Fewtril #32

It is considered the height of intellectual sophistication amongst our sophisticated flatheads to entertain equally a plethora of interpretations that are widely unequal in their reasonableness, and then to come down on the side of the one that best fits their political views. In other words, it is the height of intellectual sophistication to be unreasonable and arbitrary.

Fewtril #31

We usually deplore a man for his lack of reason, but given that he holds a set of self-righteous and false premises, one ought to be thankful that at least he cannot find his way to a logical conclusion.

Magic Ali

If there is such a thing as a Journalistic Code of Practice, it should include a protocol that states, When you tell a lie, at least make it remotely believable. This would be of some benefit to so witless a blackguard as Tariq Ali:

A few miles to the north of the disaster zone there is a large fleet of helicopters belonging to the Western armies occupying parts of Afghanistan. Why could the US, German and British commanders not dispatch these to save lives? Is the war so fierce that these were needed every single day? Five days after the earthquake, the US released 8 helicopters from war duty to help transport food and water to isolated villages. Too little, too late.

Tariq Ali, “Things are Bad and Getting Worse: Pakistan Will Never Forget This Horror”, CounterPunch, 11th October 2005.

Quite how Mr Ali expects us to believe him, when he tells us three days after the earthquake, that the Americans released eight helicopters five days after the earthquake, is beyond me. Perhaps he should be called upon to update the Journalistic Style Guide, detailing the use of a new tense: Prognosticated Future Past.

One may wonder if the development of this new tense has interfered with Mr Ali’s ability to heed the numerous reports and pictures from the past few days that testify to the arrival of US helicopters. For instance, late on Monday 10th October, less than three days after the earthquake, Sadaqat Jan of the Associated Press reported the arrival of eight US helicopters:

Eight U.S. helicopters were diverted from the war in neighboring Afghanistan. They carried supplies, tarpaulins and high-tech equipment.

Three military cargo planes with blankets, tents, meals and water also arrived.

Sadaqat Jan, “Pakistan: Desperation sweeps through the rubble”, (AP), StarTribune.com, 10th October 2005.

It is only Mr Ali’s report, however, that tells us that these helicopters will arrived in the next day or so.

(Update: I see that Mr Ali's report has appeared in The Guardian ("Pakistan will not Forget", 12th October 2005.), one day after it appeared at CounterPunch, with one noticeable change: five days has become three days. Perhaps his powers have failed him.)

Distant Correlations

When one learns that George Monbiot has murder, venereal disease and marital breakdown in mind, one would be well advised to lock up daughters, cats, dogs, ferrets and other domesticated animals, and hope for the best. When one learns, however, that he has these things in mind only in abstract consideration of their connection to religion, one may relax a little, though one might want to have a word with the local vicar, lest he become excited; for Mr Monbiot is in bold mood: “The evidence is clear that murder, venereal disease and marital breakdown are all more common in religious cultures”. (George Monbiot, “My heroes are driven by God, but I'm glad my society isn't” The Guardian, 11th October 2005.)

The evidence that Mr Monbiot finds so clear comes from a statistical research paper published in the Journal of Religion & Society, wherein a Mr Gregory S. Paul writes,

In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy, and abortion in the prosperous democracies. The most theistic prosperous democracy, the U.S., is exceptional, but not in the manner Franklin predicted. The United States is almost always the most dysfunctional of the developed democracies, sometimes spectacularly so, and almost always scores poorly.

Gregory S. Paul, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies: A First Look” Journal of Religion & Society, vol. 7, 2005.

Now, as anyone who has ever been able to tell the difference between a scattergraph and a blunderbuss should know, correlation is a measure of association, not causation; and Mr Paul, unlike Mr Monbiot, is careful to stress this. (If we were to take associations further, in order that we might begin to estimate casual relationships, ultimately we would have to seek explanations outside statistical analyses.) For associations themselves to be meaningful within statistical analyses, it is necessary to take into account the manifold factors that could plausibly impinge on the data; otherwise the associations may be meaningless. Mr Paul, however, though he has been careful to stress only association and not causation, has singularly failed to consider other factors that might plausibly affect his data, as statistician Scott Gilbreath makes clear:

There are many socio-economic data series that vary widely across the eighteen countries [in Mr Paul’s data-set] and that plausibly have a significant impact on social conditions, e.g., income distribution, proportion of GDP spent through government, social and cultural cohesion, fertility and mortality rates, age structure of the population, etc., etc. Failure to look at these and other exogenous data would introduce bias into the results, further calling them into question.

Scott Gilbreath, “From Our Bulging How Not to Do Statistics File”, Weblog: Magic Statistics, 27th September 2005.

Worse still, however, is that Mr Paul has not subjected his data to statistical techniques such as regression analysis, which ought to be used in order to determine correlation coefficients and goodness-to-fit. As Mr Gilbreath points out:

This is simply inexcusable in a research project involving statistical analysis. I have never seen anything like this--either in my professional career or in my university studies of statistics and econometrics.

