Thursday, February 08, 2007

Only 50 Enemies ?

Poll Pot on the cursed bloggers. Prague Tory and a number of other bloggers have fisked this pretty well, I'll just add my two penn'orth.

"Toynbee conceded that she is no "insider" with powerful friends"

Hence the weekend Chequers invites.

"I have around 50 arch-enemies who seem to get up at about five in the morning — they have obviously never bought The Guardian, they wouldn't contaminate their fingers with it, and they are right-wingers who hate The Guardian and everything it stands for. They really, really hate me."

Poll Pot, of course, is above such hatreds.

I'll leave the last word on Ms Pot to Free Born John - a wonderful post that I've linked to before, and doubtless will again.

One thing, and one thing only, keeps people trapped in the kind of poverty of mind where they don't feed their children properly even when they could, and shit in their own stairwells. It's a lack of ownership; a lack of self-reliance. It's a lack of the very concept of self-reliance. It's an idea that the mere thought that they should be self-reliant is immoral, evil, callous and cruel. And though this idea is gibbered out by halfwits, it actually derives from Polly Toynbee.

UPDATE - the very wonderful British Spin, back in the real world, agrees 100% with Polly.

The trouble is that the biggest outbursts of outraged ranting and ill researched nonsense tends not to come from the small audience lunatics like me, but from blinkered idealogues given space in the Guardian and the biggest source of ill informed gossip and speculation as central fact are the TV news channels.

Whether it's Andrew Murray, the always reliably barmy A L Kennedy, or today's effort from Geooffrey Wheatcroft, the Guardian has done more to promote ranting than any number of blogs. And whether it's Natasha Kaplinsky, Andrew Neill or Kay Burley, the TV news channels have done more to promote superficiality and scandal as the currency of news than any number of spittle flecked bloggers like Guido Fawkes.

12 comments:

dearieme said...

There's an implication at the end that needs teasing out. Does he think that Pol doesn't rise to the standard of half-wit?

Anonymous said...

Toynbee's main concern is to find work for the therapeutic bourgoisie - like herself, middle-class home, educational dropout, but with a strong sense of being entitled to adminster other lives.

It is the simple fact that left to the private sector economy unemployment would probably be 60% in Britain; it is the need to employ all those graduates that makes it essential to have an Overbearing Sanctimonious State staffed with people's commissars and aided by lawyers.

Praguetory said...

Cheers for the nod, Laban, although I have been accused by some of being too charitable in that fisk and would consider myself a trainee enemy at best. I note your helpful aside - on the Chequers visits.

Anonymous said...

So I see she goes on about the Daily Mail quite a bit. Obviously the root of all evil!

It seems she wants respect for elected politicians. Would she still be calling for such a thing if anyone from the right were in power?

Anonymous said...

"like herself, middle-class"

Being a Toynbee, I'm not sure she'd really be defined as middle-class. Reading her rants about the working class poor when she is obviously too far removed from them to have any understanding of what she is talking about, makes my balls ache.

Still, you can't blame her. With the family she had she was bound to be born a socialist - poor bitch was too stupid to form her own opinions.

paul ilc said...

It is the simple fact that left to the private sector economy unemployment would probably be 60% in Britain.

It's not a "fact"; it's your half-baked opinion.

If the public sector got out of the way, the private sector would move in. At present, the bloated public sector crowds out the private sector, particularly in 'deprived' areas, by (a) soaking up the most employable people and encouraging local wage inflation and (b) stifling enterprise with local and national regulation/controls and fostering welfare dependency with handouts.

Anonymous said...

"It seems she wants respect for elected politicians."

To be fair, I want that too.

No, actually, what I want is elected politicians who deserve respect through their words & deeds.

So, probably not the same thing after all...

Anonymous said...

What she wants is repect for Blairite politicians. She has scant regard herself for any other politicians.

Still this was the woman that wrote in the Independent that women should be denied the vote because they have a tendency to vote Conservative, thus proving they were unable to make sensible political choices.

I'm not sure whether she has a confused sexual identity or whether the peculiar semantics of her statement had eluded her, but The Independent quickly tired of her so now she works for the Guardian.

Anonymous said...

As a Guardian reader in the 80s I can assure you she had a regular gig there then.

The problem is that for the likes of PP is that they spend their daily lives surrounded by intelligent, interesting, well educated, well off people. They start to think the whole world is like that.

Anonymous said...

Ms Toynbee has numerous faults, and it pains me to say this, but even she does not merit the many vicious insults that are thrown her way by some bloggers on the Guardian blog. Yes she's a rich bugger of socialist pretensions, but I do feel for her...

paul ilc said...

Still, you can't blame her. With the family she had she was bound to be born a socialist - poor bitch was too stupid to form her own opinions.

You seem to be buying the left's environmental determinism here. Of course, we can blame her for her folly and her arrogance. Many people less stupid than she is can see what's wrong with left-liberalism. She has as much responsibility for her illusions and fantasies as anyone else.

Anonymous said...

It's not a "fact"; it's your half-baked opinion.

If the public sector got out of the way, the private sector would move in.


Now that is really half-baked

The Private Sector is a damp squib in Britain because the British are obsessively cautious and permeated with accounts and lawyers. The City is dominated by accountants. the Vecap Sector is besotted with merchant banking transactions of buying out Plcs rather than seed capital for ideas.

This country has a sufficient number of unemployed engineers and IT professionals for a whole Silcon Valley to emerge from the City.

Then again Filtronic Plc did not sell its largest division to Powerwave Inc because of public-sector employment - but because the City would not fund its R&D - largest shareholder being Prudential with 12%


Dyson spent 20 years and received no funding from The City but had to mortgage himself to Lloyds Bank and face bankruptcy after 200 prototypes -


Britain is NOT a risk-taking society but one obsessed with social status and guaranteed incomes