Rise of the body fascists - Curse of the Mail comments

I'm just going to get straight to it, here is some immense stupidity in the comments of a Jan Moir opinion piece. Who would have thought it? Ignoring the article, which isn't that bad, just incredibly boring to me, let's dive straight into the comments, starting with this gem from Cindy Chaplin

""Curvier"? How I hate that word. What you mean is "fatter". Why can't people just say so?"

Interesting point Cindy, so in the spirit of straight talking, instead of saying: "You have an interesting name" I will from now on tell idiots like you that "You have a stupid name." That feels a lot better, I like all this insulting; "Cindy Chaplin you are a colossal brainfart."

Jane in Brighton has another interesting bit of body fascism:

"TRANSLATION: I don't take care what I eat, I stuff myself and drink too much, I don't take any exercise.............BUT I still want to look like an attractive, slim woman. 


GET REAL, PLEASE."

Insinuating that all women who are larger than a size 12 are fatties who stuff their faces? Check. Insinuating that only slim women can be attractive? Check. Shouting because everyone CAN'T HEAR YOU OTHERWISE? Check. Congratulations Jane, you've managed to live in one of the liberal capitals of Britain and become one of the biggest body fascists in the Daily Mail comments.

Now one from a man, maybe he can bring some sense to proceedings. Unfortunately he can't, over to you Alan...

"Let us be quite honest sizes 16 / 18 + can never be elegant and certainly not as you say "real womanly". Ms Moir there are actually places in the world where slim trim and elegant are the national norm and where women are very much real. Stop making excuses for the UK trend towards over eating and lack of exercise, instead try to instill some pride of appearance into our womenfolk. Oh and by the way, start at first base, yourself."

Oh, just fuck off.

See the connection? The Daily Mail and their readers don't.

As all intelligent people who ever read the Daily Mail know, the newspaper isn't the most consistent, but these two articles I noticed today just magnified this.To compound it they were both placed in the same box of stories, almost next to each other:

Does the Mail seriously not see the links between the two stories? Let's first look at the "Council carried out out risk assessment on boy, 14, who wanted to mow tiny patch of village grass" story. This fits into the normal Mail narrative of something being stopped by the 'Elf and Safety brigade,' and if you didn't read the actual story it would be quite reasonable to expect that they stopped him from mowing the grass. Turns out they didn't and just carried out a slightly lengthy risk assessment.


My issue with the Mail here isn't their coverage of the story which doesn't blame it on the 'elf and safety brigade' but on council red tape, but more the fact that they saw fit to cover the story in the first place. In the consideration of whether a story is newsworthy, one of the things to be considered by the editor is what reaction it will engender from the readers. The Mail is perfectly aware that this story, fitting into their overall narrative of 'red tape' 'elf and safety' and appealing to their readers hatred of bureaucracy is going to enrage their readers and therefore they don't dig too deep and look for the real reason behind red tape and bureaucracy.

The real reason, in many cases is the compensation culture that is prevalent in many parts of society these days, as illustrated in this article: "Mother sues National Trust for £300,000 after son, 11, is killed by falling branch during visit to stately home"

This story is a relatively simple one and it is chosen mostly because it again advances a tabloid narrative, the 'compensation culture' that their readers will get worked up about. The same readers might comment with something like: "this cultural [sic] of litigation is getting out of hand" and then go over to the other article and comments something about how this bureaucracy is getting out of hand without making the link between the two, in that the bureaucracy  is often caused by the culture of litigation, often fuelled by the tabloids. It seems like concious doublethink on the Mail's part but it just feeds their readers stupidity and stops them seeing the full story beyond their narratives.

Maybe it's not doublethink by the Mail, maybe it's just plain and simple stupidity or the fact that the articles may be written by different journalists. However, the people in charge - Dacre and his sub-editors - must notice the direction their newspaper is taking and unless they're just completely stupid, it's just deliberately misleading to the readers, fuelling their prejudices.

Basically, what the Daily Mail does best.

Very little ever changes

In between watching the cricket this afternoon, I've started reading John Simpson's book "Unreliable Sources." I got the book for my birthday several months ago, and started reading it but only got through the first chapter for some reason. When I returned to it today I started reading a chapter on the reporting of Immigration at the beginning of the 20th century.

The only things that seem to have changed between then and now are the targets of the attacks and the fact that journalists now have to be a bit more subtle, but only a bit. The main attacks are by the same suspects now as they were then: the Express and the Mail. One telling quote is when Simpson says:

"The Express was almost comically virulent, looking for every possible way of stirring up feeling against the immigrants"

Some of the headlines are strikingly similar to ones used today, the Express running a headline "Alien Horde for Great Britain" and "Alien Horde Coming." Some however were as Simpson says, comical: "NATION MADDER. CAUSES OF INSANITY. MENACED BY ALIENS"

The link between immigration and crime, however erroneous is as common now as it was then, the small improvement over the century being that it no longer verified by dodgy science such as that practised by Dr. Ernest W. White in the Express of 1st August 1903

In his article the psychologist speaks of immigrants "with poor bodies and poorer minds", "of the criminal type", "in many cases with neurotic inheritances" and warns that "If no stop is put to this, the stability of the race, mental as well as physical, will be undermined"

It's just a good thing that dodgy science like this is no longer practiced in the tabloids today.

