Thursday, 14 February 2013
Michael Blackburn: ‘Of course, I may be suffering the same illusion as everyone else in the poetry ghetto, that there’s a way out, that we’re not just muttering to ourselves. I’m not bothered any more if that is the case but I still like the idea that someone, somewhere is taking a look at the poems and enjoying what they see. If the only way to make that happen is to use the latest technology and expect no payment, then why not? As Rimbaud said more than a century ago, “Il faut être absolument moderne”, so let us be absolutely modern.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘THERE’S ONE GROUP of people you don’t get to meet in Borgen: the people. Given the focus of the programme – ie the Danish equivalent of the Westminster bubble – that’s almost inevitable but it’s still telling. There’s an awful lot of pious mouthing about the Denmark “we” want to build; and how “we” want to cherish “our” welfare state, and “we” want to be working towards a “Common Future”, etc. In the realm of political-media doublespeak “we” means those in power; “we” as in “not you, the voters, because you’re too thick to understand”. Inadvertently, Borgen reflects the view that politicians and media have of the populace as mere bit players.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The adoption of inappropriate business practices, however, combined with the demands of political correctness, made dealing with the Arts Council (and its various regional subsidiaries) a nightmare of box-ticking and form-filling. Controversy, when it ever arose, would still conform to the hard left dogmas of identity politics. Mediocrity was often, and still is, the result.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘When it comes to food, the shopper is always innocent (and gullible). There’s never any expectation that the individual should exercise initiative or responsibility for their actions. It’s always the supermarkets to blame. Because they advertise and we’re too stupid to see that they’re trying to sell us something. Because they offer us stuff that we like, and lots of it, at prices we find acceptable? And that’s bad?’
Michael Blackburn: ‘ When young people are texting each other, or are online, playing multiplayer games, sending and receiving messages, photos, having conversations, they’re indulging in that most human of activities: they’re communicating. They’re just being human.’
Michael Blackburn: ‘As Robin McKie says, referring to Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, published in 1997: “The book’s message is simple but politically charged: there is nothing special or innately superior about western people. They are not the master race. They are simply geographically privileged.” There you have it, neatly packaged for the politically correct: “geographically privileged”. Aristotle, Archimedes, Plato, Einstein, Brunel, Locke, Newton, Voltaire, Faraday, Vergil – you’re nothing special, you’re just geographically privileged. Shame on you for being so lucky!’
Michael Blackburn: ‘As for living standards, only the most historically ignorant would deny that it hasn’t raised them. Unfortunately it doesn’t stop the whingers in the comments section from claiming they’ve suddenly found themselves back in Dickensian Britain. It would help if they’d read Dickens, of course.’
Wednesday, 26 December 2012
Michael Blackburn: ‘Different times, different customs. You can’t do anything about that. Judging an issue like this from the past through the lens of our current morality is wrong-headed. Who’s to say that in fifty years some of the most dearly held opinions of the politically correct won’t be viewed as puerile or ridiculous?’
Michael Blackburn: ‘The objective thinker will notice that the intellectual traffic is distinctly one way here: left and left again. Freedom of thought is encouraged, provided you end up at the pre-ordained conclusions. Marcuse, with his theory of “repressive tolerance” would have approved.
‘It also neatly fits in with the current rediscovery of old-fashioned class war. ‘
Michael Blackburn: ‘The Salt police have been active for a number of years. Back in 2008 a bunch of them in local councils organised various campaigns to get us to reduce our intake. In Gateshead this policy resulted in council apparatchiks visiting local fish and chip shops to get the owners to exchange their deadly, heart-attack inducing 17-hole salt shakers with politically correct and healthy five-hole shakers. ‘
Michael Blackburn: ‘Muslims (whether Arab or not) are of use to the professional left for two reasons: the first as a means to attack Israel and the Jews; the second as a means to undermine western culture, under the guise of multiculturalism and anti-colonialism. Muslims are otherwise of no importance and therefore their deaths carry no “moral weight”.’
Saturday, 10 November 2012
Michael Blackburn: ‘The British Empire happened; it’s one of those annoying facts that cannot be removed or relativised in some postmodern way. That it involved brutality, injustice and cruelty is not in question: it was an empire, for God’s sake, not an amusement park. But that it also resulted (perhaps imperfectly) in things that were beneficial should be acknowledged…’
Michael Blackburn: ‘I bet someone in the BBC is wishing Savile had been an old Etonian. Then they could have implied his criminality was coded into his class DNA.’
Michael Blackburn: The Milburn report is statist mission creep: universities are to replace their primary purposes of research and education with the ideological aim of social engineering, in this case “social mobility”. Such moves, we are told by the experts, will result in more fairness and equality and thus, magically, a more prosperous society.
Our closet imperialists.
Michael Blackburn: ‘It’s telling, of course, that neither Colley nor Naughton admit the imperial dimension of the EU itself, a dimension openly acknowledged by the Commission’s oily president, Mr Barroso. That would rather spoil their argument.’