Little Richardjohn - 1043rd post - 26 May 2005 12:41
Or maybe good value for money? Does it include some form of guarantee? After all, they say in a few years we'll be able to live forever, so why not go the whole hog, charge a grand and throw in immortality as part of the deal? Amalgamate the Pensions and Insurance industry into a vast FutureCare System for those who can afford it, who would presumably EAT those who couldn't.
Makes as much sense as expecting people to Pay to Be.
re: £100 TO EXIST? - ON YER BIKE public enemy #2 M - 102nd post - 26 May 2005 12:49
Hi Little Richardjohn, If you think about it in another way, most people pay income, NI and council tax, that's kind of payment to exist/be already! [reply] [Complain about this post]
re: £100 TO EXIST? - ON YER BIKE Little Richardjohn - 1044th post - 26 May 2005 12:55
Or looking at it yet another way, this is just another rip-off designed to make the government look tough. It's sunk. As soon as people realise the cost, it's over.
Now if they were to simply combine the ID idea with the BBC licence fee...
NOW you're talking. [reply] [Complain about this post]
re: £100 TO EXIST? - ON YER BIKE frankacne - 150th post - 26 May 2005 14:48
Yes i agree, as a radio listener without a TV i long ago realised when i got blizzards of paper from the TV licensing authority that not owning a TV at all was obviously (at least to them) an indication of covert Terrorist, drug-pushing, money-laundering activity. presumably the Bill will soon be stopping me and asking to see my TV license, woe onto me if i cannot produce it. [reply] [Complain about this post]
re: £100 TO EXIST? - ON YER BIKE Little Richardjohn - 1054th post - 26 May 2005 16:17
I can see the slogan: 'What's Good For Me Is Good For The BBC. Get An Identity!'
possibly chanted by some dreary hip hop band from cheltenham.
Football-commentator ironic that the organisation which has been the British collective Identity for the past 50 years should become the badge of individual identity.
Appropriate enough. [reply] [Complain about this post]
re: £100 TO EXIST? - ON YER BIKE Don Glen - 3087th post - 26 May 2005 16:45
You've got a point there,L.R. I have no particular objection to carrying an identity card; it's just one more of a number of similar documentation that the average Joe carries already. But I DO object to paying £100 for the privilege, and I will NOT voluntarily pay this fee. Unfortunately, the draft legislation provides for a fine of up to £2500 for failure to obtain a card, when they eventually become compulsory. You can't win!! [reply] [Complain about this post]
5/28/2005
BBC PSEUDO SCIENCE
Professor Spivey's 'Art On Earth' or whatever it was called.
Little Richardjohn - 11:07pm May 13, 2005 BST (#1 of 12) Delete
Another tedious professor 'marvelling' at the wonders of the ancient world and telling us how stupid we are because obviously we can never recreate their glories.
'There's nothing new under the sun', and what there is was created by singular great minds thousands of years ago under conditions of extreme patronage.
Yet another cavalcade of kings and demigods with no context and no purpose.
This was trivialising on a massive scale, including half-baked scientific theories swallowed whole (talk about penguins) and the statement 'This is the greatest piece of sculpture ever.'Which is one of the silliest critical pronouncements ever made. We weren't told what the official second best is, or how many 'point' it was beaten by.
Sadly, this is no departure for the BBC's cultural output these days. All great art is the work of great minds who were ingherently superior to the rest of us and who we all follow slavishly and owe our every insight to. Everything worthwhile comes down from the top.
Nothing is given historical presence, and every myth is taken at face value. It is a stultifyingly elitist view of human creativity which the Pharoahs themselves would have approved.
The BBC should be ashamed of itself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 09:51am May 14, 2005 BST (#2 of 12)
I was only sort of half-watching it whilst doing something at the computer.
I enjoyed the special fx but I suppose it was me enjoying it as chewing gum for the eyes.
I haven't been keeping up with TV shcedules so much lately (unusual for me) and I think if I had known of its impending arrival and I had been given to understand it was the new Civilisation or something I would probably thought it was a load of shallow guff.
But happening to see it by accident I was quite taken by the snippets I saw.
Of course, if you're saying it's inaccuarte, then I'm not educated enough to know I was being misinformed and that would be a different matter.
I'd definitely consider writing to the programme makers if you feel so strongly.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 11:49am May 14, 2005 BST (#3 of 12) Delete
It's not a question of historical accuracy or scholarship, but merely the poverty of the BBC's 'Pageant of Hisatory' approach. Henry XV111th for instance, single-handedly changed Britain forever. Without his personal intervention, we wouldn't have Nectar points, the Curly-Wurly or the rotary can opener.
And then we have the bleedin Pharoahs. A master race so sure of their theology that they put burglar alarms on their graves. They invented everything. Without them, we wouldn't have henry, and so it goes. Nothing we do now makes any difference, so why do anything? It is a totally reactionary agenda, and fit only for the nursery.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 12:29pm May 14, 2005 BST (#4 of 12)
My immediate thought is that without that kind of shorthand they programme would get too bogged down.
How would you resolve that problem?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 02:57pm May 15, 2005 BST (#5 of 12) Delete
Bronowski done it. Why not this bunch of Culture-Lite chinless wonders?
A new Bronowski, with his dedication to material causation is what we need.
They bung his series out occasionally at four in the morning on the OU. They're ashamed of it. It shows up their glaring failure.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 05:42pm May 19, 2005 BST (#6 of 12)
I watched the other episode with the flashing goggles etc. What a load of old bollocks.
If you wrote down the information content (ie, saw the script) the amount of factual content you're asked to digest is negligible, isn't it?
There was a ludicrous ten minutes or so where he starts by saying:
"So, why was it, after being obsessed with images for thousands of years, man forgot them...?"
He then prattles on pointlessly for 8 minutes, to conclude:
"So, in fact, man *didn't* forget images at all."
WELL NOBODY BUT YOU SAID THEY HAD YOU CUNT! I WASN'T SITTING HERE THINKING THEY HAD! UNTIL YOU SAID THEY HAD! NOW YOU'RE SAYING THEY HADN'T! FUCK OFF YOU MIND-FUCKING FUCK!
So, I agree. The programme is pants.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 08:33pm May 19, 2005 BST (#7 of 12) Delete
This is the worst documentary programme ever made.
Possibly the worst programme of any kind.
Not only scores a pencil-in-the-eye rating for being patronizing, but it insists that everything - all human civilisation - is the result of religious devotion and its marketing machine.
It's an outrageous bit of opportunism riding on religious hysteria.
Priests invented agriculture - to feed the faithful temple builders slaving away devotedly in the blazing sun?!
I mean, you would, wouldn't you.
"Some kind of scene happenning over in the mountains, they want us to salve away most of our adult lives on some big stones, fancy? Leave the family, it's this new thing - 'holy' they said. All the rage now apparently. So the family will be taken care of, they said. What'll we eat? They say they're working on something, bits of grass, something.
Look, you've eaten grass before... I know you're not a goat. Look do you fancy it or not, they say there'll be nekkid women. Tommorrow then? Your donkey or mine?"
It is SUCH bollox it goes right off the meter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 02:20am May 20, 2005 BST (#8 of 12)
And there's a problem, on all channels, with programmes that go into history where it is difficult to show (in the strict visual sense) what is being conveyed in the narration.
So, you get these hour long documentaries, with very thin content and - due to a low budget - you have a blurred handycam shot of a spinning chariot wheel cut in every 5 minutes.
Or the same forlorn actor hoves into view, charging with a sword every time a bit of aggression is mentioned.
Rostrum cameras pan slowly over candle-lit parchment - probably not an actual bit of parchment saying anything actually involved with what the narrator is saying, but who will know? It fills up the screen 'n' looks luvverly, dunnit?
