davidthompson

Stealing the Proles

Readers who followed this recent thread on Margaret Thatcher and her critics may enjoy Martin Durkin’s documentary, available on 4oD here and on YouTube here, Margaret: Death of a Revolutionary.

Durkin’s film not only offers a useful history lesson, it’s also a nimble shredding of quite a few leftist myths. Its highlights include contributions from Madsen Pirie, who really ought to be on TV more often, and some comically disingenuous squirming by Mary Warnock and Neil Kinnock. During the Kinnock interviews, pay close attention to Durkin’s right eyebrow. A lot can be said with an eyebrow. 

Elsewhere (68)

Daniel Hannan on patriotic feeling:  

The first few days of the Olympics have been accompanied by a clutch of articles about how British patriotism has been rehabilitated, the Union flag reclaimed and so forth. Really? Reclaimed from whom? Other than in the imagination of a tiny metropolitan elite, when was it ever ceded? […] Watching the women’s race at Hampton Court, we were caught in torrential rain. Among the spectators were dozens of orange-shirted Dutchmen, accompanied by a brass band, which played on impressively through the downpour. When the water eventually slackened, the Hollanders struck up Rule Britannia, delighting the natives: true patriots, of course, approve of the national pride of other peoples. The idea that loving your country means scorning someone else’s is downright silly.

Perhaps someone should tell Billy Bragg, who informed Guardian readers that “our imperial instincts” prevent us “relating to our neighbours as equals.” “The English,” wrote Bragg, “are in danger of becoming an insular people, jealously guarding the right to make our own laws.” Mr Bragg - who once told listeners of Radio 4 that he had “learned all of his politics from pop music” - went on to claim that English sports fans dislike their national teams losing because of a “hangover from an imperial past.” More prosaic explanations were not entertained. 

Greg Lukianoff on campus speech codes and uncritical thinking:

I’m trying to make the point that, after 11 years of looking at college censorship, this is starting to have a negative effect on the way our country talks with itself. I think it harms our ability and inclination to debate if the one institution that’s supposed to be making us deeper, more honest, harder thinkers is actually saying “And if you disagree, kind of shut up.” 

When it comes to discipline, apparently schools need racial quotas. I kid you not: 

The state’s board of education established a policy demanding that each racial or ethnic group receive roughly proportional levels of school penalties, regardless of the behaviour by members of each group… “What this means is that whites and Asians will get suspended for things that blacks don’t get suspended for.” 

See also Heather Mac Donald, who shares some striking statistics:

The homicide rate among males between the ages of 14 and 17 is nearly ten times higher for blacks than for whites and Hispanics combined. Such data make no impact on the Obama administration and its orbiting advocates, who apparently believe that the lack of self-control and socialisation that results in this disproportionate criminal violence does not manifest itself in classroom comportment as well.

And Nick Gillespie on Dallas and the downfall of Romanian communism: 

Dallas was the last Western show allowed during the nightmarish 1980s because President Nicolae Ceausescu thought it showcased all that was wrong with capitalism. In fact, the show provided a luxuriant alternative to a communism that was forcing people to wait more than a decade to buy the most rattletrap communist-produced cars… After the dictator and his wife were shot on Christmas Eve 1989, the pilot episode of Dallas - with a previously censored sex scene spliced back in - was one of the first foreign shows broadcast on liberated Romanian TV.

The Guild of Evil recently started watching some reruns of Dallas, ironically at first. Now the mix of schemes, shoulder pads and ginormous hair is a regular treat. And I’ll thank you not to judge me. 

As always, feel free to add your own. 

Because You Would

By Deutsch Inc.

Back Scratching

Goodness. The Sunday paper of the left is shilling for the Beeb. An Observer editorial bemoans the 16% cut to the BBC’s annual £3.8 billion subsidy and the six-year freeze of the license fee. We learn,

These are serious cuts with serious consequences.

The details of which remain somewhat vague. We do, however, learn that David Cameron finds the corporation’s modest austerity “delicious,” which of course makes him A Very Bad Man.

Is he in hock to Rupert Murdoch?

Bad men with dastardly motives. That must be it. Only a fiend would stand in the way of the Beeb and its subsidised tumescence. All good people know that the state’s statist broadcaster is entitled to your earnings, being as it is wise, impartial and utterly benign. [The aforementioned tumescence is illustrated rather nicely by rjmadden in the comments.]

The BBC's ability to compete as a world-class programme maker stands in grave doubt.

There isn’t, then, a market for heavily-branded world-class programming? Is voluntary subscription not an option?

Of course, continuing spasms of introversion, such as the pending journalists’ strike over pensions, don’t help.

Strikes that were scheduled to coincide with the Conservative Party conference with a view to depriving it of air time, thus saving the public from any ideological waywardness.

But there is nothing delicious about their predicament, nor about the real losses of freedom and resource involved.

Freedom for whom? For those of us who are coerced into subsidising a vast media organisation whose political bias has been announced by employees, admitted by its own Director General and catalogued daily and at length? 

The licence fee isn’t a tax, to be turned on or off like some Whitehall tap. It is a contract between viewer and corporation.

Contracts are generally entered into voluntarily. If I want to watch Sky, I enter into a contract by choice. I choose a package that suits me and am free to change my mind. In contrast, the BBC license fee isn’t a contract in any meaningful sense. I cannot choose the programming I have to pay for and, short of renouncing television altogether, I cannot opt out. For most of us, the license fee is a condition of television ownership and has to be paid irrespective of personal preference. It is, in effect, a tax.

