Bigoted Bozza strikes again. The Spectator, which celebrated the coming of July by publishing an article ridiculing the possibility of Islamic terrorism in Britain, has struck again. This time Andrew GIlligan (yes - the Hero of Hutton) has been given the main article to push his theory that we needn't worry about Iran getting nukes because, hey, there's no evidence they want to do anything naughty with them. A-huh.
Now, it might just be me, but I'm thinking that if the Spectator ever prints an article debunking fears of vampire attack, then it's time to start sharpening the fenceposts.
Yes, yes, yes: I know all about lead times and the like. Sure, any sports magazine that prints an article on Fulchester's great start to the season risks them having lost the last two games 6-0 by the time it hits the stands. But what we're talking about here isn't bolts from the blue. The Puppy spells out the Iran situation here. Ditto, if Al-Quaida had taken out a full page ad in the Times, they couldn't have made their intentions more obvious. Bottom line: here's the biggest issue of the day and the Spectator wasn't just wrong, it's was 180', you've got to be kidding me, wrong.
In its own way, the Spectator is the reification of what's wrong with an important strand of British Conservatism. Take the basic snobbery: everyone knew Islamic terrorists would attack sooner or later, so naturally the Spectator tried to convince us of their superior intellect by taking the opposite line in the teeth of all the evidence. There's the obvious point that just because you can construct an argument why black is white doesn't make it so, but there's more to it than that. What we're talking about is war, yet the Spectator behaves as though this were merely some obscure political issue. True, the July article was merely grimly amusing, but isn't there some connection with supposedly-Conservative publications like the Spectator taking this line and Liberal loons like Lord 'no threat' Hoffman being allowed to strip our nations defences ?
That's the other thing, of course. The Spectator can get away with its pseudo-intellectual posturing when it's talking about obscure political matters, but war has a way of exposing pretension. Mass slaughter on a bus is a hard thing for these people to explain away. Yet that's pretty much all the Spectator has to offer: a right-wing version of the chattering classes. No wonder they're in denial. We need professionals, not ponces playing stupid parlour games in which they explain that when the Iranians talk about killing the Infidels, they're really using the ancient Persian form of the verb, which also means 'buy lunch for'. If this war achieves one thing, it should be allowing British Conservatism to recognise this bunch of smug imbeciles for what they are.
Now, it might just be me, but I'm thinking that if the Spectator ever prints an article debunking fears of vampire attack, then it's time to start sharpening the fenceposts.
Yes, yes, yes: I know all about lead times and the like. Sure, any sports magazine that prints an article on Fulchester's great start to the season risks them having lost the last two games 6-0 by the time it hits the stands. But what we're talking about here isn't bolts from the blue. The Puppy spells out the Iran situation here. Ditto, if Al-Quaida had taken out a full page ad in the Times, they couldn't have made their intentions more obvious. Bottom line: here's the biggest issue of the day and the Spectator wasn't just wrong, it's was 180', you've got to be kidding me, wrong.
In its own way, the Spectator is the reification of what's wrong with an important strand of British Conservatism. Take the basic snobbery: everyone knew Islamic terrorists would attack sooner or later, so naturally the Spectator tried to convince us of their superior intellect by taking the opposite line in the teeth of all the evidence. There's the obvious point that just because you can construct an argument why black is white doesn't make it so, but there's more to it than that. What we're talking about is war, yet the Spectator behaves as though this were merely some obscure political issue. True, the July article was merely grimly amusing, but isn't there some connection with supposedly-Conservative publications like the Spectator taking this line and Liberal loons like Lord 'no threat' Hoffman being allowed to strip our nations defences ?
That's the other thing, of course. The Spectator can get away with its pseudo-intellectual posturing when it's talking about obscure political matters, but war has a way of exposing pretension. Mass slaughter on a bus is a hard thing for these people to explain away. Yet that's pretty much all the Spectator has to offer: a right-wing version of the chattering classes. No wonder they're in denial. We need professionals, not ponces playing stupid parlour games in which they explain that when the Iranians talk about killing the Infidels, they're really using the ancient Persian form of the verb, which also means 'buy lunch for'. If this war achieves one thing, it should be allowing British Conservatism to recognise this bunch of smug imbeciles for what they are.
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