So, yeah, I agree with your exasperation, though I'm probably not wise enough to identify this feudal seam you've found them mining.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 04:23pm May 20, 2005 BST (#9 of 12) Delete
Yup. It's big, it's ugly, it's flashy, it's still here - must be a temple.
Pathetic.
Well I say the stone circles in Turkey are the remains of the first Lap-dancing joint.
Why? Because they are. The Spiv doesn't offer much more evidence than that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Zozimus - 01:49am May 28, 2005 BST (#10 of 12)
It's poor. There should be a health warning on the screen at all times during the transmission of tendentious programs like these. It's what they do when reports from partisan sources are labelled "so-and-so propaganda film" in one corner of the screen.
Bronowski's series was superb. When it was first shown it filled our conversations and each episode was watched with fascination and respect. But maybe no art can be sustained at the highest level continuously, and if there are bound to be mediocrities then here they all come, like buses in convoy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 12:23pm May 28, 2005 BST (#11 of 12) Delete
Remember the scene in Ascent where the nomadic tribe leave the old man behind to die because he was too old to ford the river that year?
Meanwhile, the adolescent boys are undergoing a Rite of Passsage by fording the river for the first time unaided.
With the old man watching from the bank, knowing he is going to die.
Now THAT'S TV.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Zozimus - 04:50pm May 28, 2005 BST (#12 of 12)
Yes, and Bronowski on his knees in the mud of Auschwitz, grappling with the mud in his hands and quoting, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.'
Little Richardjohn - 11:07pm May 13, 2005 BST (#1 of 12) Delete
Another tedious professor 'marvelling' at the wonders of the ancient world and telling us how stupid we are because obviously we can never recreate their glories.
'There's nothing new under the sun', and what there is was created by singular great minds thousands of years ago under conditions of extreme patronage.
"Once when midnight smote the airNot a word about the scientific, economic and climatic conditions that fed into the art of the past. The need to exaggerate, it seems, is 'hard-wired, because we are just penguins with thumbs, and that accounts for our need to express ourselves visually.
And eunuchs ran through Hell and met
On every crowded street to stare
Upon Great Juan riding by;
Even like these to rail and sweat,
Staring upon his sinewy thigh."
Yet another cavalcade of kings and demigods with no context and no purpose.
This was trivialising on a massive scale, including half-baked scientific theories swallowed whole (talk about penguins) and the statement 'This is the greatest piece of sculpture ever.'Which is one of the silliest critical pronouncements ever made. We weren't told what the official second best is, or how many 'point' it was beaten by.
Sadly, this is no departure for the BBC's cultural output these days. All great art is the work of great minds who were ingherently superior to the rest of us and who we all follow slavishly and owe our every insight to. Everything worthwhile comes down from the top.
Nothing is given historical presence, and every myth is taken at face value. It is a stultifyingly elitist view of human creativity which the Pharoahs themselves would have approved.
The BBC should be ashamed of itself.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 09:51am May 14, 2005 BST (#2 of 12)
I was only sort of half-watching it whilst doing something at the computer.
I enjoyed the special fx but I suppose it was me enjoying it as chewing gum for the eyes.
I haven't been keeping up with TV shcedules so much lately (unusual for me) and I think if I had known of its impending arrival and I had been given to understand it was the new Civilisation or something I would probably thought it was a load of shallow guff.
But happening to see it by accident I was quite taken by the snippets I saw.
Of course, if you're saying it's inaccuarte, then I'm not educated enough to know I was being misinformed and that would be a different matter.
I'd definitely consider writing to the programme makers if you feel so strongly.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 11:49am May 14, 2005 BST (#3 of 12) Delete
It's not a question of historical accuracy or scholarship, but merely the poverty of the BBC's 'Pageant of Hisatory' approach. Henry XV111th for instance, single-handedly changed Britain forever. Without his personal intervention, we wouldn't have Nectar points, the Curly-Wurly or the rotary can opener.
And then we have the bleedin Pharoahs. A master race so sure of their theology that they put burglar alarms on their graves. They invented everything. Without them, we wouldn't have henry, and so it goes. Nothing we do now makes any difference, so why do anything? It is a totally reactionary agenda, and fit only for the nursery.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 12:29pm May 14, 2005 BST (#4 of 12)
My immediate thought is that without that kind of shorthand they programme would get too bogged down.
How would you resolve that problem?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 02:57pm May 15, 2005 BST (#5 of 12) Delete
Bronowski done it. Why not this bunch of Culture-Lite chinless wonders?
A new Bronowski, with his dedication to material causation is what we need.
They bung his series out occasionally at four in the morning on the OU. They're ashamed of it. It shows up their glaring failure.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 05:42pm May 19, 2005 BST (#6 of 12)
I watched the other episode with the flashing goggles etc. What a load of old bollocks.
If you wrote down the information content (ie, saw the script) the amount of factual content you're asked to digest is negligible, isn't it?
There was a ludicrous ten minutes or so where he starts by saying:
"So, why was it, after being obsessed with images for thousands of years, man forgot them...?"
He then prattles on pointlessly for 8 minutes, to conclude:
"So, in fact, man *didn't* forget images at all."
WELL NOBODY BUT YOU SAID THEY HAD YOU CUNT! I WASN'T SITTING HERE THINKING THEY HAD! UNTIL YOU SAID THEY HAD! NOW YOU'RE SAYING THEY HADN'T! FUCK OFF YOU MIND-FUCKING FUCK!
So, I agree. The programme is pants.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 08:33pm May 19, 2005 BST (#7 of 12) Delete
This is the worst documentary programme ever made.
Possibly the worst programme of any kind.
Not only scores a pencil-in-the-eye rating for being patronizing, but it insists that everything - all human civilisation - is the result of religious devotion and its marketing machine.
It's an outrageous bit of opportunism riding on religious hysteria.
Priests invented agriculture - to feed the faithful temple builders slaving away devotedly in the blazing sun?!
I mean, you would, wouldn't you.
"Some kind of scene happenning over in the mountains, they want us to salve away most of our adult lives on some big stones, fancy? Leave the family, it's this new thing - 'holy' they said. All the rage now apparently. So the family will be taken care of, they said. What'll we eat? They say they're working on something, bits of grass, something.
Look, you've eaten grass before... I know you're not a goat. Look do you fancy it or not, they say there'll be nekkid women. Tommorrow then? Your donkey or mine?"
It is SUCH bollox it goes right off the meter.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------xbodnotbodx - 02:20am May 20, 2005 BST (#8 of 12)
And there's a problem, on all channels, with programmes that go into history where it is difficult to show (in the strict visual sense) what is being conveyed in the narration.
So, you get these hour long documentaries, with very thin content and - due to a low budget - you have a blurred handycam shot of a spinning chariot wheel cut in every 5 minutes.
Or the same forlorn actor hoves into view, charging with a sword every time a bit of aggression is mentioned.
Rostrum cameras pan slowly over candle-lit parchment - probably not an actual bit of parchment saying anything actually involved with what the narrator is saying, but who will know? It fills up the screen 'n' looks luvverly, dunnit?
So, yeah, I agree with your exasperation, though I'm probably not wise enough to identify this feudal seam you've found them mining.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 04:23pm May 20, 2005 BST (#9 of 12) Delete
Yup. It's big, it's ugly, it's flashy, it's still here - must be a temple.
Pathetic.
Well I say the stone circles in Turkey are the remains of the first Lap-dancing joint.
Why? Because they are. The Spiv doesn't offer much more evidence than that.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Zozimus - 01:49am May 28, 2005 BST (#10 of 12)
It's poor. There should be a health warning on the screen at all times during the transmission of tendentious programs like these. It's what they do when reports from partisan sources are labelled "so-and-so propaganda film" in one corner of the screen.
Bronowski's series was superb. When it was first shown it filled our conversations and each episode was watched with fascination and respect. But maybe no art can be sustained at the highest level continuously, and if there are bound to be mediocrities then here they all come, like buses in convoy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 12:23pm May 28, 2005 BST (#11 of 12) Delete
Remember the scene in Ascent where the nomadic tribe leave the old man behind to die because he was too old to ford the river that year?
Meanwhile, the adolescent boys are undergoing a Rite of Passsage by fording the river for the first time unaided.
With the old man watching from the bank, knowing he is going to die.
Now THAT'S TV.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Zozimus - 04:50pm May 28, 2005 BST (#12 of 12)
Yes, and Bronowski on his knees in the mud of Auschwitz, grappling with the mud in his hands and quoting, 'I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken.'
ORWELL RECLAMATION STAGE 1
To try to understand Orwell's relevance today, you have to 'factor in' the way the world HAS changed since he died. what he didn't know.
How does 1984 read through the filter of global warming, and globalisation in general?
Orwell was a proto-green, without any mistake. He just didn't know the science. As very few did then. And his ability to visualise the total destruction of life was limited by his economic and political background. The hardship of life under collective oligarchism never did really happen, after all.
But in spite of these shortcomings, his predictions about the psychological distortions of modern life are generally accurate.
Modern states are giant Lie-Factories. The 'Party members' of corporate consumerism (the 'stakeholders') do have to be able to deny self-evident truths and forget them or remember them on request. (technological truths Vs religious certainty in the Bush adninnystration)
Truth is constantly manipulated as never before. We are drugged and controlled with hero-worship and exhibitions of collective sadism - see any Hollywood film - 'No Orchids for Miss Blandish'?
People are disappearing in the night and being reduced to jibbering wrecks who will confess anything - and believe it.
An interesting case study would be between Orwell's final vision and the early formative texts of al Qutb, founder of modern militant Islam.
The 2 visions of a robotic race, descended into a sub-human state by the machinations of a rapacious, power-mad autocracy are - amusing.
Orwell, though, provides a counter - vision (Lion & The Unicorn and every line he wrote). And whatever label you care to give it, the one thing that is clear from his writings is that it is not simply a matter of ideology, but culture, and must therefore be local in character. Any attempt to impose an incompatible set of cultural values on the British (at least) was doomed to fail.
And the second thing - 2 things, the second of the two things that are clear is that socialism is not the easy option. But given that the consumer capitalism means oblivion, it's likely that Orwell would have been as much of a socialist now as then.
His job was to uncover the Britishness at the core of socialism. To dig that truth out from under the dungheap of two centuries of abomination by the "dividend drawers" and streamlined oligarchs of monopoly capitalism.
Which is why the Right has always tried to hijack him. He is their logical key target. To make us believe that Orwell was a staunch defender of free-market capitalism would be the ultimate act of doublethink.
But then, you have to consider what sort of book lies within 1984, written by someone not suffering from a desperately depressing, debilitating disease.
There are hints of his disease in the book, after all. The 'Golden Country' does come across as someone reliving his childhood in a fever.
Orwell knew he could have written a better book healthy. Would it have been as powerful a message?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------eibeinaka - 07:16pm May 27, 2005 BST (#161 of 164)
"Orwell was a proto-green, without any mistake."
One of the most memorable things he ever wrote was an essay explaining why an inexpensive packet of flower seeds was the most glorious investment he'd ever made.
'An interesting case study would be between Orwell's final vision and the early formative texts of Qutb.'
Orwell knew he could have written a better book healthy. Would it have been as powerful a message?
It's an interesting argument. Would the book have been as grimly dystopian? When one considers how needle sharp his essays of earlier times are, a more biting savage humorous edge might have been achieved, which would have changed the character of the book.
I'll have to look in the collected letters again, but I seem to recall that he describes experimenting a bit with the tone of te book, when he first tells his correspondents the shape of what he's writing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 07:29pm May 27, 2005 BST (#162 of 164) Delete But maybe he wouldn't have seen the terrible possibilities of global oligarchy. Maybe we needed him to have been depressed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------cappamore - 11:24pm May 27, 2005 BST (#163 of 164)
Orwell was incredibly visionary but equally visionary were Aldous Huxley ("Brave New World") and H.G. Wells ("War of the Worlds.") They all depict a future that is chilling and, I fear, true. Science fiction has gone out of fashion these days. I wonder if that is because publishers are less willing to publish the truth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 11:44pm May 27, 2005 BST (#164 of 164) Delete
I blame the more metaphysical tendencies of Quantum Mechanics for that.
Something which, inevitably, O'Brien brags about in room 101.
There are many futurologists whose predictions were proved more materially accurate. (I daresay) but I don't know of any who examined the psychology so thoroughly and communicated it so compellingly. Until perhaps Heller, that is.
Catch 22 and doublethink are almost twins. In fact, 'Catch22' is a depiction of a totalitarian state executed by someone with enough leisure and comfort to be able to use humour to make the terror seem worse.
Orwell was never in a position to write a book like that.
Does anyone have any Heller quotes on Orwell?
How does 1984 read through the filter of global warming, and globalisation in general?
Orwell was a proto-green, without any mistake. He just didn't know the science. As very few did then. And his ability to visualise the total destruction of life was limited by his economic and political background. The hardship of life under collective oligarchism never did really happen, after all.
But in spite of these shortcomings, his predictions about the psychological distortions of modern life are generally accurate.
Modern states are giant Lie-Factories. The 'Party members' of corporate consumerism (the 'stakeholders') do have to be able to deny self-evident truths and forget them or remember them on request. (technological truths Vs religious certainty in the Bush adninnystration)
Truth is constantly manipulated as never before. We are drugged and controlled with hero-worship and exhibitions of collective sadism - see any Hollywood film - 'No Orchids for Miss Blandish'?
People are disappearing in the night and being reduced to jibbering wrecks who will confess anything - and believe it.
An interesting case study would be between Orwell's final vision and the early formative texts of al Qutb, founder of modern militant Islam.
The 2 visions of a robotic race, descended into a sub-human state by the machinations of a rapacious, power-mad autocracy are - amusing.
Orwell, though, provides a counter - vision (Lion & The Unicorn and every line he wrote). And whatever label you care to give it, the one thing that is clear from his writings is that it is not simply a matter of ideology, but culture, and must therefore be local in character. Any attempt to impose an incompatible set of cultural values on the British (at least) was doomed to fail.
And the second thing - 2 things, the second of the two things that are clear is that socialism is not the easy option. But given that the consumer capitalism means oblivion, it's likely that Orwell would have been as much of a socialist now as then.
His job was to uncover the Britishness at the core of socialism. To dig that truth out from under the dungheap of two centuries of abomination by the "dividend drawers" and streamlined oligarchs of monopoly capitalism.
Which is why the Right has always tried to hijack him. He is their logical key target. To make us believe that Orwell was a staunch defender of free-market capitalism would be the ultimate act of doublethink.
But then, you have to consider what sort of book lies within 1984, written by someone not suffering from a desperately depressing, debilitating disease.
There are hints of his disease in the book, after all. The 'Golden Country' does come across as someone reliving his childhood in a fever.
Orwell knew he could have written a better book healthy. Would it have been as powerful a message?
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------eibeinaka - 07:16pm May 27, 2005 BST (#161 of 164)
"Orwell was a proto-green, without any mistake."
