Which hits home more,
this:
Once again, it is the way fresh fruit is presented here that has made my day. I have not seen pineapple cut quite like this anywhere else. [And again, they will do this for you in the simplest bar.]
or
this:
The retired detective at the centre of the Sadiq Khan bugging case was bugged for months by fellow officers as part of a "witch-hunt" intended to stop him becoming a whistleblower, it has been claimed.
Former Detective Sergeant Mark Kearney, 49, was subjected to months of surveillance with his friend Sally Murrer, a local newspaper reporter, ostensibly because police suspected him of giving tip-offs on local crime stories.
But Mrs Murrer, 49, is convinced the huge police investigation, in which her car was bugged and secretly fitted with a tracking device, was a "smokescreen" to ensure Mr Kearney was discredited before he could go public with details of how he was ordered to bug the MP.
... or how about this?
Tsk, tsk, pushing Hillary on the little people to continue the policies of the Council on Foreign Relations, The Federal Reserve and the New World Order. Pres. Bill Clinton was a member of the CFR. The repeal of the Glass Steagall Act of 1933, NAFTA, and the China Trade Agreement were in the best interests of the elitist. And due to Clinton's policies, we, the little people are being robbed with the contrived subprime mortgage, credit crunch, and inflation to steal the wealth of the middle class by the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs.....
And there is a
debate right now between
Guido,
Samisdata and Tiberius:
Where I concede is that Paul Staines is right: there is a separation between Paul and Guido, between the person and the blog persona. Perhaps because this blog is so much the creation of my personal whim and not of any attempt to create a persona, that means that I underestimated that.
Political blogs who take themselves very, very seriously abound but ultimately it's a small pool in comparison to the general populace out there. I agree with numbers 2-4 above as I've a political mind but not exclusively political and I'd argue that the all-consuming politblogger who likes nothing better than velociraptor debate would scathingly view someone speaking of how pineapple was presented as trite and insignificant.
There is a huge pool of people out there for whom a constant diet of daily politics is as interesting as intestinal worms. This blog's readers come from different walks of life and different persuasions. Does that make them trite, as our Velociraptor Anonymous
says:
There is no debate worthy of the name on your blog, merely pre-arranged visits to generate stats, and stupid banal comments ... Even the debate by your friends, when they can be bothered, is contrived, at best. You may want to run a hierarchical system based on whether some one is certified. Many of your bloggers should be!
Easy to rage over issues on which we're largely agreed and where our pool of blogfriends equally rage to each other and everyone's happy. Except it's not about raging to each other - it's about presenting the message to a pool of non-politicos who are not interested, who have their own agendas, including pineapple and who have their own lives.
The way pineapple is presented is an aspect of living which comes under the heading of "taste" and "rising above the banal", equally important issues in today's tendency to mediocrity. All right, police corruption is a major issue. So how should a blogger get that message across to people out there who have a life, how to get them interested in corrupt politicians or how dire Clinton and the CFR really are?
Firstly, in small doses, without the stridency which I've been equally guilty of falling into. Secondly, realizing that the pool of non-politically thinking people is not certifiable but actually amenable to an idea if it's presented understandably and with respect for the reasoning ability of the reader. The commenter who shows not a great deal of understanding of an issue has simply shown he's not au fait with the issue. OK, so the blogger has to do better next time.
The Case for Slowly EducatingEducation doesn't have to mean some sort of nazi force-feeding of names and statistics and resorting to insults when the other doesn't go along with you.
Instead, it's a war of attrition, an education process where most people will listen or internalize if it's presented the right way in the first place. The onus is on the presenter to interest the reader - not that of the reader to knuckle down and start howling with rage.
I howl with rage myself because I've read the material and followed the links but that's no guarantee anyone else is going to be equally upset. You write:
I've given you so many pointers to serious aspects, it just beggars belief that you missed them all.
Who says I've missed them? Who says that readers didn't click on those links, follow some of them, read them and note them at the back of the mind? Just because an army of non-political readers don't take up the cudgels and storm the ramparts, a la Rik Mayall the urban guerilla, doesn't mean it didn't register.
The Brit in particular is attuned to passive resistance and cold shouldering. It's more the Italian who's into the impassioned debate. Your links, Anonymous, are invaluable and I'd suggest that many people for whom Mark Kearney or Hutton are not household words are now cognisant of them.
Then you go and say:
Carry on thinking with your balls, James. You'll get some nooky in the end.
... and all the good work you've done disintegrates because who's going to take anything you say seriously after that? There's a place for your style, even here but there's also a place for "steady as she goes", which is the style more favoured by the great silent majority out there.
The Case for PineappleThere are some very nasty people out there who are hellbent not just on enslaving society in the next few years but on defining the agenda in dire terms. Therefore everyone must be in the same dire frame of mind, no one is allowed to enjoy life any more for its own sake.
Those exposing this are equally sucked into a dire life on the edge and pleasure simply ceases, to be replaced by endless outrage at how terrible life has been made by the animals up top. I'd argue that the question of how pineapple is cut is vital to concern ourselves with because it thumbs its nose at the opposed agenda and says, 'Hey, this life is to be enjoyed, not bemoaned.'
The Case for BollocksI have two choices. I can either spend my life writing tomes of anti-cabal literature, raging against the state 24/7 or else I can spend some time enjoying nooky with my girlfriend, spend some time appreciating beauty and spend some time presenting anti-cabal articles.
David Jenkins, Bishop of Durham, Oct 4, 1984:
