Telegraph Comment of the Week (#28)

On Monday, Dan ‘Tribal Loyalty’ Hodges, the Telegraph’s Blairite-in-residence, attempted to write something objective about the BBC. But as anyone will tell you: the right – especially those who leave comments on Telegraph blogs – hates the BBC, because of its imagined ‘left-wing’ bias. Hodges’s blog: “The BBC isn’t anti-Tory. It’s anti-government” sounds like it should be anti-authority, maybe even counter-cultural, but rather predictably, it is anything but.

He kicks off with,

Today has seen yet another significant drop in unemployment; down 125,000. The trend is clear. The war against unemployment is being won.

Groovy. So what is this really about?

Which of course isn’t what’s supposed to be happening. Only yesterday I became involved in a round of Twitter handbags with former MPC member David Blanchflower, who had confidently predicted “Tory public spending cuts ‘could push unemployment to 5 million’”. According to Blanchflower “If spending cuts are made too early and the monetary and fiscal stimuli are withdrawn, unemployment could easily reach four million.

The thing is, Dan, that apparent ‘drop’ in the numbers of unemployed is entirely concocted. You’re forgetting the numbers of people who’ve been sanctioned, forced into workfare, working ‘self-employed’ and all those other people who are on zero hours contracts. Then there are all the part-time workers who want to work full-time but can’t because the jobs aren’t there. You’re not exactly playing with a full deck. Are you, Dan?

Two paragraphs down and we get to the real point of the blog.

So how does the Today programme choose to cover this dramatic fall in unemployment? With a feature on the scourge of youth unemployment.

Oh dear. Yes friends, the Today programme hasn’t done what it was supposed to do: suck up to the government, which it does every day without fail.

But hang on, what’s this?

But this charge of “Left-wing bias”, or more accurately “pro-Labour bias” is too lazy. It’s true there is a small “l” liberal culture which dominates the Corporation.

Dan, if this is your idea of trying to persuade your headbanging readers to accept the BBC is anything other than ‘left-wing’ you’re wasting your time. Oh and god damn those liberals! Yeah. That’s a sentiment that even this week’s commenter,  CassandraKing, can agree with.

Those damned left-wing scumbags at the BBC allowed people with dissenting views to express their opinions of Thatcher when she died. Did they? The thing is, the coverage of the week-long Thatcher binge was dominated by gushing tributes from those who worshipped her  as the ‘saviour of Britain’.  The same oleaginous types even tried to rewrite history before our very eyes. “Cassandra” (a delusional choice of online name for sure) can’t see this. “The Maggie haters got more air time than those who loved her”,  she thunders. Aw, diddums.

“CassandraKing” then claims that the BBC turned into “North Korean TV” in their coverage of the death of Nelson Mandela. I hate to tell you this, Cass, but Mandela was a better politician than Thatcher. In fact, Mandela fought a struggle against oppression. Thatcher fought on behalf of the oppressors. She hated unions, unless they happened to be in Poland and she defended apartheid.

Tony Benn is next for the Cassandra treatment.  She whines “The BBC will allow no demonstrators or critics airtime”.  First, let me ask “what demonstrators”? Right doesn’t do demonstrations because it doesn’t need to. I mean, just look at the Rally Against Debt a few years ago. The right couldn’t even muster two hundred supporters for an issue about which it was apparently passionate. Not even Toby Young could be arsed to turn up. No doubt about it, “Cassandra”, like many right-whingers is playing the victim here.

“CassandraKing” closes with the standard “the BBC is the mouthpiece of extremist left/green axis”. The “left/green axis”, eh? The BBC? Yeah, right. Only in DelingpoleWorld.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#24)

If you put the words ‘homosexual’ and ‘Africa’ into the same blog title, there is every chance that you’ll get a load of right-wing sad sacks with too much time on their hands leaving comments that vary from ‘gay is a disease and we are the cure’ to ‘the bloody Africans should be grateful to us for giving them Christianity’. And so it is with this blog from Tim Stanley, which on the face of things, seems reasonable enough. Here’s a snippet.