One of the most memorable things he ever wrote was an essay explaining why an inexpensive packet of flower seeds was the most glorious investment he'd ever made.
'An interesting case study would be between Orwell's final vision and the early formative texts of Qutb.'
Orwell knew he could have written a better book healthy. Would it have been as powerful a message?
It's an interesting argument. Would the book have been as grimly dystopian? When one considers how needle sharp his essays of earlier times are, a more biting savage humorous edge might have been achieved, which would have changed the character of the book.
I'll have to look in the collected letters again, but I seem to recall that he describes experimenting a bit with the tone of te book, when he first tells his correspondents the shape of what he's writing.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 07:29pm May 27, 2005 BST (#162 of 164) Delete But maybe he wouldn't have seen the terrible possibilities of global oligarchy. Maybe we needed him to have been depressed.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------cappamore - 11:24pm May 27, 2005 BST (#163 of 164)
Orwell was incredibly visionary but equally visionary were Aldous Huxley ("Brave New World") and H.G. Wells ("War of the Worlds.") They all depict a future that is chilling and, I fear, true. Science fiction has gone out of fashion these days. I wonder if that is because publishers are less willing to publish the truth.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------Little Richardjohn - 11:44pm May 27, 2005 BST (#164 of 164) Delete
I blame the more metaphysical tendencies of Quantum Mechanics for that.
Something which, inevitably, O'Brien brags about in room 101.
There are many futurologists whose predictions were proved more materially accurate. (I daresay) but I don't know of any who examined the psychology so thoroughly and communicated it so compellingly. Until perhaps Heller, that is.
Catch 22 and doublethink are almost twins. In fact, 'Catch22' is a depiction of a totalitarian state executed by someone with enough leisure and comfort to be able to use humour to make the terror seem worse.
Orwell was never in a position to write a book like that.
Does anyone have any Heller quotes on Orwell?
'Faith Crime' - We Asked For It.
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 838th post - 25 Feb 2005 13:56
Child exorcism is not an new thing. Until very recently it did go on in this country, and all over the 'civilised' world.
They are still unearthing the graves in some Catholic boarding schools.
Sorry, but this is not an issue which can be hitched up to another creaking call for forced repatriation. Neither is it a final confirmation that human beings can only coexist with other human beings who act and look the same. This is about the care of children.
And all religious faith abuses children. When it's not poisoning their minds, it's breaking their bodies. In fact, if it fails to do the first, it resorts to the latter. Our own glorious empire had a long tradition of beating the evil out of children.
In Victorian times, a child's life was cheap - as we all know. You only have to look at the gravestones of the time: 'Martha - Wife of the Above and two or three infants'. They didn't even bother to count them, let alone name them.
It's always the same in societies with a high infant mortality, and a correspondingly high birth rate. And when that culture is overlain with a world-beating monotheism like Christianity, it is easy for any local psychopath to assume the role of God and tell his flock to do what comes naturally.
And in a culture of conflict and harship, the thing that comes naturally is to inflict pain. Especially when your parents did exactly the same to you, because as we know, being beaten as a child NEVER does you any harm as an adult. The very idea.
All you're seeing in the Newsnight report was a return to - wait for it - 'Victorian Values'. I know a certain Baroness who's very happy with that state of afairs.
So in the short term, the only solution is a Scandinavian style ban on all smacking. They seem to be happy with it, what's wrong with us? Too far gone? Not a convenient notion to live harmoniously in the hang 'em and flog 'em and send 'em back where they came from brigade? A combination of both, probably.
In the long term, eradicating child abuse is about treating children as human beings, not property. But then we'd have to treat everyone as human beings, and that will surely be the end of civilisation as we know it.
It will be even worse than raising the minimum wage to £5.50 an hour, which will have us all murdered in our beds. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism David McD - 813th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:27
Mr Littlejohn,
"They are still unearthing the graves in some Catholic boarding schools". Perhaps you would like to give some examples.
"In Victorian times, a child's life was cheap..." If you had any knowledge of history, literature, medicine or Victorian engineering then you would know that nearly half of all children died their first year of life in the early Victorian area (generally much to the distress of their parents and siblings) but these figures were dramatically reduced during the Victorian era due to the advances in medical practice and sewage engineering, particularly the latter.
The programme concerned dealt exclusively with the practices brought in by recent immigrants from West Africa. The practises revealed had absolutely nothing in common with the Christian religion as practised in Britain or Western Europe.
If we import large third world minorities of unskilled uneducated people (why we should import them, many from countries that were never even British colonies, I cannot even begin to imagine) we should not be surprised if we also import their customs and their problems. The manner reported had absolutely nothing to do with the "reasonable chastisement" of children and this was quite obvious. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 840th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:23
"If you had any knowledge of history, literature, medicine or Victorian engineering then you would know that nearly half of all children died their first year of life in the early Victorian area "
Which is just what I went on to say: "It's always the same in societies with a high infant mortality, and a correspondingly high birth rate."
But the loss was NOT the dreadful loss you depict. It may have been among a sector of the genteel classes, generally, children were very very expendable, Any reading of virtually any relevant text of the period will confirm that. Your ignorance is stupendous, and totally baffling.
The Newsnight Report may have concerned itself with the practices of quasi Christian cults, but their attitude to children is not very different from the Victorian attitude, or that of any disciplinarian school until the mid fifties or so. Face up to it.
What we're seeing is our own past with a few exotic ribbons and feathers. And we are simply re-importing the message our Christian missionaries exported in the first place. By banning smacking, social services would be much more empowered to clamp down on these sects.
In general, the people attending them are law-abiding, so the culture would begin to change and with the natural increase in prosperity and education in the second generation, the ideological extremes would die out - as they have in every other immigrant wave with deeply ingrained world-views.
These practices are partly caused by persecution and alienation. By hijacking this issue and seeking to demonize an entire community, you are contributing to that hostility and playing into the hands of those ready and willing to exploit it. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism David McD - 814th post - 25 Feb 2005 16:26
Mr Richardjohn,
If you believe that only "a sector of the genteel classes" (whatever that may mean) mourned or cared for the death of their children then I fear you have little understanding of what it is to be a parent. Of course, when childbirth was common, people were more accustomed to it and recovered more quickly and, if poor, had to get on with their lives but that really does not mean that the great majority did not care.
To blame “Christian Missionaries” for the more violent and alarming cultural and tribal practices of some West African groups is a twist of post modernist thinking that leaves even me at a loss for words!
The second part of you post seems to imply, yet again, that to point out the problems of large numbers of unskilled, ill educated people, many from countries which have no historical relationship with the UK (and therefore no family ties etc.), is "racist". Well then, by your definition I am "racist" but so are the overwhelming majority of your fellow countrymen. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 842nd post - 25 Feb 2005 19:10
My countrymen? Who are they?
You have no understanding of what it was like to be a parent in the C19. Probably because you don't want to know.
When children are plentiful, they are are cheap, like anything else. The texts are just too numerous to refer to, even if I thought for a minute you'd pay any attention. Just Google yourself. It's not difficult. Failing that, read Jane Eyre or something similar.
Christian missionairies introduced monotheism and the concept of universal guilt. That is not reinventing history - that's your job. And with those constructs came the concept of universal power. That was a new thing to animists, whose dieties had previously been local and specialized.
The economic realities of the marketplace are inescapable. And their consequences for the mobility of labour and the role of the new labour market in a flexible social structure are unpleasant if you are an opponent of market forces, or on the recieving end of them.
Those priced out of jobs by new waves of immigration are always on the receiving end.
The whinge of those who oppose market forces is due to their being overtaken in the social scale by 'newcomers'. Well, they had their chance, and blew it.
