All over the shop

Brendan O'Neill has written one of the most ridiculous blogs I've read in some time on today's Guardian Comment is Free site.

As a way of background, Brendan is a member of the deeply suspect Living Marxism sect details of which can be found here, here and here.

Brendan today writes about the cancellation of a concert in Brighton, UK due to be performed by the Jamaican reggae artist Buju Banton. This has given Brendan an excuse, like he ever needs one, to rant and rave against the liberal left which he claims is hypocritical and racist.

The reason the gig was cancelled was because of protests from gay rights groups about the hateful anti-gay lyrics that are contained in Banton's work (and in many songs performed by Jamaican performers.) These aren't just anti-gay but actually encourage people to go out and harm homosexuals. Banton himself was charged in 2005 with gay bashing (and acquitted after a botched police investigation).

Now, we can have a debate about how far free speech should be extended and whether people like Banton have a right to air such views in a public concert. That's a fine debate to have.

But Brendan, being Brendan, can't help using the whole episode as an excuse to attack the liberal left. According to him the real reason white liberal (for some reason he associates liberalism with being white) people wish to see these performances stop is because they are racist. They believe that young black music fans are 'a potentially excitable horde whose access to inflammatory material must be restricted by the authorities.'

It is interesting to see how Brendan is injecting a racial element to this when he has absolutely no evidence at all to suggest it is true - all that is guiding him is his pathological hatred of the liberal left. In fact I think this theory exposes his own ingrained prejudices towards black people. This has nothing to do with the fact that the reggae scene is 'black', if these songs were bought by exclusively white people there would still be a valid argument made by the 'liberal left' against them.

The really ridiculous thing about his article though is that he tries to draw a parallel between the left's attempt to clamp down on anti-gay performers and their opposition to religious hatred laws. The two things though are not comparable and Brendan knows it full well. He states that liberals like Rowan Atkinson and Joan Bakewell were against the religious hatred laws - and yes they were. They were concerned, rightly in my opinion, that the law would prevent people from insulting someone's religious beliefs or mocking them. None of the terms in the shoddy bill were defined and so it had the real potential to end free religious debate in the UK. There are a couple of important points to make here:

1) There is no contradiction at all between wanting to prevent a law that may have criminalised valid criticism and comic parody of religion and wanting to clamp down on entertainers that espouse the murder of gays. If a singer produced songs that advocated the killing of Muslims then I somehow doubt that the 'liberal left' would be rallying to their defence. The point is that it's fine for people to criticize homosexuals but when they start to incite hatred and violence towards them it really is on a different level. The liberal argument against the Religious Hatred bill wasn't that it sought to criminalize inciting hatred but because it was an attempt to prevent critical discourse about religious belief. The Religious Hatred bill sought to criminalize 'insulting' religion - the term 'insulting' was left undefined. The liberal objectors to the bill did make clear that if this was removed and the bill was more tightly drafted to just cover incitement to hatred and violence against religious people then this would have been acceptable. Banton has expressed the desire to douse gays in acid, that's not an 'insult', that's threatening behaviour and incitement to violence which is illegal in all decent societies.

2) How does Brendan know that just because the likes of Rowan Atkinson and Joan Bakewell protested against the religious hatred laws that they are also for preventing homophobic reggae singers performing in the UK? Has he asked them? Or is he just stupidly suggesting that all liberal people have exactly the same views on each subject?

I had no firm opinion on whether these performers should be banned from performing in public. Then I thought about if a singer was due to perform in a concert in which they advocated killing all black people or dousing Jews in acid . Would they be banned from performing public concerts? Of course they would and I would agree with such a decision. Why is vitriol against gays deemed less bad?

No country in the world has pure free speech. The debate to be had is how free the speech should be - that's a debate worth having. I think that Western countries probably have it about right. But Brendan is not seriously interested in having this debate. He is only interested in creating straw man arguments so he can rant about the 'liberal left'.

What a cunt.

MP in nightclub shocker!

South Australian Democrat MP Sandra Kank did a remarkable thing recently. Rather than believe the fountain of lies and distortion regarding the nightclub scene, she thought she'd go along and take a look at it herself. Rather than seeing ghoulish drug fucked freaks trying to murder & rape people whilst simultaneously trying not to collapse from double dropping she saw a bunch of people having fun and dancing to music (although the former scene is of course seen at hard house clubs across the world on a weekly basis). She said she learned that 'there are a lot of happy people [at dance parties]' and that if she had the choice of going to the pub or going to a club she'd 'go to the rave party every time'. Brilliant!

Of course this small slice of reality about drug use in the political world went down like Grossi in an Australian penalty area and the South Australian health minister John Hill said 'if people want to know about the impacts drugs have they should go to some of our emergency departments Saturday nights and they should go to mental health institutions as well'. I'm sure if she had visited a hospital her assertion about preferring clubs to pubs would have been confirmed as there would have been many many more people there seeking treatment for alcohol related injuries/diseases than there would be people affected by drug usage.

In fairness the Education Minister did sound more sympathetic to the MPs adventure saying ' I think it's always a good idea to find out what it's actually about and get the facts'. Indeed.

If only more MPs were prepared to do this. I can see it now. Peter Costello up on the podium, shirt ripped off, reaching for the lasers. Little Johnnie Hunt scurrying around trying to score some drugs. Tony Abbott gurning at the front waving his glowsticks around. Maybe even Amanda Vanstone could be there - the fat girl that is a bit *too* sweaty and that everyone avoids standing next to on the dancefloor. Ah, just imagine....