Oh. And some more

A bit of housekeeping

After a promising 2009, I feel I've neglected this blog a little this year, and the decision to start a new blog - A Cultural Philistine - detailing my seemingly unsuccessful attempt to watch 100 films I'd never seen before in a year may have been a bad idea, splitting my rare blogging between two rarely updated blogs.

So I've decided that this blog needs a bit of a new beginning, all my old posts will stay but I'm going to attempt to start blogging regularly again and basically expanding this blog from politics and the media to more diverse topics, meaning that this blog will hopefully become a lot more interesting to read.

With a new start comes a new name, Allsorts was frankly a filler name and I've thought long and hard about a new one, and my final answer is...

Leftish Tendency.

Mail speculation - Mostly wrong

At least that's what I think...

So I'm going to put it to the test, as often as possible I'm going to pull some Mail speculation out and comment on it, record it and wait until the truth becomes obvious.

Today it's "Is it a Dannii boy? X Factor judge Minogue drops a big hint about the sex of her unborn child"

The major speculation in this is that the unborn child of Dannii Minogue is a boy because of a picture of a babygro seemed to be one for a baby boy. For one, some baby clothes can be quite unisex, and isn't it also possible that the couple don't want to know until it is born and are buying some stuff for both eventuality.

In any case, all this is pure speculation, and in a couple of months time I'm sure all will be revealed. I would just love it, if the Mail managed to guess wrong in a 50/50 situation.

EDIT: Oh bollocks, I managed to pull out one of the rare occasions where the Daily Mail gets something right.

I don't normally single out comments...

... but this one from Polly Toynbee's excellent rebuttal of Call Me Dave's Guardian comment piece is so stupid in a 'clearly this person has some intelligence' kinda way.

Unlike a lot of BBC Have Your Say comments, it is properly punctuated and readable, but still monumentally wrong in almost every way

Taking it from the beginning...

So not such bad chaps really. If only they could get rid of "Dave" and give us someone else. David Davis perhaps. These policies are just sensible. There is no reason to be anything other than skeptical of the climate change case, bankers' pay caps are asinine, regulation is the problem and the 50p top tax rate is just idiotic.

Wow. Where to start? The ludicrous climate change denial, lack of commitment to cutting wages the wages of and taxing the very top earners, on to the most astonishing thing ever... 'regulation is the problem.' I pray you're not talking about the unrestrained financial sector which got us in this mess in the first place. Maybe they're just talking about regulation in general,  something which makes it even stupider.

Continuing the stupidity... Thatcher was a progressive. Right, that makes sense.

I assume that in her rush to get words that press all her readers' buttons - fundamentalist for instance - Ms Toynbee has sacrificed common sense and logical coherence. If it is a return to Conservative roots - and it isn't - then of course it is a change. It is progress, of sorts. Thatcher was a radical and a progressive. Dave is not. Just because you don't like the direction she took the country doesn't mean she did not bring about real change.

Progress does not mean going backwards you utter tool! 'Just because you don't like the direction she took the country .' You mean backwards right? 'doesn't mean she did not bring about real change.' Change in a backwards direction is regression you rhetorically challenged buffoon.

The worst thing about all of this is, that this is a typical Tory voter who demonstrates why Cameron's 'caring conservatives' are not the progressives they claim to be. It's enough to make you go and smash your brains out on a wall.

Paul Wiffen - The UKIP racist standing in my constituency

It has been said many times before that UKIP are the BNP for middle class people who aren't openly racist, but harbour those sort of thoughts, and it appears that this may actually be true.

The Telegraph reports that Paul Wiffen - the London UKIP chair and PPC for Ilford South - has been suspended from any party positions (but still allowed to campaign for UKIP in his constituency) for this racist rant on the website Community Care...

Britain is full, you prat! Even your scummy, illiterate Grauniad admits it!

In the circumstances, I think "get lost" is positively polite. "Go forth and multiply" elsewhere would be my wording.

You left-wing scum are all the same, wanting to hand our birthright to Romanian gypsies who beat their wives and children into begging and stealing money they can gamble with, Muslim nutters who want to kill us and put us all under mediaeval Sharia law, the same Africans who sold their Afro-Caribbean brothers into a slavery that Britain was the first to abolish (but you still want to apologize for!)

Worry about where we are going to live and grow food, you wanker, not the UKIP policy that might just save your worthless skin! 

I shouldn't be surprised that this sort of idiocy has emerged from UKIP, but this is a colossal mistake just before an election. 

Digging deeper it seems surprising that this story first broke in Hugh Muir's Guardian diary almost a week ago yet it took until today for the Telegraph and BBC London News to pick it up. Muir commented that...

The end came quickly. We rang Ukip, and though he seemed quite defiant when we rang him, they last night suspended him from any party position with a view to disciplinary proceedings. He was a character. But he hardly seemed very nice.

Still the question remains, if UKIP aren't a racist party, why aren't they stopping him standing in Ilford South and why isn't any of this on their website.

Perhaps the funniest part of the whole this is his apology...

Explaining what sparked his outburst he said: “I was very surprised to see such a party political piece on a website called Community Care, and when I read the lies about Ukip being a racist party, I just saw red and fired off an angry email.

So he saw someone saying that UKIP were racist, and proceded to prove them right... some things are beyond satire.