The rule is, if you're still living in the slums when the new wave of immigrants move in, you haven't been trying hard enough, and deserve what you get. Ask Margaret Thatcher or Keith Joseph or anyone. After all, to her, riding on a bus after the age of 30 was a sign of a failed life. The sign that your bootstraps haven't been pulled hard enough.
Culturally, each new influx is the only positive side to the whole sordid bearpit. At least those influences, when blended with aspects of native culture, provide a degree of variety. But it's no use complaining when the child-care practices of our forefathers are served up to us a hundred years on.
And it's not as if those practices are dead in this country now. Until the morons stop screaming for blood every time a teenager steals a car radio, we have no moral high horse to ride.
All we can do is make bigotry and barbarism of all kinds less acceptable. And in practice that means squeezing all religions till the pips burst. It's time to put the old mare out of her misery. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism David McD - 819th post - 25 Feb 2005 20:31
RLJ,
"The rule is, if you're still living in the slums when the new wave of immigrants move in, you haven't been trying hard enough, and deserve what you get"
Thank you for so perfectly capturing your thought process and that of those who think like you. No wonder the abhorrent BNP grows and grows; a classic example of one evil philosophy feeding from another. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 845th post - 27 Feb 2005 17:31
Your thought processes – Unless I’ve become Thatcher overnight. Do read the post.
I know that the people who hate to have the rules of the market waved in their faces most are those who profess its' merits most loudly, but this is ridiculous.
Although the inability to detect irony is very typical.
The abhorrent BNP thrives on the rules of the marketplace. And your intolerance and ignorance and inability to acknowledge the sins of the British Empire, plus your yearning to return to those glorydays (irony again) only gives them more motivation.
It's therefore not unusual that you are unable to see the connection between labour costs and anti-immigrant feeling. Your economic system depends on cheap labour, and with that requirement come new populations and new cultures. You cannot escape that inevitability or the amorality of its consequences.
Instead you call for market forces to be flouted in a most uncharacteristically socialist manner, or you pretend it's a conspiracy against something called the 'British way of Life' which only you are allowed to define, and which always ends up being as racially pure as a Nuremburg Chorus Line.
And naturally, anyone who is able to invoke even a modicum of basic economic reality - your economic reality - is labelled EVIL. If I'm evil because I understand that the market is about making money and that it is not some kind of Sunday School Treat for the Poor of The Parish, then I'm guilty as charged. The genuine pathos is in the fact that you really do not know what is happening, and it is causing you so much pain.
The world must seem a supremely treacherous place when the wonderful Free Market, which is Nature's Friend and the Boon of Mankind - after all, Margaret Thatcher promised - turns round and bites you deeply in the gluteous Maximus.
That just wasn't supposed to happen.
Well. We tried to explain. But as usual when money is involved, you simply stuck your fingers in your ears and went La La La La - as you're doing now. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1154th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:17
Little Richardjohn
This is'nt about victorian values (whatever they might be) it's about ignorance and fear. People from central & west africa have to be educated, they have to be taught that juju, black magic and witchcraft dont exist exept in the mind of the frightened and ignorant parent listening to the local tower hamlets witch doctor.
Victoria Climbie was not murdered because her guardians simply felt like beating her, they thought thanks to the local witch doctor that the poor girl was possessed by evil spirits. This level of fear and ignorance is difficult for us (for me anyway) to understand, but understand we must and these people must be educated [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 839th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:05
This is'nt about victorian values (whatever they might be) it's about ignorance and fear.
Ignorance and Fear. As I said, Victorian values.
Education how? You're dealing with a culture which is self-isolating, and feels threatened anyway (boo-hoo) but more than that, is essentially criminal.
How many so-called churches are really just money-laundering operations for drug money we will never know for sure. But we'll never find out until churches are liable to the same fiscal scrutiny as other businesses.
If I was a succesful crack dealer, I would be looking for a nice respectable sideline, preferably dealing in voluntary donations of cash.
So we have to end tax breaks for all religions to drive out the criminals and open the cults up to the rest of society before we can hope to educate anyone. Otherwise any education will be treated as intrusion, and merely reinforce the spiral of insularity and abuse. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism trueblue - 207th post - 25 Feb 2005 13:57
I agree it is shocking. Would all those who believe in the multi-cultural society (which of course can never work) like to comment? Presuambly, this is okay as these people form a 'culture' or 'minority' or 'community' that has its own rights. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism peter fluck - 5073rd post - 25 Feb 2005 15:56
But yesterday, Mr Trueblue, you told us that your believe children may indeed be possessed by demons. I would have thought these muti obsessed Africans would have been people after your own heart? [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism trueblue - 207th post - 25 Feb 2005 13:58
I agree it is shocking. Would all those who believe in the multi-cultural society (which of course can never work) like to comment? Presuambly, this is okay as these people form a 'culture' or 'minority' or 'community' that has its own rights. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism the hidden paw - 1st post - 25 Feb 2005 14:14
This sort of behaviour is known in many religious sects - not only African ones. Jeanette Winterson, the author, wrote of her bleak Lancashire childhood in 'Oranges are not the only Fruit' and described a beating the central character got from the pastor of the local chapel for being gay. The beating was administered by people who 'loved' the girl and wanted her to be saved.
And doesn't the adage 'spare the rod and spoil the child' originate in Christianity?
There will always be some for whom evil spirits and beatings are a reality.
The police needs to gather intelligence about these practices, wherever they occur in this country, and to take appropriate action against those who would abuse their children through their mistaken beliefs. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1155th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:25
I agree, Paddy Doyle's "The God Squad" is a remakable true story of how he was shockingly treated by nuns in an "Industrial school" in 1950s Ireland. In Paddy Doyle's own words: The book is about society's abdication of responsibility to a child.
It's an incredible story. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Rosie T - 1571st post - 25 Feb 2005 14:32
A school friend of mine was put in a Catholic children's home when her widowed father went to prison for Manslaughter. My mum wrote to her and sent her parcels regularly, and considered fostering or adopting her. Suddenly her replies stopped coming. After writing several times to both her and the Mother Superior and receiving no replies, my mother came to the conclusion that she had moved on, been adopted or whatever.
Years later, she returned to our town as a grown woman. She told my mother what had happened: a girl had been found to be corresponding with a boy, so the nuns decided to immediately cut off all contact with the outside world for all the girls. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Samantha Girl - 110th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:20
Children are used and abused on a daily basis in this way. A certain establishment are begging for money so that this sort of thing can be stopped, on top of brutal behaviour from the parents. And what about those children in Africa (especially girls) who have to go through circumcision without any anesthaetic. This sort of thing has no place in our modern society. But it still goes on..... [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1156th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:32
Samantha Girl
Young girls being forceably circumcised happens quite a lot in this country, places like London & Bradford in particular. It's closed secretive societies & minority groups that ensures this sort of abuse still flourishes. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 841st post - 25 Feb 2005 15:43
"It's closed secretive societies & minority groups that ensures this sort of abuse still flourishes."
And these factors are the direct result of prejudice, lies, regular hate campaigns by the gutter press, alienation, and the poverty required to produce the cheap labour we need to keep Canary Wharf nice and sparkly.
The hypocrisy of the right on this is quite staggering. Not to mention its selective memory - or doublethink, as it's otherwise known - about colonial and domestic British history and culture.
The reversal of cause and effect is almost neolithic in its totality. It has much more in common with the world view of the Witch Doctor than Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Alexander Fleming. [Complain about this post]
...