More World Cup Post Mortem

Simon Hattenstone writes an excellent piece about the World Cup in today's Guardian blog.

He writes that he knows he should be getting over it but he can't. I feel much the same way, Simon. I'm still thinking about it about every 45 minutes which is an improvement on Sunday (every minute) and yesterday (every 30 minutes). Soon it'll be down to hourly and then daily before tapering off when it will be mainly forgotten until Euro 2008.

He also writes about some of the tabloid headlines regarding Sven's departure:

They [British Tabloids] might be bilious, intrusive, venal gratuitous soul-suckers, but they sure as hell know how to reflect the national mood. My favourite headline of recent days: Goodbye tosser: end of an error - Sven's reign of shame. You're probably looking for the clever pun on "tosser", but I think you'll find it isn't there - this is pure abuse. My theory is that the Sun ultimately settled on "Goodbye tosser" because "Fuck off wanker" - if you'll pardon my French - didn't fit. The Mirror opted for the more subdued He banked, he bonked, he ballsed it up. It took me back to the glory days: It's Swedes 2 - turnips 1 (News of the World, 1998).

Great stuff!

The Beeb doing what the beeb does best

Oh how I've missed the BBC coverage of this world cup. I'm sure I'd have been sobbing (like I did at World Cup 1998) if I had seen this just after the match had finished on Saturday.



HT: Andrew Sullivan

Revolting!

The moral outrage over the Big Brother 'incident' is getting louder and louder.

Little Johnnie Hunt has joined the chorus of 'middle Australia' and has called for the program to be axed. Of course a man who lied about refugees throwing their children off boats knows all about upholding fine moral standards.

Yes, the incident (rather amusingly known as 'Turkey Slapping') was unpleasant but the Big Brother producers took the right action and evicted the boys involved. What else were they meant to do? No criminal charges are being laid on the boys and Camilla herself has said that it was just a joke that got a little out of control and as soon as she asked them to stop, they did. I'm not trying to excuse what they did but let's not blow this out of proportion eh?

The best quote so far comes from Queensland Premier Peter Beattie when asked if he believed the program should be taken off air:

'Look, we have so much American crap on our television I think a bit of Australian nonsense doesn't do any harm, frankly.'

Quite.

The Age

The Age's inferiority complex regarding AFL reaches new heights of ridiculousness in this front page article.

A few days ago the Age were printing 5am specials celebrating Australia's wins in the 'soccer' world cup now they are doing the very predictable 'we only watched it because there was no AFL on' rubbish.

Just because football is the most popular and most watched sport in the world does not mean the tiny niche sport of AFL is threatened. They can both co-exist perfectly well, even in Melbourne. Articles as pathetic as this only show up the inherent insecurity of the AFL journalists of the Melbourne press - as does the name of the mini site on which this article is hosted, 'realfooty.com' and indeed the headline of the article itself: "'our' football returns".

63,000 people turned up to watch Collingwood V Richmond on the weekend. The sport is very popular (in Melbourne) and deservedly so - it has a rich history and is followed passionately by millions. About that number stayed up till 3am and braved the cold to watch Australia V Italy on big screens across Australia. Just because one is hogging the headlines does not mean the other is 'threatened'. We all know that Melburnians love their footy, we've been told a billion times. Enough already.

England are out.

ARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

No more. Not again. Not like this.

Against my better judgment I was cautiously optimistic – Portugal didn’t look that great, they had key players missing and Rooney was getting into his stride for England. All of the teams left in the tournament looked beatable. It was possible, I hoped. And as I said in my previous blog, it’s always the hope that kills you – and killing me it is.

I’m sure everything that needs to be said about the game has been said – England put in a ‘gutsy’ passionate performance that ‘deserved’ a goal whilst the Portuguese played a cynical, underhand and negative game to force a penalty shoot out. Whilst that’s the favoured view no doubt of the News of the World etc it does hide the severe shortcomings of England’s failure at the World Cup.

England were utterly woeful in their first 4 matches and won purely due to the poor opposition. The first good team they came up against held them at bay with relative ease and once it went to penalties they had no chance of winning it. It’s clear that we are never going to win a penalty shoot out again (unless it’s against Spain!) and so I hope that if McClaren ever finds himself in a situation where England are 10 minutes away from going to a penalty shoot out he throws caution to the wind and changes things so that England really try and win in extra time. Don’t bring on a defender to take penalties, as Sven did with Carragher, bring on two more strikers and try and win the game before it gets to the dreaded 12 yard kicks.

But England didn’t go out of this World Cup due to our inability to take penalties. We went out because our supremely talented players were utterly mismanaged by a man who was making it up as he went along. He deserves the blame for this debacle and the FA should be ashamed that he has collected £25million and has simply not delivered – nowhere near.

I felt very deflated after the match but the grimness of it all only really sank in when I woke up, slightly hungover, the next day. My brain appeared to have been replaced by an internal DVD player which was stuck on a loop replaying the missed penalty kicks over and over and over again. I literally thought of nothing else all day. I felt numb and physically sick at times. Of course I spent the day trying to take my mind off it by pouring over every single word written about it in the English press. The post mortem of the game. The Wife kept telling me to stop but I couldn’t – it’s all part of the mourning process, it’s a necessary catharsis.

Today I’m feeling a bit better but it’s still there, painful, right in the guts. The pain will dull over the next few weeks of course and I can start looking forward to it happening all over again in Switzerland & Austria in 2008. That’s if we get there of course and with McClaren in charge that’s by no means certain.

These are dark days for an English football fan. The Sunday Express summed it up in their simple front page headline:

‘It’s the end of the world.’