It is amazing just how far you can get with the right family connections plus a slavish devotion to licking the arse of the powers that be. Ladies and gentleman, I give you Patrick Wintour, as talentless a piece of servile scum as ever disgraced the once fine profession of journailsm.
Here we have quite possibly the worst piece of political journalism in British history. Even given that it is supposed to be a puff piece by someone as openly critical of New Labour as Himmler was of Hitler, it is pathetic. What information precisely is it meant to convey?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/wintour-and-watt/2010/mar/26/alistair-darling-gordon-brown
The astonishing thing is that the completely intellect free Wintour is actually the political editor of the Guardian. I get so angry about the Guardian because it was once – within my lifetime – truly a great newspaper.
I offer £100 cash to anyone who can show me a piece of genuine journalism by Wintour – and to make it fair, commenters on the blog can vote whether it is genuine or not. On the debit side, allow me m’lud to enter this atrocious Blair apologia:
Tony Blair to tell Chilcot inquiry: war stopped Saddam building WMDsFormer PM expected to tell inquiry that without military action Saddam would have built WMD using the team of scientists he had assembled for the task
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jan/29/tony-blair-wmd-saddam-hussein
Not a single word of scepticism about the bonkers Blair narrative from Wintour.
In fact, I should be fascinated to know if anyone can unearth any evidence that lickarse Wintour has ever asked any New Labour politician a sensibly critical question.
Why precisely is Wintour’s £220k a year salary and expenses paid by the C P Scott trust and not by New Labour?
We’ve had Israelis on Irish blogs. They do more than post “Jooooos” every day or so, but they do make the anti-semitic argument. They’ve tried to justify what was done in Lebanon and Gaza. They complain about rockets. They leave when they realise what they’re facing, by way of opposition.
My latest take on Larry is that he’s retired and at a bit of a loose end. Maybe he doesn’t sleep too well.
dreollin: They write on Irish blogs justifying what they did in Lebanon? Hmm. Wonder if they can justify this:
http://wakeupfromyourslumber.blogspot.com/2006/07/israeli-children-sign-their-missiles_18.html
Glenn, that’s dreadful. I’ll pass it on.
My take on Larry is he is retired and still a virgin.
Larry would say criticizing what those children did is anti-Semitism.
Those Zionist say criticizing the firing of those bombs is anti-Semitism.
If you say what those children are writing is wrong, they will say you are only doing it because those children are Jews.
That is their answer to everything.
And mostly, it works.
It doesn’t work so well with Muslims, so they mainly concentrate on you guys.
If they, whether here or on the Irish Blog call you an Anti-Semitism, tell them to stuff their Anti-Semitism up their bums.
We do, Arsalan. 🙂
Arsalan – whine, whine, whine. You have to make up things to whine about.
Simple Larry’s vacuous post prompted me to mention this. Reporters are finding the pressure on Palestine is actually promoting violence, by expecting the leaders to Do Something about the intolerable conditions:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/insidegaza
Someone I really respect mentioned to me yesterday that it may be that the ‘larries’ are ‘here, there and everywhere’ and that their contract is likely to be directed at defaming oppositional websites that have wide readership so that the websites fail to gain broader currency, esp. in the USA.
I think the person who posited this dynamic has a point.
Short, snappy phrases filled with references to Jews, etc. tend to get picked-up on internet engine searches. The arguments on the sites tend to become narrowed-down because arguing with someone who is shouting insults and making facile comments which are refractive of rational discourse tends to have that effect.
I sense that most of the people who blog here already suspect such a dynamic in any case.
Suhayl – we can suspect forever, but I wonder if it achieves anything, helps us understand ? Motives are difficult to be sure about, once you start doubting honesty.
Unless there’s something that can actually be established, proved. I see the results, certainly, but is there a way to distinguish the motive ? Is there anything in the behaviour that isn’t just as well explained by suggesting that Larry(eg) is a narcissistic obsessive who “just” likes to see people jumping when he prods them, and doesn’t have the (self- or other-) respect to bother much how he gets his fix ?
Provability :-
against – any conversation you could get involved in, anywhere on the internet, is vulenrable to this kind of Gresham’s Law, bad conversation drives out good. It doesn’t matter what the subject, pick the least likely to be subject to reasons for any such attack, and just so long as it comes to public visibilty in some way, it’s not likely to be very long before there will be people turning up acting in very similar ways. The ability to give oneself any name one wants, change it to taste, etc, seems to let a lot of people give themselves permission to act the obnoxious disruptive arsehole for the most trivial of reasons, or apparently none. Occam’s razor is handy to keep around.
neither for nor against – your probing for taboos is interesting, but on the assumption that you’re speaking to a paid liar, isn’t it diagnostic of a badly-thought-out effort, rather than an effort per se ? If it’s a job, then the better someone is at it, the less you’d be able to tell. Yes, he isn’t answering, but then again that’s not atypical behaviour, he also evades many other questions, arguments, responses. He isn’t engaging in conversation, he’s throwing stones and running away.
for – the hypothesis that this stuff is being posted for the sake of being made use of elsewhere, is testable. Are there examples elsewhere where this blog is being dismissed by means of them ? The proof of the pudding; where is it being eaten ?
I’m not disputing that huge sums of money are being disbursed on all sorts of propaganda/astroturf operations, I’m just wondering how much it’s worth bothering about in this case – what difference does it make, I mean ? Hanlon’s is another useful razor – “never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity”. Our response, I mean. Does it make a difference to the way we’d respond to it ? If somebody’s flinging their shit around, does an analysis of their motives lead us to vary our responses ?
There are other flavours, of course; the variously-named BNP, for example. But that’s hardly a “hidden” agenda.
Ah, I missed a bit – “the ‘larries’ are ‘here, there and everywhere'”
That might be evidence. Of something.
How are ‘larries’ and ‘here, there and everywhere’ defined, recognised ?
If it just means that people act the disruptive arsehole all over the place in various different ways, then; well, yes, that’s life.
Or is it something more specific ? People emitting a recognisable set of stock comments ? Reacting to a specific set of stimuli ? Blogs on a distinguishable set of subjects all being diverted in similiar directions ?