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1159th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:01
fretslider
I'm shaking my head with frustration as I read you post! Education is the key I assure you. Kids from Senegal to Cameroon who live in this country believe in witchcraft, because their parents believe in witchcraft because their parents etc etc. The only way of breaking this very ignorant and destructive chain is by educating people, children and adults. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Rosie T - 1576th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:11
What sort of education, Fretslider? A friend of ours, a philosopher, took up a post in an African university. They were very fussy, only an Oxford or Cambridge graduate was considered good enough.
During his first year there a colleague in his department died, after which he noticed a strange atmosphere in the office, people were avoiding him, funny things were appearing on his desk, etc. He finally discovered to his horror and bewilderment that he was generally suspected of having caused his colleague's death by witchcraft. He fled the country!
Similarly, in Indonesia the highly educated also believe in witchcraft. They have a western legal system borrowed from the Dutch model, but have made provisions in it to prosecute those who have caused damage to others by placing curses on them. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1163rd post - 25 Feb 2005 16:25
peter fluck
I dont think you can ever overestimate the power of education, although I realise as I chip away at this, the more I find out about it the less I understand, however.
I appreciate it will be difficult if not impossible to change minds and attitudes in west africa, but it should not be as difficult to do that in the UK, after all, witch doctors are not widespread in this country and that is where education has to play a part surely. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 844th post - 25 Feb 2005 19:49
Education don't mean squat if you've got an empty stomach or work a 14 hour day.
Education needs the soil of leisure to grow in. That means improving standards of living. Without that the seedling of education withers and dies.
So it is all too easy to overestimate the powers of education, especially as a single strategy. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1167th post - 25 Feb 2005 20:01
I'm assuming you think I was talking about education in West Africa, (nice Idea for a different thread perhaps) but no I was talking about education in this country. From what I saw on Newsnight yesterday social services, local authorities, the police and schools all need educating on this subject. Child sacrifice (The Adam Case) and abuse (Victoria Climbie) on this scale is not the norm in this country, so people wouldn't in normal circumstances look for it, but thanks to our much vaunted multi-cultural society it's here and thriving, and that has much to do with our own ignorance. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Harry Seldon - 84th post - 25 Feb 2005 16:42
Rather reminiscent of the USA, where it's not so long ago that teachers were being sacked and put on trial for mentioning Charles Darwin in class.
Even now, most Americans -- including the Bozo-in-Chief -- seem to believe that the world was created by JC the Elder on October 22, 4004 BC, just before tea-time (He hadn't created coffee yet, silly). [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Claire Watkins - 38th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:22
Hi,
I read a posting about some Boxing Day event being banned because it was likely to offend our sensitive people as the blacked up their faces. We have a law and even a department to investigate such things. Then this is discovered - what kind of barmy system have we gor here?
So many people get all heated about immigrants being asked to adopt our culture such as it is but at least we know about it and what it should produce. We need to be very careful about multi-culturalism. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 841st post - 25 Feb 2005 15:51
"We need to be very careful about multi-culturalism."
Then we need to start 2,000 years ago.
Multi-culturalism is normal in many countries. It is a natural bi-product of trade and always has been. And in a global market place, there will be diverse customers. There is absolutley nothing you can do about it.
Britain is no longer an island, so stop trying to drive back the tide, unless of course you mean that you want some sort of isolationist Stalinist state like North Korea - and look what happened to them.
Child exorcism is not an new thing. Until very recently it did go on in this country, and all over the 'civilised' world.
They are still unearthing the graves in some Catholic boarding schools.
Sorry, but this is not an issue which can be hitched up to another creaking call for forced repatriation. Neither is it a final confirmation that human beings can only coexist with other human beings who act and look the same. This is about the care of children.
And all religious faith abuses children. When it's not poisoning their minds, it's breaking their bodies. In fact, if it fails to do the first, it resorts to the latter. Our own glorious empire had a long tradition of beating the evil out of children.
In Victorian times, a child's life was cheap - as we all know. You only have to look at the gravestones of the time: 'Martha - Wife of the Above and two or three infants'. They didn't even bother to count them, let alone name them.
It's always the same in societies with a high infant mortality, and a correspondingly high birth rate. And when that culture is overlain with a world-beating monotheism like Christianity, it is easy for any local psychopath to assume the role of God and tell his flock to do what comes naturally.
And in a culture of conflict and harship, the thing that comes naturally is to inflict pain. Especially when your parents did exactly the same to you, because as we know, being beaten as a child NEVER does you any harm as an adult. The very idea.
All you're seeing in the Newsnight report was a return to - wait for it - 'Victorian Values'. I know a certain Baroness who's very happy with that state of afairs.
So in the short term, the only solution is a Scandinavian style ban on all smacking. They seem to be happy with it, what's wrong with us? Too far gone? Not a convenient notion to live harmoniously in the hang 'em and flog 'em and send 'em back where they came from brigade? A combination of both, probably.
In the long term, eradicating child abuse is about treating children as human beings, not property. But then we'd have to treat everyone as human beings, and that will surely be the end of civilisation as we know it.
It will be even worse than raising the minimum wage to £5.50 an hour, which will have us all murdered in our beds. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism David McD - 813th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:27
Mr Littlejohn,
"They are still unearthing the graves in some Catholic boarding schools". Perhaps you would like to give some examples.
"In Victorian times, a child's life was cheap..." If you had any knowledge of history, literature, medicine or Victorian engineering then you would know that nearly half of all children died their first year of life in the early Victorian area (generally much to the distress of their parents and siblings) but these figures were dramatically reduced during the Victorian era due to the advances in medical practice and sewage engineering, particularly the latter.
The programme concerned dealt exclusively with the practices brought in by recent immigrants from West Africa. The practises revealed had absolutely nothing in common with the Christian religion as practised in Britain or Western Europe.
If we import large third world minorities of unskilled uneducated people (why we should import them, many from countries that were never even British colonies, I cannot even begin to imagine) we should not be surprised if we also import their customs and their problems. The manner reported had absolutely nothing to do with the "reasonable chastisement" of children and this was quite obvious. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 840th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:23
"If you had any knowledge of history, literature, medicine or Victorian engineering then you would know that nearly half of all children died their first year of life in the early Victorian area "
Which is just what I went on to say: "It's always the same in societies with a high infant mortality, and a correspondingly high birth rate."
But the loss was NOT the dreadful loss you depict. It may have been among a sector of the genteel classes, generally, children were very very expendable, Any reading of virtually any relevant text of the period will confirm that. Your ignorance is stupendous, and totally baffling.
The Newsnight Report may have concerned itself with the practices of quasi Christian cults, but their attitude to children is not very different from the Victorian attitude, or that of any disciplinarian school until the mid fifties or so. Face up to it.
What we're seeing is our own past with a few exotic ribbons and feathers. And we are simply re-importing the message our Christian missionaries exported in the first place. By banning smacking, social services would be much more empowered to clamp down on these sects.
In general, the people attending them are law-abiding, so the culture would begin to change and with the natural increase in prosperity and education in the second generation, the ideological extremes would die out - as they have in every other immigrant wave with deeply ingrained world-views.
These practices are partly caused by persecution and alienation. By hijacking this issue and seeking to demonize an entire community, you are contributing to that hostility and playing into the hands of those ready and willing to exploit it. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism David McD - 814th post - 25 Feb 2005 16:26
Mr Richardjohn,
If you believe that only "a sector of the genteel classes" (whatever that may mean) mourned or cared for the death of their children then I fear you have little understanding of what it is to be a parent. Of course, when childbirth was common, people were more accustomed to it and recovered more quickly and, if poor, had to get on with their lives but that really does not mean that the great majority did not care.
To blame “Christian Missionaries” for the more violent and alarming cultural and tribal practices of some West African groups is a twist of post modernist thinking that leaves even me at a loss for words!
