"Brown's migrant work plan slammed"

Gordon Brown advocates lots of shifts breaking rocks in a quarry, combined with a disciplined regime of press-ups for immigrants - sort of.

But the more important question, over and above whether Gordon Brown has lost his damn mind, is where outside the world of journalism do people ever get 'slammed' for doing or saying certain things? Have you ever heard anyone using this expression in normal conversation? Neither have I. So how come people accept day after day this linguistic curiosity in their newspapers? Not that it's exactly a weighty issue - but still...

For more sense and patience on this topic, see here.

Against the Old Firm

Here's a photo stolen from Mr Eugenides.



Here's a demonstrator complaining about the 'unacceptable normalisation' between London and Dublin. Something to do with a rugby game, apparently. Anyway, the diddy with the placard complaining about 'foreign games' is, as Mr Eugenides points out, wearing the full regalia of Glasgow Celtic.

[Glasgow, in case you were unaware - and you could be forgiven for being ignorant of this fact - is not part of Ireland.]

He's doing this because he's an idiot.

As are most Rangers supporters.

If you go to Dublin, you'll see people wearing Celtic strips; if you go to Belfast, you'll see people wearing Rangers strips. I find this unbelievably depressing.

Back home - let me describe the situation here. You can get a staffroom full of teachers - you know, people who are supposed to have degrees and shit.

Some of them are monotheists that come from a rain-soaked country where people drink too much.

Then you go to a different type of school where they are monotheists who come from a rain-soaked country where people drink too much.

There's actually two countries involved here but it's easy to get confused because a) they're so fucking similar, b) the people who owe their allegiance to country A were actually born in country B.

As well as being monotheists who are drunk and wet - both groups are distinguished by having a fairly unsubtle view of history, to put it charitably.

Despite being to the outside observer so unbelievably similar, each group often refer to the other in suspicious tones as 'them'. In some cases they go as far as to limit our already limited gene-pool by declining social interaction with the Other.

That's why I hate the Old Firm.

If you are a Rangers or Celtic supporter, you may have been offended by this piece. Which is a good thing, in my view.

Tagged

By Jazza at Nourishing Obscurity who asks, "Which two posts have been your most viewed of all time?"

The short answer is I don't know because whereas Extreme Tracking gave you this sort of information, Sitemeter, to my knowledge, doesn't. However, if data gathered from recent activity plus what Google brings up, it's this one - largely because Tim Worstall linked it - followed by this heart-felt piece of spleen.

De-motivation

Chris Dillow describes a world in which the payment of bonuses would be unacceptable:

"It would be one in which incentives were unimportant. And this, in turn, would be a world where people had no effect upon outcomes. It's be one where workers filled space, like those poor sods with placards advertising golf sales, or merely obeyed bosses' instructions*. In such a world, bonuses and incentives would be unacceptable, as they'd introduce useless random noise into pay.

This would be a world in which workers had no agency at all, but were merely passive objects to be manipulated."

Are there any other employees of Glasgow City Council out there? Uncanny, isn't it?

For 'secular fundamentalism'

There is, for me, a blood-pressure raising article by Stuart Jeffries about 'Britain's new cultural divide', which he claims is between those who believe and those who don't. In a theme that is now becoming familiar, Jeffries describes a clash of 'fundamentalisms', with the religious on one side, and 'militant atheists' like Dawkins, Hitchens etc. on the other. Take this, for example:

""We are witnessing a social phenomenon that is about fundamentalism," says Colin Slee, the Dean of Southwark. "Atheists like the Richard Dawkins of this world are just as fundamentalist as the people setting off bombs on the tube, the hardline settlers on the West Bank and the anti-gay bigots of the Church of England. Most of them would regard each other as destined to fry in hell.

"You have a triangle with fundamentalist secularists in one corner, fundamentalist faith people in another, and then the intelligent, thinking liberals of Anglicanism, Roman Catholicism, baptism, methodism, other faiths - and, indeed, thinking atheists - in the other corner. " says Slee. Why does he think the other two groups are so vociferous? "When there was a cold war, we knew who the enemy was. Now it could be anybody. From this feeling of vulnerability comes hysteria.""

Recognise your position in this triangle? Neither do I. This is, I reckon, on account of the fact that it doesn't exist. I have my disagreements with the way in which Hitchens and Dawkins approach the subject of religion but to suggest their 'fundamentalist secularism' is in some way akin to the demented theocrats who would rather immolate themselves and innocent commuters than live and raise their children is absolutely outrageous. Take this piece of tripe, for example:

"The intolerance for people of faith, though, might not seem to be the preserve of only angry atheists such as Dawkins and Hitchens. Instead, there is a widespread fear that religion is being treated as a problem to British society, best solved by airbrushing it from the public sphere."

By 'airbrushing' we can assume that what is meant here is measures like the separation of religion from the state with, for example, the denial of public subsidy for religious segregation and indoctrination in public schooling. The sort of system, in other words, that has been enjoyed by citizens of the American and French republics since the 18th century. The idea that this is merely the secular counterpart to the theocracy of the Taliban is a damnable lie that has to be challenged. For what are the 'fundaments' of secularism? Not a state like Stalin's Russia or Mao's China that insists to the point of coercion that people be atheists - only one that holds religion to be a private matter and where the government is constitutionally compelled to be neutral on matters of faith.

The reality, in contrast to the falsehoods propagated in this insidious article, is that this vision of the secular state is at the opposite end of the spectrum to the religious states of history, as well as those still in existence in Iran and Saudi Arabia. Because whilst the latter insist that men believe, the former does not. While they may be, and are, imperfect in many ways - and while people of goodwill may disagree concerning the proper boundaries of public religious expression - in such states liberty demands that a distinction should be made between what is a crime and what is a sin. Anyone who claims this is in someway equivalent to living under a theocratic or communist tyranny is either an ignoramus or a fucking liar.

Update: Jim Denham on the same subject.