The snub to the outside world is important. Some African politicians argue that homosexuality is a Western import and gay rights a form of neo-colonialism – a way of exerting Western cultural influence on innocent, “God-fearing” countries. The argument goes that African societies have always been historically 100 per cent straight. An explosion in gays and lesbians is a recent thing, encouraged by foreign powers.

Doc Stanley’s efforts are like a red rag to the proverbial bull. The number of ignorant and offensive remarks left on the comments thread are too numerous to mention and I found it difficult to choose one in particular. Needless to say, there was the inevitable traipse into victimhood with, “Oh, so it’s all whitey’s fault”. Some commenters even tell the Doc to leave this country and go and live in Africa. Yes, this is the level of intelligence we’re dealing with here. I’ve heard Telegraph blogs being likened to a bear-pit. Frankly I think a bear-pit is a much kinder place.

This week’s comment was left by “molly black”, who saw an opportunity to launch into an attack on her favourite obsession: Muslims.

You can always tell what kind of person is making the comment by the way they use outdated words and terminology. Here, the word “Moslem” is used. “Yes, Moslems practice sodomy – we know that” says molly authoritatively. Nothing like a good old fashioned smear from the Middle Ages, eh? But who is “we”? I suspect “molly slackwit” is referring to the BNP or similar, in which case her use of the pronoun “we” is being used selectively to imply a consensus. Then there’s the much loved phraseological style of the typical right-winger: cram all your hatred into a single sentence by using as many clichés as possible, thus “molly” produces, “professional placard-carrying, mincing queen”. The beauty of this phrase is that you can replace “mincing queen” with “dirty layabout” or “soap-dodger” and voila, you’ve got a handy phrase for expressing your hatred of student protesters. Try it at home with whatever minority group takes your fancy. It’s so easy!

The comment beneath “molly” also interested me. Mainly because the commenter uses the name “indigenousbrit” in an ahistorical manner that not only evidences a lack of self-consciousness and erudition, but also because they crown it off by displaying Enoch Powell as their avatar. No prizes for guessing how this person feels about ethnic minorities.

There’s more white male heterosexual victimhood on this comments thread than you can shake a stick at. Welcome to the sewer.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#20)

This week’s comment was found on Toby Young’s blog, which pleads for a “First Amendment” (sic) to protect verbal bullies and the orally incontinent. Free speech in Tobes’s mind is where people say anything they like regardless of how nasty and mean-spirited the words may be.  It’s ‘free speech’, right?

Tobes claims that Katie Hopkins is the subject of “visceral hatred” after a successful campaign to sack her from This Morning where she had been appearing as a reactionary rent-a-gob. A tad dramatic. No? Here’s how Tobes opens his article:

There are lots of good arguments for a British equivalent of the First Amendment, not least that it would prevent Parliament passing any law that abridged the freedom of the press, and I hope the next Conservative manifesto includes a commitment to replacing the Human Rights Act with a Bill of Rights.

What Tobes doesn’t realize is that a “First Amendment” or to be more precise, a right to free speech enshrined in law, would not actually apply to a campaign to remove her from our screens. La Hopkins hasn’t been arrested nor has she been charged with any offence. A “First Amendment” has to be part of an existing document and no such document exists, thus the use of the phrase is a little silly.

Nonetheless the Honourable Tobes whines on:

I made a film about JS Mill recently for the Daily Politics and he identifies this form of censorship, which he calls “the tyranny of the prevailing opinion and feeling”, as a far greater threat to freedom of thought and emotion than any laws a tyrannical government might pass. Orwell wrote about the same danger in his essay on ‘The Freedom of the Press’:

In Tobesworld, the right to insult people is more important than making sense and advancing rational arguments. Therefore, challenging crazy ideas or offensive speech is indicative, in his mind at least, of “tyranny”.

Now to the Comment of the Week. This is from “Kentucky Straight”, who doesn’t think the Hon Tobes goes far enough.

