[Rosvanian]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... Court.html

In which Peter struggles with train timetables, the decline of cricket (???), his egg obsession, and the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

Hitchens' England just won a world cup.
Was that his excuse for "Don't recognise my country" because Ali, Rashid and Jordan (But somehow not Stokes or Curran).

No, Hitchens if far too clever to be lumped in with the unapologetic racists like Farage and that cunt from New Zealand and their ilk. I haven't read this particular article so I'm guessing his umbrage here is that 20-20 cricket isn't real cricket.

[Bones McCoy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/articl ... Court.html

In which Peter struggles with train timetables, the decline of cricket (???), his egg obsession, and the separation of powers between the executive and the judiciary.

Hitchens' England just won a world cup.
Was that his excuse for "Don't recognise my country" because Ali, Rashid and Jordan (But somehow not Stokes or Curran).

No, Hitchens if far too clever to be lumped in with the unapologetic racists like Farage and that cunt from New Zealand and their ilk. I haven't read this particular article so I'm guessing his umbrage here is that 20-20 cricket isn't real cricket.

I hope the C from NZ is the bloke off of the GB news, and not England's test match captain.

If Hitch Minor had paid any attention to the national summer passtime, he would know that far more grassroots clubs play the 20 over format then ever played what he considers "proper cricket".

20 overs has been the standard format for midweek evening leagues since the cows came home, and of course schools cricket.
It's also been a popular draw for "festivals" where a local club hosts several visiting teams in a weekend long tournament.
There aren't many village greens hosting games in a 3 4 or 5 day format.

But to know such things you'd been a connection to reality, and friends interested in more than just gammoning for money.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... odbye.html

A return to Peter Hitchens, the Seymour Skinner "No, it's the children who are wrong" meme made flesh.

This week he lays into the racist courtier incident, deciding that it's all the fault of the charity head (for being nasty to an old woman) and Twitter (for reasons).

He then has a sneer at the death of septuagenarian singer Christine McVie, for not having the decency to be a war hero. He also describes her as one of "the new generation".

Then he has a whinge about some posters on a nice old building as part of a display on something he doesn't seem to approve of, moans about guests on Radio 4 (what, invitation lost in the post again?) and says that people prefer being unemployed to working shit jobs for shit wages. OK, he might have a point on the latter, but when he talks about rethinking our attitude to work, I don't think he's considering pay rises.

[Yug]

I'm beginning to wonder if there are two Peter Hitchens'. This piece he wrote for "Compact" magazine back in July is worlds away from the reactionary dribble he churns out for the Fail.

The Attack on Rail

Peter Hitchens

https://compactmag.com/article/the-attack-on-rail

While I don't agree with everything he says, I also don't feel the urge to shout obscenities and throw cowpats at him. Thought provoking, rather than merely provocative.

A glimpse of what Hitchens might have been had the siren call of right wing funded wingnut welfare not proved too attractive to resist.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... urses.html

In which the Hitch offers a solution to the NHS strikes ("Sunak should just sort it out"), oddly segues from "throwing open the borders" to a woman's murder by an admittedly awful man, but one who appears to be "indigenous British", suggests that the police have been dissolved but are still paid handsomely not to strike, and finally moans about a detective drama that features nasty crimes rather than a bit of low level vandalism and possibly doing 80 on the motorway.

[Crabcakes]

Hitch features in part in a recent Origin Story podcast (by Ian Dunt and Dorian Lynskey- much recommended) on the war on drugs, as they dipped into his book on the topic.

Needless to say, his book doesn’t add anything of any use - no evidence for his position that drug use is wholly moral weakness and prohibition and punishment should be total, no discussion of the evidence against, no new insights, no thought. Just a dreary puritanical whine that seems to have started in the 1960s and hasn’t progressed. A Corbyn for the right who despite being younger has his clock stuck even earlier.

I did discover something else about him though - he’s so utterly arrogant he even doesn’t *believe* in dyslexia. A condition where the differences in the brain can be shown on MRI, the treatments and allowances shown to work, and so on. I assume purely from the position that if something was historically attributed to laziness, he’d rather stick with that and continue to demonstrate an wilfully ignorant and bigoted worldview rather than even momentarily entertain the fact that the human brain can be as susceptible to variation and imperfection as the rest of the body.

In keeping, I do hope his optician simply refuses to prescribe glasses in future, and instead shouts at him to buck his ideas up and merely look harder. An utterly idiotic man, perfectly at home in the Mail as they’re all stupid enough to accept a plummy way of talking, a condescending manner and a haughty attitude must be indicative of intelligence rather than a gaping chasm where that intelligence should be, sloppily filled in with useless dogma.

