Back Towards The Locus

Now, I must depart to the moors, in order that I might hone my Withnail impression. Here, however, are a few odds and ends that I’ve been toying with and shall now throw into the metaphorical gutter to be washed away by the linguistic flow.

• Julian Baggini quotes Lee Jang-moo, the president of Seoul National University, claiming that philosophers could teach us “the direction in which to steer the human destiny”. This leads me to wonder whether the poor fellow’s been reading rather too much Plato. Is a dictatorship of the wise really what that region needs?

• Two fine political bloggers, Septicisle and Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads, are editing a new site titled The Sun – Tabloid Lies, and have given their mission statements. As the hound on Murdoch’s leash, The Sun does not necessarily create prejudice, but nurtures it, fosters it and maximises it. I look forward to laughing, crying and saying “oh, so that’s how..” over the output of this blog.

• The writers at Scribo Ergo Sum have been musing at length regarding Miliband’s maunderings. James, in the latter, not only brands Harriet Harman a ‘harridan misandrist’ – I won’t comment on the substance, although the tone is archaic enough to invoke Chumley Warner – but praises the MiliMotivator for his attacks on the Tories and “refusal to accept their subtle agenda-setting“. The problem, of course, is that one can hardly criticise the emptiness of one’s alternatives without emphasising the substance of oneself. The suggestion is that Labour, while still in office, become the opposition. Practice in advance, maybe?

• Denis Mcshane provides an absurd example of this in reminding us “how bad and sad the Conservative shadow foreign affairs approach is“. If I wasn’t already aware that he’d been a strong supporter of the Iraq War, I’d advise him to stop lurking in the shadows and see what his party have done in broad daylight.

• A McCain campaign video mocks the media love affair with Obama…and includes twice as many media representatives talking about how pathetic Obama love as it does media representatives ‘loving’ him.

Let’s finish on a song: