog, which is very party political as is only to be expected of a party politician, but I find him quite good. Not so long ago he had a posting entitled Legislation – just a longer press release?
You sense that everyone in and around the government has now come to similar conclusions themselves, about themselves. It is being said that what is keeping Mr Brown in his job is that they are all far too busy abandoning ship to care who the captain is. Although, maybe they are being too pessimistic about how badly they will do. Presumably their extreme pessimism comes from reading the newspapers every day.
At a time when the credit/money bubble financial institutions are in crises the Economist chooses to lead with a story on Mr Cameron – the leader of the British Conservative party. I can not claim to have read the story as I do not find Mr Cameron very interesting – at least compared to other matters. And, as I am British and have been an active member of the Conservative party since the end of the 1970’s, if he was of such great interest to anyone (other than his family and friends) it would be surely be me.
In case anyone makes the defence that the financial crises was not known at the time when the Economist went to press…
Well the absurd government created Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had not lost 50% of their stock market value when the Economist went to press – but their problems were obvious, as were the problems of the compassionate lender to the poor (always run a mile from a company that says it is in business to help the poor) Indybank of California, the run on that enterprise was well under way.
The people at the Economist could have made some reasonable predictions about the general financial situation, but they did not – or at least did not lead with them. I will make the prediction now that the the gutless Bush Administration will not order the arrest of the corrupt Mr Johnson (the ex head of Fannie Mae and leading Democrat) as this would upset his friends, such as Senators Obama and Durbin and Congressman Barney Frank – and we must not upset these upstanding individuals…
…Any more than we must upset Speaker Nancy Pelosi by having a Presidential press conference asking people to telephone her to ask why she will not allow a vote in Congress on whether or not to allow more drilling for oil at a time of record fuel prices – although it is fine for Speaker Pelosi to have a press conference telling everyone to telephone the President Bush to blame him for high fuel prices.
Of course the Economist did have other stuff in it:
A brief look, thanks to the library, showed an article sneering at Governor Bobby Jindal (the upcoming Republican and someone the Economist shows signs of fearing) and another puff piece about the all wise Senator Obama – this one claiming that his cynical habit of saying anything to get elected (even, supposedly, reversing positions he has held all his life – well reversing them till after the election) is a good thing, and pointing to his economic advisers as the height of “sensibleness”.
No doubt they will prove about as sensible as the fanatical collectivist Paul Krugman – a man the Economist long favoured.
I could go on, for example examining their obituary of the late Senator Richard Helms and showing how the obituary shows the Economist writers do not understand the nature or effects of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, but I will stop here.
Anyone who is still buying the Economist is beyond rational argument.
The reason I ask is that I was half listening and I heard a really good and rather funny quote go by. I stopped what I was doing and typed as much of it into the computer as I could remember. Then I went to the ABC News website and replayed the story. The quote was either removed from the story or I am confusing two similar stories on the same night. That is why I am asking for help.
As I recall, a reporter, I think but I’m not certain it was the John Berman piece, was reporting Obama’s latest policy shift as he maneuvers against McCain. Apparently a campaign staffer said or was quoted as saying : ” [Obama] makes decisions based on what he thinks is right.” To which the reporter added rhetorically “The question is ‘how far to the right?”
Great quote. Where’d it go? Obamabots?
And as an aside, I realize that Obama is promising us “change”. But does it have to be so often?
A forceful article in the Times today stating that the pessimists are wrong. In Iraq, in Afghanistan and at home, the death-cultists of Islamism are on the run.
What is also clear that if this progress is lost, it will not be because of the lack of bravery or skill of the US, British and other allied forces. They have been magnificent. No, the weak link in the chain remains, in my view, the craven attitude of the domestic western populations to the constant demands from home-grown radical Islamists. The farcical treatment of Mark Steyn in Canada is a case in point.
What remains an issue for advocates of isolationist foreign policy – which is actually not a policy at all – is how any of the gains that the Times’ article talks about could have been achieved by adopting the equivalent of hiding under the bed with a bottle of whisky.
The Economist ran a comparison of Senator McCain and Senator Obama this week. Senator McCain was damned with faint praise for his ‘orthodox’ supply side deregulation proposals (things the Economist itself is supposed to believe in) and then the magazine (sorry ‘newspaper’) dismissed proposals to deregulate health care and other areas of life with the following statement.
