Dumb and Dumber is an American movie about a pair of idiots who create chaos and disaster. Teletubbies is a British children’s program about a group of brightly dressed humanoids who emote rather than articulate. I’ve never seen either the movie or the program, but over the years I’ve learned what they’re about and what […]
Bullets are harmless. So are microbes. And innocent Israel is the helpless puppet of amoral America. How can we know all that? It’s thanks to a falsehood-smashing truth-technique recently deployed at Spiked Online. That’s the headquarters of the Trotskyist libertarians who fight for a better world under the guidance of the Jewish sociologist Frank Furedi. […]
The book I remembered; the author I forgot. Not that I ever read the book. I just read about it in Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 – A Personal Choice (1984). One of the choices was called Riddley Walker and Burgess lavished praise on it. He described how it used […]
Yuck! Stale pale males. They’re the worst of the wickedest, the vilest of the villainous. That’s what all decent and caring progressive folk are agreed upon. But this raises what you might call a prosoponic paradox (prosōpon is ancient Greek for “face”). In Britain, the proudly progressive Labour Party has traditionally been the home of […]
Ich habe meinen Tod gesehen! That’s one of the most plaintive and poignant things I’ve ever read. Ironically enough, it’s also one of the most penetrating. In English it goes: “I’ve seen my death!” That’s what Anna Bertha Röntgen, wife of the German physicist Wilhelm Röntgen, reportedly said in 1895 after she saw an X-ray […]
