So, I went to see Chris Morris’s takfiri flick, Four Lions. Short review – it’s desperately, barkingly hilarious. Stupidly funny. It started with the snickering. The snickering led to giggling and the giggling led to batshit honking horselaughs all night long. Perhaps too funny – one of the markers of Chris Morris’s work is that…
Read More we’re the muslimeen, creating a sceneF-Secure Labs’ blog points to Cyberwar is Bullshit. I say yes! And I point you to Evgeny Morozov‘s cracking 10-step guide to cyberwar fearmongering. Follow his simple plan and you’ll be able to spread arrant drivel to the underbriefed with the best of them. I especially like: 2. Begin the story in Estonia, with a…
Read More HOWTO be a Cyberwar ExpertTim Ireland’s new project is more necessary than ever. It’s not quite achieved the same degree of punch and professionalism that the daddy of tab-bashing blogs, BildBlog offers readers of Germany’s biggest newspaper, but give them time. (This also bothers me. When I started this blog there were one million blogs, of which 50,000 updated…
Read More Blinded By The SunOK, so I’ve been off line quite a bit due to a weird perversion called “moving house”. This means that my constituency MP is no longer Philip Hammond, which almost makes it all worthwhile by itself. Hammond was one of the most annoying features of living in wonderful Runnymede & Weybridge; an immensely self-satisfied and…
Read More I heard a rumour that someone got Philled in…OK. Remember a few months ago, the Sundays were briefed about one of Tony’s eye-catching initiatives – to launch a magnetic levitation high-speed rail link from London up to Scotland? Well, if it ever had any substance, it’s now a dead parrot. And so are all maglev projects, which should bring a hearty cheer from…
Read More Maglev is DeadBacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target – after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as…
Read More More silly metricsOver the last few months, I’ve done a succession of posts which can be read under the tag TWOS, for the war on stupidity, which explore various forms of ideology and consensus. More related posts will be tagged as I go. But is this just an exercise in pooflinging? Beyond tirades about managerialism, Tony Blair,…
Read More Method, not ideologyVia comments at Our Word, Rob makes this excellent point. It’s always struck me as a serious tactical mistake for those on the left to argue against laissez-faire on the grounds that it deprives people of economic security, because this hands a powerful rhetoric of liberty to the right, who basically only care about it…
Read More The freedom to get crushed by a crane jibApparently, Dick Cheney’s lawyers are actually trying to invoke in court this batshit insane doctrine they seem to have cooked up, that claims that Cheney is both part of the Executive and the Legislature, and that therefore he answers to neither. That’s just head-spinningly weird. They are arguing, in a sense, that a sort of…
Read More Schrödinger’s VeepFollowing an unexpected referral to this blog, I came to this discussion of Theodor Adorno. Well, that takes me back. I remember having reams of him stuffed down my neck at Vienna University in the winter of 2001, which I didn’t like in the least. I certainly didn’t like the cult of personality some people…
Read More The enemies of embittered freedom come in unexpected forms