Meanwhile, Labour’s Ivan Lewis tells Guardian readers,

Labour will stand up for the BBC, make no mistake.

A favour that will doubtless be reciprocated at public expense.

Wounds Sustained, Oblivion Avoided

By the mid-1970s, Britain was widely regarded - choose your favourite cliché - as the Sick Man of Europe, an economic basket case, ungovernable... In [1978] the year before Thatcher came to power, Britain, upon whose empire the sun never set, endured the Winter of Discontent. Labour unrest shut down public services, paralysing the nation for months on end… Rubbish was piled high on the streets of Britain that winter, and so, at one point, were human corpses. The Soviet trade minister told his British counterpart, “We don’t want to increase our trade with you. Your goods are unreliable, you’re always on strike, you never deliver.” This was what had become of the world’s greatest trading power.

From Claire Berlinski’s “There Is No Alternative”: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters, which I’m halfway through reading and enjoying quite a lot. It’s a brisk and witty reminder of what was at stake and how socialism can lead to extraordinary selfishness. It also has plenty of revealing incidental nuggets, as when Berlinski notes the feelings of some of Thatcher’s loftier enemies:

When asked why intellectuals loathed her so, the theatre producer Jonathan Miller replied that it was “self-evident” – they were nauseated by her “odious suburban gentility.” The philosopher Mary Warnock deplored Thatcher’s “neat, well-groomed clothes and hair, packaged together in a way that’s not exactly vulgar, just low,” embodying “the worst of the lower-middle class.” This filled Warnock with “a kind of rage.”

Claire Berlinksi is interviewed by National Review’s Peter Robinson, again in 5 parts:

1. Socialist winter.

2. How she did it.

3. Thatcher and Obama.

4. Turkey and Islam.

5. What’s a radical?

Glenn Reynolds also interviews Berlinksi here. (Registration required.)

Related: Tory! Tory! Tory! An excellent 2006 miniseries tracing the history and context of Thatcherism, the miseries it involved and the much greater miseries it avoided. Well worth viewing in full. The three episodes are embedded below in six parts: 

The Random Shatner (2)

In which Mr Shatner rests his person against Gene Winfield's 1967 custom car, Reactor Mach II. 

 

Previously. Via. And for newcomers, some hardcore Shatner.

Reheated (8)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Artists for Gaia.

Escaping gas, high drama and The Great Symbolic Bench.

“The wind was so strong that the mission would have failed immediately, the bench would be blown off the iceberg in no time. Around 8 in the evening we gave up... I started to feel that my project was gaining a different, and maybe stronger, meaning... And maybe the bench was an excuse and didn’t need to be left out on the ice at all.”

Much Tutting, Bluster. 

James Bond is insufficiently emasculated, unlike Theo Hobson.

It seems to me that a huge part of Bond’s appeal, as a character and a franchise, is precisely the rejection of many PC assumptions and their petty, emasculating tenor. Unlike many Guardian writers, Bond isn’t prone to disabling fits of quasi-Marxist handwringing. And nor is his boss, ‘M’, played by a pleasingly firm Judy Dench - hardly a “flimsy thing who needs hard male mastery.”

Ray Gun Patriarchy.

On Bidisha’s Planet Diversity all science fiction will be made to conform.

The claim that the world of science fiction is inordinately populated by “homophobic white male straight writers” and “woman-hating racists” – none of whom are named - sits uneasily with the author’s admission that science fiction fandom is noted for its breadth and inclusivity and a propensity for discussing “sex, race, whatever.” Nor is it entirely consonant with her own extended list of suitably inclusive authors. Indeed, so extensive is this list, and so numerous are the writers and characters unfairly omitted from it, one might suppose the author of this article is intent on disproving her own premise.

Or poke about in the greatest hits.

Chase

Directed by David Rosenbaum for Mothership. 

Reheated (6)

For newcomers, three more items from the archives.

Uprising.

Mandatory lesbianism and the politics of shoes. A video history of radical feminism.

“It was a fantastic bit of graffiti and everybody had it up on their walls. And then we found out that a man had done the graffiti. We were just like, ‘Right, that’s it.’ We were basically going to go round and brick his house ‘til we found out he lived with women and children [laughs] … then of course we couldn’t do it, yeah.”

I Sense A Malign Presence.

Meet Jane Elliott: “diversity” pioneer and Witchfinder General for the modern age.

Note Elliott’s disregard for context, motive or objective criteria. “Perception is everything,” says she. By which she means the perception, or misperception, of one party only. This is the premise of Elliott’s crusade – to provide moral correction for all pale-skinned people. The particulars of an exchange and who did what to whom are all but immaterial; what matters is which party belongs to the Designated Victim Group, as defined by Jane Elliott and others in the trade.

The Wrong Kind of Rich.

Wealthy Guardianistas deserve hefty salaries. Unlike you.

Toynbee’s Guardian salary, for years a subject of speculation, was eventually revealed as £106,000 - excluding royalties, advances, media fees, etc. Presumably Polly feels her own financial rewards are not at all “extravagant” or “unjust,” or a likely cause of public outrage. It seems, then, that Ms Toynbee only dislikes the wrong kind of rich people, which is to say rich people whose politics and backgrounds may differ from her own.

And the updated greatest hits may reward some rummaging.

The Random Shatner

Shatner does Poe in terracotta face paint. Bewildering make-up aside, The Raven does lend itself to being Shatnered. Recorded for Hallowe’en, 1983.

Want hardcore Shatner? Of course you do. Via Nerdcore.