Hacked off at the BBC

Auntie Beeb
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Let’s rag on the BBC for a bit then, eh? There are a few things about the BBC that cheese me off no end.

For one thing, for a non-commercial organisation they sure do put a lot of ads. Why the fuck do we need to be reminded forty times a day that this new exciting programme will premiere in two days? By the time it finally comes on I’m sick of it already. Not to mention that usually they’re so obnoxious that you want to shoot everybody involved after the second time you’d seen them.

And the programmes being advertised are often no better. How many fucking shows do we need to have where some nice upper middle class white couple gets their room redecorated, their garden done, their clothes revamped or their life sorted out? Yes, they can be entertaining and obviously are cheap to make, but after the fifth variation on a theme I’m sick of them.

Let’s not even mention Fame Academy.

Another cheap format that should’ve been discontinued by now: celebrity quiz shows. Have I Got News for you should’ve been stopped after Angus Deyton was fired. When it was good, it was very very good, but it only looks tired now. The same goes for Buzzcocks, which has had all of the interesting music celebrites by now and is now reduced to the third backup singer for Atomic Kitten.

A related format is that of the celebrity nostalgia shows. I Love 1999? What the fuck? Various non-entities talking about how much they liked four years ago? Or what about Grumpy Old Men? Various baby boomers whinging about all the predictable stuff you’ve heard your parents complain about too often already.

But at least there’s still Eastenders.

On horror

"Literature"
Published on

In a recent discussion on genre in rec.arts.sf.written, someone quoted a post of mine I had written a year or so earlier. Looking at it, I thought it would be interesting enough to share here too.

Horror is a mood, fantasy is a genre.

To explain a bit: horror can be evoked through the mundane (Silence of the Lambs), the science fictional (Who Goes There?) or the fantastic (Dracula).

Horror revolves around evoking a mood of dread, of being scared shitless, a growing sense of unease or discomfort, the sense that something is wrong with the world.

Fantasy revolves around magic in some sense or other, like science fiction revolves around science in some sense or other and mainstream or memitic fiction revolves around “the real world”.

Horror can be evoked in all three of them.

What do you think?

“Dutch racism is a well-intentioned, friendly apartheid”

Dutch politics, Racism
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An interesting article on the openDemocracy site about the Dutch and racism

Dutch racism is a well-intentioned, friendly apartheid: white, Christian, and fuelled by feelings of supremacy and superiority which are self evident, although they will be generally denied.

Denial, indeed, appears to be a built-in part of the mix. Both in the form of anti- semitism, and in the various forms of racism, patronising attitudes prevail. In this sense, the anti-racist norm on which we have relied is part of this denial: since racism is seen as barbaric, nobody — except for small fringe groups — will allow themselves to be called racist or anti-semitic for one moment.

This attitude really came out in the open after the twin impact of the September 11 attacks and the rise of Pim Fortuyn. With a charismatic leader of a far right party legitimising what many people felt anyway, the sluicegates of intolerance have been fully opened these past two years. Many Dutch people just don’t seem to want to have to live in a multicultural society, are fed up with the problem ethnicity du-jour and think that integration is a one-way process.

This is not an attitude unique to the Netherlands; it is also on display in some of the interviews in Stud Terkel’s Race, which is about race relations in the USA. It seems to me to be an attitude common to a priviledged people anytime it stands to lose some of its priviledges.

Why Ken MacLeod won’t be in the pro-war left

Antiwar, Decentists and other ex-lefties
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Ken Macleod has a long and interesting post up detailing why he isn’t part of the
pro-war left:

This is why no argument so far presented could convince me to take the position of the pro-war left.
I admit to being one of those boring old ex-Trots whose thinking on war and peace was shaped, not only by the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s and 1990s, but by the oft-invoked historical memory of the 4th of August 1914, when the War to End All Wars began, and a world ended. As my oldest surviving uncle once said: ‘I haven’t believed in God since the First World War.’ Most of the left, Marxist and liberal and anarchist, backed one side or another in that war too.

Invasion of the entrists

Living Marxism/Spiked online, Pointless contrarianism
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I’ve sort of been following the group that used to be the Revolutionary Communist Party, then morphed into Living Marxism and is now known as Spiked online/The Institute of Ideas. They’re a classic example of how a group of extreme leftwing nutcases can metamorphose into a group of rightwing nutcases.

Yesterday they turned up on George Monbiot’s radar:

One of strangest aspects of modern politics is the dominance of former left-wingers who have swung to the right. The “neo-cons” pretty well run the White House and the Pentagon, the Labour party and key departments of the British government. But there is a group which has travelled even further, from the most distant fringes of the left to the extremities of the pro-corporate libertarian right. While its politics have swung around 180 degrees, its tactics – entering organisations and taking them over – appear unchanged. Research published for the first time today suggests that the members of this group have colonised a crucial section of the British establishment.

The organisation began in the late 1970s as a Trotskyist splinter called the Revolutionary Communist party. It immediately set out to destroy competing oppositionist movements. When nurses and cleaners marched for better pay, it picketed their demonstrations. It moved into the gay rights group Outrage and sought to shut it down. It tried to disrupt the miners’ strike, undermined the Anti-Nazi League and nearly destroyed the radical Polytechnic of North London. On at least two occasions RCP activists physically attacked members of opposing factions.

When I first started getting interested in socialism and politics in general, Spiked Online looked interesting and modern, but it soon seemed to be more glitz than substance: establishment dogma with a fashionable cyberlibertarian sauce. Plenty of opinions on everything, but few ideas of their own…

Earlier posts on the Spiked crew:
Brendan O’Neill doesn’t get it
one man’s journey into sectarianism