“America is already a pretty deregulated place”.
So the thousands of pages of Federal, State and local regulations that are strangling life in the United States, do not really exist?
And people wonder why I hate the Economist. The writers know nothing about the political economy of the United States – or anywhere else. Ignorance is not fatal if someone understands that they are ignorant (for example, I am ignorant of spelling and grammar) but to be ignorant and to think oneself knowledgeable is a fatal combination.
However, how can the writers of the Economist be anything other than ignorant – when they are the products of modern universities?
I recently heard a Professor of Economics from the University of York on BBC Radio. This person suggested that a good way to reduce inflation (so that the Bank of England could reduce interest rates) would be to take yet more things out of the (already rigged) Consumer Price Index. The Professor was not being ironic – the man really thought he was making a sensible suggestion.
The students of such people go on to be writers for the Economist.
If a Mafia don forced you and your neighbours to pay him protection and he later had the brass neck to claim that you were getting great value for money instead of the services offered by free marketeers, I think you would, humble reader, suspect a bit of a flaw in the logic. Well, that flaw appears to be lost on the author of a piece that carries the headline, “Why Jonathan Ross is worth the money”. For people who have been blessed with ignorance as to whom Ross is, he is a foul-mouthed, extremely well paid late-night chatshow host and movie pundit who, among other recent glittering performances, told the US actress Gwyneth Paltrow and mother of two children that he’d like to f**k her. Classy.
Excerpt:
The most important thing is that in everything the BBC does, the trust is looking for it to demonstrate as often as possible an understanding that it must justify the licence fee by striving constantly to deliver the highest standards and programmes that stand out from the crowd.
The public values talented performers – but expects, rightly, that it will get the best possible value when paying for them.
The author of this piece forgets that value is in the eye of the beholder. If I think that I get value for money for shopping in Tesco’s, Sainsbury’s or Walmart, that is my judgement, made on the basis of my choice, for specific goods that I happen to buy. If one of those supermarket chains demanded that I pay them a flat fee every year regardless of whether I shopped there or not, and claimed that its services/goods were “great value for money”, and employed loutish staff, I think I might be a tad unimpressed by that logic.
The only way to know if the BBC offers value for money is to let customers pay for it out of their own free will. Everything else is special pleading.
Is the Guardian becoming increasingly illiberal? It may have a section of its website called “Comment is Free”, yet it is now attacking free speech when it disagrees with the opinions expressed.
Once a supporter of liberal values, the Guardian was the sort of paper that would have quoted Voltaire’s “I may disagree with what you have to say, but I shall defend, to the death, your right to say it.” But just as it has dropped support for liberal ideas on economics (it was once a free trade paper), it now appears to be dropping liberal ideas about freedom of expression.
In that vein, it is getting itself worked up because one of its rivals, the Telegraph, runs a blogging platform, like Blogger or Typepad, where members of the public can start their own blogs. That blogging platform has been one of the reasons why the Telegraph, according to moaning articles in the Guardian, has recently overtaken the Guardian in online readers.
Among the 20,000 people who have signed up for a ‘MyTelegraph’ blog, one is a member of the anti-immigration British National Party. The Guardian thinks the Telegraph should ban him, but the Telegraph says that it believes in free speech – even when the views are wrong – and rightly so.
The Guardian’s lack of faith in free speech is not just restricted to BNP-type comments. It whines that: “My Telegraph is also inhabited by some very unsavoury characters, including a minority of active members of the far right, anti-abortionists, europhobes and members of an anti-feminist ‘men’s movement’.”
Anti-abortionists! Europhobes! Opponents of excessive feminism! I wonder if the Guardian would prefer a return to the old days before the decentralisation of publishing in which only the elite, who knew best, were allowed a voice.
This would have been the Samizdata quote of the day if there was not one already. It is from our own Michael Jennings, commenting on this posting at my blog, which is about the promising future of specialist publications online – as opposed to general purpose ex-newspapers:
Newspapers employ “fact-checkers”, but their job is not to check facts but to avoid libel suits. Therefore they check that Gordon Brown really did say that, but if the article says that “The moon is made of green cheese” it will go straight through because the moon is not going to sue.
This was only in a comment, so Michael should not be blamed too severely if his facts turn out a bit wrong. Very probably, the moon does now have lawyers.
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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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