Thursday, September 07, 2006
A Mole Located
There is a mole at Comment Is Free. I headed over there with the intention of parodying some of the rubbish that's to be found there most days, only to find that the writer of the headlines and - is it by-lines? - whatever you get under headlines anyway, is already suberting them! Have a look:
Susan Tomes: 'Sometimes basic literacy can be of vital importance.'
No shit?
Ed Vaizey: 'The defenestration of Tony Blair will leave lasting bitterness in the Labour party, with many allies of the prime minister left hoping for a Tory victory.'
Handy hint for writers: avoid the words 'defenestration' and 'decimate' if you don't know what they mean. In the first place, the last time I looked Tony Blair was still in office. In the second, even if he had been thrown out, he wouldn't have been defenestrated unless he'd been forcibly ejected through the window.
Robert Fox: 'The 'one per cent doctrine' was the measure by which the US government could break the rules to enforce its rules.'
Break the rules to enforce its rules? What?
Gerald Kaufman: 'We should go down on our knees to thank Blair'
Oh yes, let's all worship the master.
David Hirsh: 'To brand Israel's acts of violence in Gaza as 'genocide' lets Ehud Olmert off the hook.'
Yeah, I mean, I can't understand why anybody'd be pissed if it was genocide.
Sometimes the articles are just deeply flawed. James K Galbraith's attempt to cast the recent Mexican election as some kind of conservative coup is deeply misguided, and fails to acknowledge that the Mexican elections are a story with two sides to them. He doesn't point out that the AMLO leader Jose Manuel Lopez Obrador, for all his protestations of an unfair count and calls for a recount, didn't bother calling for a recount of the votes for the national assembly, in which the AMLO got their greatest ever result. He also relies for his data on a professor of, believe it or not, physics. Furthermore, he doesn't relate the fact that both the Carter Centre and the OECD have said there were no major irregularities, and the fact that Lopez Obrador's refusal to accept the verdict has considerably lowered his status in the polls, since most Mexicans heartily disapprove of the implicit threat of civil unrest behind his refusal to accept the verdict. I'm not saying I know Calderon won fairly, because clearly I don't, but it would have done his article the power of good to at least answer some of these basic points.
Fortunately, it's not all fusty political point scoring, and George Monbiot has rattled in an unintentionally hilarious piece. I know bloggers write 'read it all' all the time, and nobody ever does, but seriously, if you want a real good laugh - I was having difficulty breathing - read all about the time he was thrown off Greenham Common, and how the women torched a hippie's groundsheet. I'm wiping tears from my eyes even now.
Susan Tomes: 'Sometimes basic literacy can be of vital importance.'
No shit?
Ed Vaizey: 'The defenestration of Tony Blair will leave lasting bitterness in the Labour party, with many allies of the prime minister left hoping for a Tory victory.'
Handy hint for writers: avoid the words 'defenestration' and 'decimate' if you don't know what they mean. In the first place, the last time I looked Tony Blair was still in office. In the second, even if he had been thrown out, he wouldn't have been defenestrated unless he'd been forcibly ejected through the window.
Robert Fox: 'The 'one per cent doctrine' was the measure by which the US government could break the rules to enforce its rules.'
Break the rules to enforce its rules? What?
Gerald Kaufman: 'We should go down on our knees to thank Blair'
Oh yes, let's all worship the master.
David Hirsh: 'To brand Israel's acts of violence in Gaza as 'genocide' lets Ehud Olmert off the hook.'
Yeah, I mean, I can't understand why anybody'd be pissed if it was genocide.
Sometimes the articles are just deeply flawed. James K Galbraith's attempt to cast the recent Mexican election as some kind of conservative coup is deeply misguided, and fails to acknowledge that the Mexican elections are a story with two sides to them. He doesn't point out that the AMLO leader Jose Manuel Lopez Obrador, for all his protestations of an unfair count and calls for a recount, didn't bother calling for a recount of the votes for the national assembly, in which the AMLO got their greatest ever result. He also relies for his data on a professor of, believe it or not, physics. Furthermore, he doesn't relate the fact that both the Carter Centre and the OECD have said there were no major irregularities, and the fact that Lopez Obrador's refusal to accept the verdict has considerably lowered his status in the polls, since most Mexicans heartily disapprove of the implicit threat of civil unrest behind his refusal to accept the verdict. I'm not saying I know Calderon won fairly, because clearly I don't, but it would have done his article the power of good to at least answer some of these basic points.
Fortunately, it's not all fusty political point scoring, and George Monbiot has rattled in an unintentionally hilarious piece. I know bloggers write 'read it all' all the time, and nobody ever does, but seriously, if you want a real good laugh - I was having difficulty breathing - read all about the time he was thrown off Greenham Common, and how the women torched a hippie's groundsheet. I'm wiping tears from my eyes even now.
Comments:
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Break the rules to enforce its rules? What?
i believe the dude meant the 'one percent doctrine' was cheney's thing that if there was a 1% chance that there'd be TERRA!!!11!!!, all bets were off and it was cool to create ('enforce') /their own/ 'rules' (e.g., torture's cool if we're the ones doing it &c).
so Blair's throwing himself out a window? COOL! i wanna watch.
i believe the dude meant the 'one percent doctrine' was cheney's thing that if there was a 1% chance that there'd be TERRA!!!11!!!, all bets were off and it was cool to create ('enforce') /their own/ 'rules' (e.g., torture's cool if we're the ones doing it &c).
so Blair's throwing himself out a window? COOL! i wanna watch.
# posted by 
: 8:10 am
: 8:10 am
Yes, I didn't exactly disagree with his article (though it was a little tubthumping) but I did think that byline was particularly poorly phrased.
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