Dangerous & Lazy

Now that Hillary Clinton has announced her candidacy:

The Democrats will, with the 2008 election of Hillary Clinton as President, finally succeed in their long-term goal of bringing real, live communism permanently, irrevocably, to our shores.

“If only,” you’re saying. Read more↴

The Guardian last week saw some particularly high-quality entries in the competition to write the stupidest thing possible about religion. Tobias Jones is terrified of “totalitarian” Richard Dawkins, who is apparently poised to carry out a genocide of religious believers. A. C. Grayling fights back, accusing homophobic protestors of “an obscenity against human rights” (whatever that means), and a desire to institute widespread torture. Grayling loses in the “who’s the stupidest” stakes because the particular religious people he is incoherently attacking are indeed bastards; but Jones does say one thing that is slightly suprising and might be worth a bit more comment: Read more↴

1. Jade Goody’s apparent support for Fatah on Celebrity Big Brother.
2. The This Life special nostalgically reviving lazy mid-90s reflexive “irony” (Egg has written a book! Little does he know he is just a character himself!).
3. The current state of British dance music, as filtered through ads for compilations. A surprisingly high concentration of Happy Hardcore (is this just a north of England thing?), and a remix of “Another Brick in the Wall.” Genius.

I’m not so keen on the fact that ITV and the producers of Dead Clever seem to think it’s OK to structure your plot around classic 1950s cliche, “Lesbian, driven mad by her disordered, unnatural lusts, turns to murder.”

And, an early contender for post of the year: an extraordinarily insightful discussion of the recent case of a disabled girl being medically kept permanently at the age of nine.

I never really paid much attention to how I read things when I was an undergraduate; rather, I picked up the strange form of telepathy practiced by analytic philosophers, where the text is merely some kind of mediating fetish object in the transfer of ideas from mind to mind (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Then I got beaten about the head by Quentin Skinner (figuratively; he’s actually a perfect gentleman, of course), and encouraged to think about how to read as it were self-consciously, paying attention to what it might mean that certain words and turns of phrase were chosen instead of others. But what I’d really like is to learn how to misread. Read more↴

I’ve been reading Dorothy L. Sayers’s Murder Must Advertise. Above all, it makes me want to live in the twenties, when it would have been possible to call oneself a “Bolshevist,” but it is a fine book for many reasons, including this description of early Fordism: Read more↴