[Andy McDandy]

I said elsewhere that I'm reading "The Year in Tory" at the moment, and in it the author (Russ Jones) identifies a core element of modern conservatism - laziness.

On the one had, there's the Johnsonian version. You can have it all, free movement for you and your goods across the continent, and no foreigners on your doorstep. All the privileges, none of the payments.

On the other, you have Hitchens. And the best way I can think of summing him up is that he really wishes he'd got into Oxford. That's why he projects this air of fogeyishness, of studied superciliousness, of the last decent Englishman plodding through the fields where some old poet got their inspiration. Or sucked off. Or both. It's why he puts such stress on what's basically rote learning - times tables, poems, quotes from Shakespeare, Imperial measures. But it's like Rimmer in Red Dwarf - great at geography when it was just colouring in countries and remembering capitals, not so good when it comes to actually thinking.

[Crabcakes]

Hitchens strikes me as someone who wants everyone to have a hard, miserable time because he has - despite a very obvious life of privilege and comfort - never got what he wanted. His original dream to join the Navy was scuppered by a physical defect (a lazy eye - and I’m sure his loathing of what he sees as defects doesn’t come from this *at all*), he didn’t get into Oxford (though did get into my old Uni - York. Though I’m sure to him it was a mere consolation prize), and he is constantly upstaged and compared and found wanting to his older brother in work, in intelligence, and in simple reasonableness.

He is very much the same Tory type as Johnson despite their differences - absolutely convinced of the fact they deserve more than they have got, and practically incandescent when they feel they have been denied. Hitch will run round screaming ‘ad hominem!’ then claim Partridge-style to have had the last laugh and won, whereas Johnson will plot petty revenge. But at their core it’s the same - spoilt little boys furious at their pedestals not being high enough for their liking, and more furious still that others surpass them in respect garnered.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/columnists/ ... itain.html

In which Hitchens has an issue with a TV drama. It's too grim and unrealistic, but it's also influencing the way the police operate, and it's full of nasty characters, and there's a nice posh lad playing a heavy, and there's some acting going on.

She is a ‘strong woman’, in the jargon of the feminist movement.

Oh just fuck off Peter.

I would say she has not treated her body as a temple, though modern police gear is not flattering to the female figure, is it?

Yeah, because showing off your tits and arse are the most important thing, right?

The opinions of the scriptwriters are slipped in with references to The Guardian, a newspaper which I suspect is not much noted in the Pennine region in which this is drama is set, and in denunciations of Donald Trump.

One, look up Hebden Bridge. Two, a lot of people think he's a cunt.

How impossibly distant it all seems but if Dixon’s methods (which never failed) were still used, real towns in northern England would not have the horrible problems of unchecked crime, especially epidemic shoplifting, and streets where the law-abiding are afraid of the lawless.

I refuse to like Happy Valley. Like so much else on the BBC, it is insidious propaganda for a society and a moral system which have failed. A new elite, including the Corporation, pressed for years to dismantle the old-fashioned family, to undermine the authority of parents, to pretend that crime came out of ‘deprivation’ rather than out of unrestrained human evil.

And when you're done fucking off, fuck off some more.

[Youngian]

In one scene we watched her, despite a continuing smoking habit, chase and catch a lithe young criminal, pull down his trousers and then punch him hard in the face with the force and power of, say, the late Henry Cooper.

I’m Sarah Lancaster’s age, have a smoking habit and can still able to punch people hard in the face, especially if it’s Peter Hitchens.

[Watchman]

“Dixon’s methods (which never failed)” ; Peter mate, it’s just a television program, you know, just like the one you’re saying is unrealistic, also how stupid is it that Dixon can solve all these crimes from beyond the grave that Dirk Bogard put him in

[davidjay]

The era of Dixon, held up as a halcyon time for policing, brought us Operation Countryman, the Birmingham Six, the West Midlands Serious Crime Squad, the Guildford Four and the Bridgewater Four, plus a host of bruised and beaten bodies whose faces didn't fit while walking home at night. I also suspect that Mrs Dixon never had to worry about remembering her purse when she nipped down to the local shop for a few bits and George had a list of pubs on his beat that he could nip into for something to keep the cold out.

[kreuzberger]

He's heard people saying something nice about something so his only means of earning a crust kicks in - a dreary contrarian who raises fewer laughs than the execrable Clarkson.

[Rosvanian]

Hitchens' shtick is that he has traversed the political spectrum and is therefore completely, fully, objectively qualified to pass judgement on all and sundry. He also has God on his side, having turned full-on King James Bible, Protestant in later life having, apparently, objectively weighed up the options. I used to find him interesting but his insistence on taking easy money for these types of pieces for the Mail on Sunday (don't dare tell him it's the same as the Daily Mail) completely undermines his integrity.