This guy is confused: Scousers come from Liverpool, while “Man Utd fans” are fans of guess who? In fact, you don’t need to be a Mancunian to support Man  United. Anyone can be one.  “Kentucky” moans that an unnamed MP (Labour’s Jack Dromey, in fact) used the word “pikey” to refer to a postal worker.  “Pikey” is a derogatory word that is used to refer to Romanis and Irish Travellers and since 2007  it has been an offence to use the word. “Kentucky Fried” then complains that “another councillor” (likely to be UKIP), who is being investigated for “racism” for his remarks about an unnamed council ward in an unnamed city.  You see, this isn’t about “free speech” at all: it’s about the right to be nasty and intolerant as well as offensive.

Now “Kentucky Fried” may deny that he’s a racist but he’d have a hard time convincing me. Today’s racists are more likely to use euphemisms in an attempt to avoid confrontation or, indeed, detection. “Kentucky” is quite clearly either a member of a far-right party or he sympathizes with one. How do I know? It’s the way he claims that “We are becoming a Marxist police state”.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#18)

One subject that tends to occupy the minds of the halfwits who leave comments on Telegraph blogs is Barack Obama. These self-styled ‘birthers’ can’t quite believe that the President of the United States is a man with brown skin. Obama’s parentage has been the subject of countless racist conspiracy theories. “He’s a Muslim”, “He’s a communist”, ” “He was born on Mars”.

Like I’ve said many times on this blog I’m not a fan of Obama. He’s shown time and time again that he’s little different to all the other US presidents, especially when it comes to bombing the world’s brown people.

Normally it’s Nile Gardiner who’s obsessed with Obama. If you look at his blogs over the course of the last five years, you will see that most of them are about Obama and how he “hates Britain” or some such nonsense. Thursday, it was the turn of Doc Stanley to provide pieces of rotting meat for the slavering hordes of racists.

The Marxist Bill Ayers is a good capitalist – he knows what sells. The blurb for his new book, Public Enemy: Confessions of an American Dissident, comes with this interesting tease:

Ayers reveals how he has navigated the challenges and triumphs of this public life with steadfastness and a dash of good humor—from the red carpet at the Oscars, to prison vigils and airports (where he is often detained and where he finally “confesses” that he did write Dreams from My Father).

What?! He confesses that he wrote Barack Obama’s best-selling memoir Dreams from My Father? Making Obama not just a bad president but a fraud, too? It was too much to disbelieve for some on the Right, with Investors.com walking into the trap and Rush Limbaugh following behind, both headlining that Ayers had exposed himself as the original author.

That was enough to get extreme headbangers like “Lord Howard Hurts” to leave this coiled-up present on The Doc’s dreadful blog.

This demand to see Obama’s birth certificate is predicated on nothing less than racism. As I’ve pointed out before on this blog: John McCain, who was born outside the United States was never subjected to this kind of demand. Why? Because he’s white. “Lord Arse Hurts” now also claims that Obama’s parents weren’t who they claimed to be. Again this is based on racist notions of racial purity.

I had a look at “Lord Arse’s” blog, which he has laughing titled “freedomfiles” and the language used is characteristically violent. It’s exactly the sort of thing that you’d expect from a Tea Party supporting, gun-toting, racist shit-kicker who lurvs his country.

The survival of America and this great Republic will not be found in the empty rhetoric of political ‘sing song‘ given us by the likes of President B.H. Obama or Hillary ‘my daughter and I were under fire in Bosnia‘ Clinton, or any current RINO pretender. We are currently on the edge of a Civil War between the races precisely because  President B.H. Obama has so divided this nation along the lines of race and personal responsibility that the freedoms so long ago won through blood, sweat, and tears, is fast coming to an inglorious end. Unless actions are taken by concerned Patriots the collapse into complete socialism will be upon us.

