Sunday, July 31, 2011

Shorter d'Ancona: The Dave Just Needs New Ways To Bamboozle You Idiots

Pal, it ain't a perception problem when the guy really does suck. Besides, on most issues Cameron's not the fireman, he's the arsonist.

How Government Budgets Work

You can't tell me it's any different in Britain. Well.... except that it always turns out that the taxpayer is funding astroturf campaign groups to run studies proving that lack of dairy products in space causes 20,000 deaths per year.

The Amy Thing

Given that this is a blog dedicated to the idea that smart is the new stupid, I guess it makes perfect sense that this guy has produced the sanest thing I've read this week about the death of Amy Winehouse.

Forget the MSM's attempts to turn her into a martyr or a monster. The truth is she was neither a hero nor a villain, she was simply a young girl crushed under the weight of her own talent and now she's dead and it sucks.

Hollywood Still Awful

Interesting theory over at Big Hollywood on just why modern movies are terrible.

I'd actually say he's underestimated the awfulness of liberalism. These guys not only have a downer on individual responsibility for bad behaviour, they don't believe in moral judgements in the first place - not unless the villain has blond hair anyway.

Consider the difference between 1971's The Omega Man and 2007's I Am Legend. In 26 years we've gone from Colonel Neville under siege by Matthias's crazed cult to Will Smith fighting CGI monsters. Of course, one problem may be that by 2007 standards, Matthias's cult were probably saner than half of California but at least they had a coherent motivation. Absent that, what are you left with? Two hours of Will Smith shooting at computer graphics.

In fact, it's a double whammy. Hollywood not only won't produce villains with any more coherent motivation than an urge to drown puppies, they simply assign any vaguely right-wing characters to the same puppy-drowning demographic.

Consider Michael Douglas in Wall Street, Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men or Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross. Chances are you can quote at least one line from each. They were meant to be villains, but they had rational motivations and the ability to explain why they believed what they did. In short, they were believable. Now? It's all drowned puppies and mutants.

Saturday, July 23, 2011

Say, Does Anyone Know What Colour Hair The Oslo Attacker Had?

I don't know, but I kind of get the feeling the media is trying to make some kind of point when they keep telling us the attacker was a blonde. Are they trying to tell us that there's some kind of non-blonde terrorists out there?

Hey, and after all those years of liberals telling us there was no point profiling airline passengers...

Wednesday, July 20, 2011

It's All Fun And Games Until Someone Loses A Pie

... As Ann Coulter once said.

Yep, liberals tried to throw stuff at her too. Ditto, Jeremy Clarkson, Bjorn Lomberg and seemingly everyone who's ever spoken out against the left in any way. That's in addition to the whole 'riots' thing, of course.

Meanwhile, Sharon Shoesmith, Abu Hamza and Gary Glitter all remain not only resolutely unpied, but also the subject of approximately 1 billion editorials equating even the mildest criticism of them with coded support for lynch mobs - and if there's one thing the liberal media can't stand, it's people encouraging violent thugs....

Then again, the left's decision to give up actual arguments, and make juvenile acts of intimidation the central plank of their platform is probably a case of making the best of a bad job. Consider allegedly serious politician Tom Watson's line of attack on Murdoch: apparently he's a doddering, incompetent old fool who spends all day drooling on his paperwork, and also a sinister puppet master single-handedly responsible for making British liberals look like a bunch of whining no-marks.

Mind you, you can kind of see why they're worried - the last time they got so worked up about a supposedly senile evil genius, he won the Cold War. Ralph Miliband was never the same again.

Still, all that's way better than the latest conspiracy theory. Apparently, Murdoch pledged his support for Cameron so in return The Dave will push policies supported by Murdoch.

Really?

It never worked that way for the Tory base. On past form, Murdoch's lucky Cameron didn't announce a £1 billion bailout for the Guardian.

Wednesday, July 13, 2011

High Priest Loses Faith

Guido is uncharacteristically gentle with the now-ex Cameron groupie Peter Oborne when he deserves much worse, and not just because Oborne's rose-tinted specs only seem to come out with MPs from a certain demographic.

Oborne is shocked - shocked - to find sleaze going on here, but who was hiding that from Petey in the first place? On the contrary, Oborne spent years writing about the question marks over Cameron's integrity. Which is to say he spent years sliming anyone who raised questions about Cameron's integrity. Now he's finally where the bumpkins and bigots got to years ago, he wants us to admire his integrity.

Oborne wasn't just wrong about Cameron, he was the opposite of right. You'd have been better off listening to just about anyone in the conservative base instead of Certified Deep Conservative Thinker Peter Oborne.

Even now Oborne doesn't get it. The Coulson thing doesn't just undermine Cameron's moral posturing, it also undercuts the main excuse for Cameronism in the first place. We were assured that whatever Cameron's ideological shortcomings, he was a political genius. Now he's landed himself in a completely unnecessary scandal, where's all that genius gone?