[Crabcakes]

Another one like Mogg whose Christianity extends as far as using it as a convenient stick to beat others about morals, and no further.

[Andy McDandy]

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/arti ... stice.html

Peter has a stopped clock moment with Shamima Begum, calling her case out for what it is. Performative bullying for the benefit of suburban thugs. Then he's back to normal.

On the matter of Those Gays:

Expressions of conservative Christian belief, especially about marriage, have been virtually forbidden in the public sector for ages, and the police have long had a habit of taking stern action against conservative street preachers.

Look, the revolution has happened. For most people, this is normal life. If it hasn’t reached you yet, it soon will. Visit my home town, Oxford, this week and you will see, over almost every college in the vast University, the flag of the Republic of Transgendria flying. The new elite, who will march into the political parties, civil service, BBC, the police, law courts and schools in the next few years, all know they must salute this flag if they hope to be employed or promoted. Do wake up, dears. It has happened, and protests against it are tolerated because they make no difference.

My emphasis. How do you reconcile those?

Onto That Telly, and he's not happy with new crime drama The Gold. Fresh from his outrage over Yorkshire people reading the Guardian, he's now saying that this series is some sort of wank fantasy for us lefties.

The Gold, features a militant feminist detective (played by Charlotte Spencer) in Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad in the 1980s. We also glimpse several ‘strong women’ who are the wives of gangsters, a favourite Left-wing fantasy.

Senior police officers meanwhile muse about the desirability of locking up people with posh accents, and one criminal is given lines suggesting he is a revolutionary hero, pitted against England’s traditional rulers.

Apparently there were no feminists, class tensions, politics of envy or intelligent working class people in the 80s.

[Yug]

"Expressions of Conservative Christian values" have been made a no-no in the Civil Service because of the circumstances where they have been expressed. There is a small minority who cannot keep their bigoted views to themselves, and when they come out with their anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti whatever dogma they are deemed to be doing so to provoke and offend. Which, of course, is exactly why they're doing it.

[Youngian]

Onto That Telly, and he's not happy with new crime drama The Gold. Fresh from his outrage over Yorkshire people reading the Guardian, he's now saying that this series is some sort of wank fantasy for us lefties.

The Gold, features a militant feminist detective (played by Charlotte Spencer) in Scotland Yard’s Flying Squad in the 1980s. We also glimpse several ‘strong women’ who are the wives of gangsters, a favourite Left-wing fantasy.

Senior police officers meanwhile muse about the desirability of locking up people with posh accents, and one criminal is given lines suggesting he is a revolutionary hero, pitted against England’s traditional rulers.

Apparently there were no feminists, class tensions, politics of envy or intelligent working class people in the 80s.

Best line was head blagger’s wife Mrs McAvoy; “What?! You’re giving it (the gold) to a builder named Kenny.”

[Crabcakes]

So to sum up: “I demand the right for people to be shitty to other people based on selective interpretation of the parts of an old book that don’t talk about being open and accepting to all (while ignoring the very, very clear messages elsewhere about being open and accepting to all), and also I loathe any demonstration of people being open and accepting to all”

Peter really would be much happier under the Taliban.

[MisterMuncher]

"Expressions of Conservative Christian values" have been made a no-no in the Civil Service because of the circumstances where they have been expressed. There is a small minority who cannot keep their bigoted views to themselves, and when they come out with their anti-gay, anti-abortion, anti whatever dogma they are deemed to be doing so to provoke and offend. Which, of course, is exactly why they're doing it.

I used to be a civil servant. Water board, science division, lab monkey second class. I had to work with a born again type whose breadth of ignorance was matched only by it's depth*, and he was genuinely incapable of getting through a lunch break without giving us all the benefit of his "revolutionary" creationist apologetics. The only upshot was myself and a few others having the joys of a quiet, informal word from the line manager not to argue with him because it simply wasn't worth the hassle if he decided this amounted to hostility. So yeah, you've got the exact measure of it.


*Oh, fuck me but he had to be one of the poorest thinkers I've ever met. There are so many examples, but as a preçis: whilst driving his wife's car he ran out of diesel. In fear of his life (read: he was in a vaguely Catholic area and his sectarianism caused him to believe Marty McGuiness would appear like The Duke in Escape From New York to fuck him up) he reasoned that there had to be a quantity of fuel lying in the arse of the tank that would get him up the road, if only he could get it up to the level of "the wee pipe that sticks it out".

So, he pissed into the tank to "float it up". Shockingly, this didn't work, and some locals chanced past, for him a taxi home and sorted him out with a mechanic (this being before mobiles where ubiquitous).

Most damning of all, he thought that this was a story to tell to a group of scientifically educated people.