The second part of you post seems to imply, yet again, that to point out the problems of large numbers of unskilled, ill educated people, many from countries which have no historical relationship with the UK (and therefore no family ties etc.), is "racist". Well then, by your definition I am "racist" but so are the overwhelming majority of your fellow countrymen. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 842nd post - 25 Feb 2005 19:10
My countrymen? Who are they?
You have no understanding of what it was like to be a parent in the C19. Probably because you don't want to know.
When children are plentiful, they are are cheap, like anything else. The texts are just too numerous to refer to, even if I thought for a minute you'd pay any attention. Just Google yourself. It's not difficult. Failing that, read Jane Eyre or something similar.
Christian missionairies introduced monotheism and the concept of universal guilt. That is not reinventing history - that's your job. And with those constructs came the concept of universal power. That was a new thing to animists, whose dieties had previously been local and specialized.
The economic realities of the marketplace are inescapable. And their consequences for the mobility of labour and the role of the new labour market in a flexible social structure are unpleasant if you are an opponent of market forces, or on the recieving end of them.
Those priced out of jobs by new waves of immigration are always on the receiving end.
The whinge of those who oppose market forces is due to their being overtaken in the social scale by 'newcomers'. Well, they had their chance, and blew it.
The rule is, if you're still living in the slums when the new wave of immigrants move in, you haven't been trying hard enough, and deserve what you get. Ask Margaret Thatcher or Keith Joseph or anyone. After all, to her, riding on a bus after the age of 30 was a sign of a failed life. The sign that your bootstraps haven't been pulled hard enough.
Culturally, each new influx is the only positive side to the whole sordid bearpit. At least those influences, when blended with aspects of native culture, provide a degree of variety. But it's no use complaining when the child-care practices of our forefathers are served up to us a hundred years on.
And it's not as if those practices are dead in this country now. Until the morons stop screaming for blood every time a teenager steals a car radio, we have no moral high horse to ride.
All we can do is make bigotry and barbarism of all kinds less acceptable. And in practice that means squeezing all religions till the pips burst. It's time to put the old mare out of her misery. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism David McD - 819th post - 25 Feb 2005 20:31
RLJ,
"The rule is, if you're still living in the slums when the new wave of immigrants move in, you haven't been trying hard enough, and deserve what you get"
Thank you for so perfectly capturing your thought process and that of those who think like you. No wonder the abhorrent BNP grows and grows; a classic example of one evil philosophy feeding from another. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 845th post - 27 Feb 2005 17:31
Your thought processes – Unless I’ve become Thatcher overnight. Do read the post.
I know that the people who hate to have the rules of the market waved in their faces most are those who profess its' merits most loudly, but this is ridiculous.
Although the inability to detect irony is very typical.
The abhorrent BNP thrives on the rules of the marketplace. And your intolerance and ignorance and inability to acknowledge the sins of the British Empire, plus your yearning to return to those glorydays (irony again) only gives them more motivation.
It's therefore not unusual that you are unable to see the connection between labour costs and anti-immigrant feeling. Your economic system depends on cheap labour, and with that requirement come new populations and new cultures. You cannot escape that inevitability or the amorality of its consequences.
Instead you call for market forces to be flouted in a most uncharacteristically socialist manner, or you pretend it's a conspiracy against something called the 'British way of Life' which only you are allowed to define, and which always ends up being as racially pure as a Nuremburg Chorus Line.
And naturally, anyone who is able to invoke even a modicum of basic economic reality - your economic reality - is labelled EVIL. If I'm evil because I understand that the market is about making money and that it is not some kind of Sunday School Treat for the Poor of The Parish, then I'm guilty as charged. The genuine pathos is in the fact that you really do not know what is happening, and it is causing you so much pain.
The world must seem a supremely treacherous place when the wonderful Free Market, which is Nature's Friend and the Boon of Mankind - after all, Margaret Thatcher promised - turns round and bites you deeply in the gluteous Maximus.
That just wasn't supposed to happen.
Well. We tried to explain. But as usual when money is involved, you simply stuck your fingers in your ears and went La La La La - as you're doing now. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1154th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:17
Little Richardjohn
This is'nt about victorian values (whatever they might be) it's about ignorance and fear. People from central & west africa have to be educated, they have to be taught that juju, black magic and witchcraft dont exist exept in the mind of the frightened and ignorant parent listening to the local tower hamlets witch doctor.
Victoria Climbie was not murdered because her guardians simply felt like beating her, they thought thanks to the local witch doctor that the poor girl was possessed by evil spirits. This level of fear and ignorance is difficult for us (for me anyway) to understand, but understand we must and these people must be educated [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 839th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:05
This is'nt about victorian values (whatever they might be) it's about ignorance and fear.
Ignorance and Fear. As I said, Victorian values.
Education how? You're dealing with a culture which is self-isolating, and feels threatened anyway (boo-hoo) but more than that, is essentially criminal.
How many so-called churches are really just money-laundering operations for drug money we will never know for sure. But we'll never find out until churches are liable to the same fiscal scrutiny as other businesses.
If I was a succesful crack dealer, I would be looking for a nice respectable sideline, preferably dealing in voluntary donations of cash.
So we have to end tax breaks for all religions to drive out the criminals and open the cults up to the rest of society before we can hope to educate anyone. Otherwise any education will be treated as intrusion, and merely reinforce the spiral of insularity and abuse. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism trueblue - 207th post - 25 Feb 2005 13:57
I agree it is shocking. Would all those who believe in the multi-cultural society (which of course can never work) like to comment? Presuambly, this is okay as these people form a 'culture' or 'minority' or 'community' that has its own rights. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism peter fluck - 5073rd post - 25 Feb 2005 15:56
But yesterday, Mr Trueblue, you told us that your believe children may indeed be possessed by demons. I would have thought these muti obsessed Africans would have been people after your own heart? [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism trueblue - 207th post - 25 Feb 2005 13:58
I agree it is shocking. Would all those who believe in the multi-cultural society (which of course can never work) like to comment? Presuambly, this is okay as these people form a 'culture' or 'minority' or 'community' that has its own rights. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism the hidden paw - 1st post - 25 Feb 2005 14:14
This sort of behaviour is known in many religious sects - not only African ones. Jeanette Winterson, the author, wrote of her bleak Lancashire childhood in 'Oranges are not the only Fruit' and described a beating the central character got from the pastor of the local chapel for being gay. The beating was administered by people who 'loved' the girl and wanted her to be saved.
And doesn't the adage 'spare the rod and spoil the child' originate in Christianity?
There will always be some for whom evil spirits and beatings are a reality.
The police needs to gather intelligence about these practices, wherever they occur in this country, and to take appropriate action against those who would abuse their children through their mistaken beliefs. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1155th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:25
I agree, Paddy Doyle's "The God Squad" is a remakable true story of how he was shockingly treated by nuns in an "Industrial school" in 1950s Ireland. In Paddy Doyle's own words: The book is about society's abdication of responsibility to a child.
It's an incredible story. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Rosie T - 1571st post - 25 Feb 2005 14:32
A school friend of mine was put in a Catholic children's home when her widowed father went to prison for Manslaughter. My mum wrote to her and sent her parcels regularly, and considered fostering or adopting her. Suddenly her replies stopped coming. After writing several times to both her and the Mother Superior and receiving no replies, my mother came to the conclusion that she had moved on, been adopted or whatever.