This talk of being “on the edge of Civil War” reminds me of the kind of language used by self-styled British ‘patriots’ who constantly talk of ‘treason’, ‘genocide’ and ‘race replacement’. “Lord Arse” also believes that he and his ilk are the only people who understand “freedom”. Yet if this person actually bothered to do any research instead of relying wholly on myths, he would see that the “freedom” of which he writes was limited to a certain class of people. Indians and Blacks had no freedom and women couldn’t vote. The working classes were shot and killed when they organized and agitated for better working conditions. “Lord Arse” may talk about “freedom” but he and his class work tirelessly to deny others of their freedoms. In other words, he talks out of his arse.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#16)

It’s been 16 weeks since I started the Telegraph Comment of the Week and in that time, the vast majority of the comments I’ve featured here have been left by self-described ethno-nationalists who baulk at the thought of being called ‘racists’.  Yet this is what they are and there is no escape for them. No matter how hard these people try to rationalise their racism as eminently sensible and logical, they always end up making themselves look foolish as well as hate-filled.

This week’s comment was found on this blog by Alan Johnson, no not the right-wing Labour MP, but the Torygraph columnist. His mini-biography describes him as…

… the Editor of Fathom: for a deeper understanding of Israel and the region and Senior Research Fellow at the Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre (BICOM). A professor of democratic theory and practice, he is an editorial board member of Dissent magazine, and a Senior Research Associate at The Foreign Policy Centre.

A “deeper understanding of Israel”? Come again? That is not the aim of BICOM (British Israel Communications and Research Centre), which is, for all intents and purposes, the British version of AIPAC (American Israel Public Affairs Committee). Like its American counterpart, BICOM acts as a propaganda and lobbying arm of the Israeli state and exists to demonize opponents of Israel’s military and social actions. Its role is to also cosmeticize Israeli brutality in the Occupied Territories and Gaza and to drum up support for a war against Iran.

The title of Johnson’s blog is designed to attract loads of frothing-at-the-mouth nationalist types who whine and moan about ‘halal’ and ‘dhimmitude’. The title is:

George Orwell betrayed: Islamist Tariq Ramadan gives a lecture in his name

Here are the opening paragraphs.

This week in London, the annual George Orwell Lecture was given by the Islamist writer Tariq Ramadan. Where is one to start?

George Orwell was against religious censorship. Tariq Ramadan campaigned successfully to cancel a production of Voltaire’s play Le fanatisme, ou Mahomet le Prophete in Geneva.

Orwell was a rational man. When Ramadan taught at the College de Saussure he argued in favour of Islamic biology over Darwin.

I’ll tell you what isn’t ‘”rational”: the tone of Johnson’s article.

Cue today’s headbanger! Today’s commenter is “journeyman” who writes:

This is the rant of a  typical BNP type. Notice the hysterical tone of the comment: the way he (I assume it was a he wrote this dreck) rails against “anti-racism” and complains of “White historical guilt”. Notice how he also falls back on Nazi-style hygiene metaphors by using the words “healthy and auto-immune defence mechanisms”. Anyone who isn’t in “journeyman’s” eyes one of ‘us’ is by definition a ‘parasite’. Yet, what these people seem to forget in their rush to claim the ‘West’ is more civilized than any other point on the compass, is the brutality that was used to subdue colonized peoples in Africa, Asia and The Americas. There was nothing ‘civilized’ about the European genocide of the American Indians or the Australian Aborigines.

When hardline right-wingers like “journeytoparanoia” rant and rave about social hygiene, it’s only a matter of time till they start playing the victim.

By doing this the Left aided and abetted in Global Capital / Corporatism’s unquenchable thrist for cheap labour and profit, by crushing any resistance to mass immigration by demonising it as ” fascist ” “bigot ” ” racist ” ” hate monger ” “nazi “

Here, our fascist friend uses words that allude to The Protocols, then he complains that he and his violent ilk are being “demonised”. There’s an old saying where I come from. ‘If the cap fits’ and the cap fits this fasho so well.

The last part of this comment is completely off-the-scale in terms of its ridiculousness.

The Capitalist billionaires who donate to Left wing causes are not “right wing ”  They are Capitalists who support Left wing agendas like the Koch Brothers or Soros who are pro-mass immigration .