Years later, she returned to our town as a grown woman. She told my mother what had happened: a girl had been found to be corresponding with a boy, so the nuns decided to immediately cut off all contact with the outside world for all the girls. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Samantha Girl - 110th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:20
Children are used and abused on a daily basis in this way. A certain establishment are begging for money so that this sort of thing can be stopped, on top of brutal behaviour from the parents. And what about those children in Africa (especially girls) who have to go through circumcision without any anesthaetic. This sort of thing has no place in our modern society. But it still goes on..... [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1156th post - 25 Feb 2005 14:32
Samantha Girl
Young girls being forceably circumcised happens quite a lot in this country, places like London & Bradford in particular. It's closed secretive societies & minority groups that ensures this sort of abuse still flourishes. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 841st post - 25 Feb 2005 15:43
"It's closed secretive societies & minority groups that ensures this sort of abuse still flourishes."
And these factors are the direct result of prejudice, lies, regular hate campaigns by the gutter press, alienation, and the poverty required to produce the cheap labour we need to keep Canary Wharf nice and sparkly.
The hypocrisy of the right on this is quite staggering. Not to mention its selective memory - or doublethink, as it's otherwise known - about colonial and domestic British history and culture.
The reversal of cause and effect is almost neolithic in its totality. It has much more in common with the world view of the Witch Doctor than Isambard Kingdom Brunel or Alexander Fleming. [Complain about this post]
...
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1159th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:01
fretslider
I'm shaking my head with frustration as I read you post! Education is the key I assure you. Kids from Senegal to Cameroon who live in this country believe in witchcraft, because their parents believe in witchcraft because their parents etc etc. The only way of breaking this very ignorant and destructive chain is by educating people, children and adults. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Rosie T - 1576th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:11
What sort of education, Fretslider? A friend of ours, a philosopher, took up a post in an African university. They were very fussy, only an Oxford or Cambridge graduate was considered good enough.
During his first year there a colleague in his department died, after which he noticed a strange atmosphere in the office, people were avoiding him, funny things were appearing on his desk, etc. He finally discovered to his horror and bewilderment that he was generally suspected of having caused his colleague's death by witchcraft. He fled the country!
Similarly, in Indonesia the highly educated also believe in witchcraft. They have a western legal system borrowed from the Dutch model, but have made provisions in it to prosecute those who have caused damage to others by placing curses on them. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1163rd post - 25 Feb 2005 16:25
peter fluck
I dont think you can ever overestimate the power of education, although I realise as I chip away at this, the more I find out about it the less I understand, however.
I appreciate it will be difficult if not impossible to change minds and attitudes in west africa, but it should not be as difficult to do that in the UK, after all, witch doctors are not widespread in this country and that is where education has to play a part surely. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Little Richardjohn - 844th post - 25 Feb 2005 19:49
Education don't mean squat if you've got an empty stomach or work a 14 hour day.
Education needs the soil of leisure to grow in. That means improving standards of living. Without that the seedling of education withers and dies.
So it is all too easy to overestimate the powers of education, especially as a single strategy. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Lord Lucan - 1167th post - 25 Feb 2005 20:01
I'm assuming you think I was talking about education in West Africa, (nice Idea for a different thread perhaps) but no I was talking about education in this country. From what I saw on Newsnight yesterday social services, local authorities, the police and schools all need educating on this subject. Child sacrifice (The Adam Case) and abuse (Victoria Climbie) on this scale is not the norm in this country, so people wouldn't in normal circumstances look for it, but thanks to our much vaunted multi-cultural society it's here and thriving, and that has much to do with our own ignorance. [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Harry Seldon - 84th post - 25 Feb 2005 16:42
Even now, most Americans -- including the Bozo-in-Chief -- seem to believe that the world was created by JC the Elder on October 22, 4004 BC, just before tea-time (He hadn't created coffee yet, silly). [Complain about this post]
re: Child Exorcism Claire Watkins - 38th post - 25 Feb 2005 15:22
Hi,
I read a posting about some Boxing Day event being banned because it was likely to offend our sensitive people as the blacked up their faces. We have a law and even a department to investigate such things. Then this is discovered - what kind of barmy system have we gor here?
So many people get all heated about immigrants being asked to adopt our culture such as it is but at least we know about it and what it should produce. We need to be very careful about multi-culturalism. [Complain about this post]
"We need to be very careful about multi-culturalism."
Then we need to start 2,000 years ago.
Multi-culturalism is normal in many countries. It is a natural bi-product of trade and always has been. And in a global market place, there will be diverse customers. There is absolutley nothing you can do about it.
Britain is no longer an island, so stop trying to drive back the tide, unless of course you mean that you want some sort of isolationist Stalinist state like North Korea - and look what happened to them.
TV Sports Photography Is Appalling
Will someone please take all the ultra-telephoto lenses down the crusher?
Then, take all the sports cameramen and directors, show them thierfavourite film (Raging Bull, obviously) and give them electric shocks every time the shot goes into even a medium close-up.
When will TV sport realise that the sports enthuisiast wants to see the game, not a saga of the inner torments of the players - however glamorous and overpaid, and no matter how many corporations they endorse.
Every televised cricket match for the last 25 years at least has been totally ruined by the action zoom fetish.
The bowler runs up, all the relevant fielders are in view, the tension is building nicely as we can still see the space into which the ball can go and which way it will move off the pitch. The options are there waiting tobe filled. This creates tension - then suddenly we are thrust into the batsman's face with a ball arriving somehow from the corner of the screen.
The continuity is totally destroyed, and if there is a stroke, we are then subjected to frantic panning to follow the ball, frequently in the wrong direction.
The result is that not only do we miss the full achievement of many catches, but even miss some altogether - the Bangladeshi final dismissaltoday for instance. Also we are unable to assess the rue state of the pitch, or get any sense of the team tactics being played out, frequently with some drama to those able to see the game live.
Football, Rugby, most team sports get the same personality-driventreatment. All off the ball action is seen as irrelevant, whereas anyone who appreciates team sports at even a basic level will know that what makes the game interesting, as opposed to just a crude display of one-to-one dominance, is the role of the chorus,as well that of the hero and villain.
But it seems that everything is a question of goodies and baddies in the cheap melodrama of modern tv sport.
If these guys want to shoot Coronation Street let them go and do it.
If their real talent is endoscopy, I suggest they practise on themselves,and leave sports coverage to people who care about it.
Then, take all the sports cameramen and directors, show them thierfavourite film (Raging Bull, obviously) and give them electric shocks every time the shot goes into even a medium close-up.
When will TV sport realise that the sports enthuisiast wants to see the game, not a saga of the inner torments of the players - however glamorous and overpaid, and no matter how many corporations they endorse.
Every televised cricket match for the last 25 years at least has been totally ruined by the action zoom fetish.
The bowler runs up, all the relevant fielders are in view, the tension is building nicely as we can still see the space into which the ball can go and which way it will move off the pitch. The options are there waiting tobe filled. This creates tension - then suddenly we are thrust into the batsman's face with a ball arriving somehow from the corner of the screen.
The continuity is totally destroyed, and if there is a stroke, we are then subjected to frantic panning to follow the ball, frequently in the wrong direction.
The result is that not only do we miss the full achievement of many catches, but even miss some altogether - the Bangladeshi final dismissaltoday for instance. Also we are unable to assess the rue state of the pitch, or get any sense of the team tactics being played out, frequently with some drama to those able to see the game live.
Football, Rugby, most team sports get the same personality-driventreatment. All off the ball action is seen as irrelevant, whereas anyone who appreciates team sports at even a basic level will know that what makes the game interesting, as opposed to just a crude display of one-to-one dominance, is the role of the chorus,as well that of the hero and villain.
But it seems that everything is a question of goodies and baddies in the cheap melodrama of modern tv sport.
If these guys want to shoot Coronation Street let them go and do it.
If their real talent is endoscopy, I suggest they practise on themselves,and leave sports coverage to people who care about it.
5/11/2005
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