The Koch Brothers are what? Left-wing? Not according to all the available information, they’re not. Naturally, “journeytothebin” closes with a much-loved phrase of the anti-immigrationist right: “mass immigration”. Nothing like an appeal to emotion, eh?

Coherent thinking is not the forte of the far-right, hence the potpourri of hate-speech and paranoid ramblings. Their ideas are produced out of hatred, prejudice and fear. They use emotional phrases to play on the heart-strings of gullible members of the public, some of whom will claim they are in favour of ‘free speech’. But in allowing these people to dominant the discourse on immigration, they unwittingly allow the entire debate to be poisoned with the rhetoric of hate and intolerance.

Remember, if you’ve seen a comment on the Telegraph website that you think qualifies as a candidate for Telegraph Comment of the Week, then post a screenshot of the comment and a link to the original article to buddyhell@hotmail.com.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#14)

You’re going to love this comment. Man, is this a doozy. I found this comment on one of The Lyin’ King’s (Dan Hannan) blogs.

The blog, titled “Capitalism: the environment’s best friend” tries to make the claim that unfettered, that is to say laissez-faire, capitalism is best for the environment. Hannan has posted a video of himself speaking in the European Parliament.  in which he claims that capitalism is giving us “cleaner air” (sic). To this he adds, “the best thing to happen to the environment was the collapse of the Berlin Wall”… just sit back and take that in for a moment. I know, barking. Isn’t it?

Now to the comment. This one is from “spencerisright” but I think “spencer” is a little deluded in thinking that he (and it has to be a ‘he’) is “right”.

Yes, “spencer” thinks that the prospect of “increased co2” will spell a bumper harvest for the world’s farmers. What “spenceriswrong” has failed to consider is the fact that increased levels of CO2 will kill humanity and all animal life. And they say that right-wingers aren’t thick? Pull the other one.

Telegraph Comment of the Week (#11)

This week’s Telegraph comment comes from “Sir Tabby” who left his rather naive comment on Will Heaven’s blog, which is little more than an anti-Guardian hatchet-job of which I shall quote a portion.

Starting on p.9 of today’s Guardian, you’ll find an impressive range of voices sticking up for the paper’s coverage of what it calls the “Snowden files” (they’re not actually his, but whatever). The first belongs to the editor of the New York Times, Jill Abramson, and on p.13 the very last voice is Dilma Rousseff’s, the president of Brazil. (They could also addVince Cable to the list.)

Fine. But it’s also worth revisiting the comments below – all made this week by respected public or establishment figures. Alan Rusbridger, the Guardian’s editor, would probably dismiss them out of hand. “They would say that,” he’d argue. Or: “Spies and politicians have been making the same arguments since the early 1990s.” “We’re living in a golden age of surveillance.” etc etc.

Heaven  quotes a few people, one of whom is the spooky Jack-in-the-box head of MI5, Andrew Parker.

Andrew Parker, the director general of the Security Service (MI5)

“It causes enormous damage to make public the reach and limits of GCHQ techniques. Such information hands the advantage to the terrorists. It is the gift they need to evade us and strike at will. Unfashionable as it might seem, that is why we must keep secrets secret, and why not doing so causes such harm.”

Heaven then goes on to quote an anonymous “Downing Street spokesman”.

Downing Street spokesman, speaking on behalf of the Prime Minister

“The Prime Minister thinks [Andrew Parker’s] was an excellent speech and we are, as you would expect, always keeping under review the measures that are needed to contribute to keeping our country safe. I would happily point you to all parts of the director general’s speech.”

I never trust anything that purports to come from a “Downing Street spokesman”. Usually such people tend to be low-grade pen pushers. This is the “free press” in action, guys. It works tirelessly to promote the view of the security services and the party that represents those views in Parliament – the Tories.

Here’s Sir Tabby the Alley Cat’s contribution:

Poor gullible, naive “Sir Tabby”. He thinks the security services “know what they’re talking about”. The security services couldn’t catch a cold, let alone a terrorist cell. MI5’s job is to keep people in a state of fear and to blackmail ordinary citizens, and fit up politicians and foreign dignitaries by photographing them in compromising situations.