The three reasons listed [by Mr Paul in his paper] for skipping the regression analysis are all bogus. High variability of degree of correlation is precisely why goodness-of-fit is estimated. If high variability appears to be an issue, that’s all the more reason to run regressions. The second reason, potential causal factors for rates of societal function are complex, is another reason why regression analysis needs to be conducted: to assess the impact of the unspecified correlated (not necessarily causal) factors. Furthermore, this reason seems to contradict what Mr Paul said earlier: The cultural and economic similarity of the developing democracies minimizes the variability of factors outside those being examined. The third reason, that the purpose of the study is not to establish causal relationships, is a red herring. Regression can be used to estimate supposed causal relationships, but it can also be used to calculate correlation coefficients without any implication of causality. In any case, if Mr Paul is worried to avoid causal inferences, there are other equally valid techniques of calculating precise correlation estimates. (ibid.)

Without a proper statistical analysis of the data, an association can be found between almost any two variables. It is in the understanding of this meaninglessness, that Sean Gleeson at the Gleeson Blogomerate has written a fine parody of Mr Paul’s research, happily finding that,

a higher proportion of visits to the Gleeson Bloglomerate seems almost to guarantee the elimination of malaria . . . [and] that in every single country beginning with U plus Colombia, those societies with higher degrees of Gleeson-visiting enjoy more gooder goodness in every single quantifiable basic measure to be studied. These findings suggest avenues of further research.

Sean Gleeson, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Goodness with Gleeson readership in Countries Beginning with U”, Weblog: Gleeson Blogomerate, 30th September 2005.

If Mr Paul cannot subject his data to the statistical analyses necessary for an understanding of the strength of correlation between religious belief and social dysfunction, what then is the point of his research? He claims that it is “not an attempt to present a definitive study that establishes cause versus effect between religiosity, secularism and societal health”, but since he has made no serious attempt to demonstrate an association between these things, we are left with the suspicion that it is little but fodder for the causal ruminations of newspaper columnists.

And so we come back to George Monbiot, who on the basis of this bogus study is in no doubt that the “evidence is clear that murder, venereal disease and marital breakdown are all more common in religious cultures”. Now, if the degree to which a culture is religious can be said to be a function of the numbers of the population that adhere to religion, then Mr Monbiot’s proposition is easily refutable. Britain, for instance, has become less of a religious culture since the 1960s, and yet at least one factor – namely, the murder rate –, which Mr Monbiot cites as positively correlated with religious culture, has risen. The number of homicides per million has more than doubled since the 1960s, from 6.8 homicides per million in 1965 to 14.1 in 1997 (Joe Hicks & Grahame Allen, “A Century of Change: Trends in UK Statistics since 1900”, Houses of Parliament Research Paper 99/111, 21st December 1999.), and yet belief in God – which for most people is affixed to religion, and thus is some overall indication of religious belief – has nearly halved, from 77% in 1968 to 44% in 2004 (YouGov poll for The Telegraph, 27th December 2004). I do not suggest a causal link, only that the facts are at odds with Mr Monbiot’s statement.

I am not surprised, however, that Mr Monbiot finds the evidence clear; for we should all know by now that Mr Monbiot views evidence through the ogle-piece of credulity, in whose confident sights the world is shrunk to fit. We might concur with him, however, when he says, “self-doubt is more likely to be absent from the mind of the believer than the infidel”. The shame is all the greater, therefore, that he cannot see the truth of this in himself.

(This post can also be found at The Sharpener)

Fewtril #30

In the shameless world of radical-intellectual chicanery, one tries not only to have one’s cake and eat it, but also to establish that “cake” is an illegitimate ontological postulation, rendering void any talk of having or eating cakes.

Blame for Cause

Blame entails moral responsibility, and the word requires of its legitimate use that the guilty party is not only part of the causal conditions of an act but also that he acts wrongly. If one were to remove the element of moral responsibility from the definition of blame, it would entail only the causal conditions of an act. It would be absurd to use as a term of moral condemnation the word “blame” in this new sense, as a consideration of the following should elucidate:

(1) I try to kill a man for no good reason, and in defence he kills me.
(2) I slight a man for no good reason, and in reaction he kills me.
(3) I happen to stand near a man, and for no good reason he kills me.

In all three propositions, I am to differing extents part of the causal conditions of the man’s killing of me. Even in (3), the causal conditions include also my presence, and I could not legitimately deny that my presence near the man is part of the causal conditions of my death; but it would take a perverse mind indeed to hold that I am to blame – that is, morally responsible – for my death in that my presence was part of its causal conditions. As I have said, cause alone is not enough to fulfil the concept of blame; an element of moral responsibility is also required. Thus, in the case of (3), blame – that is, moral condemnation – for my death is directed towards the man who killed me. In (2) I am again part of the causal conditions of my death, but though I have committed a wrong in slighting the man, his wrong is disproportionate to mine, and thus he takes the greater part of the blame; for he has committed the greater wrong. In (1), however, it is my wrong that precipitated my death at his hands, and though his action is a major cause of my death, one should have no trouble in saying that I am to blame.

I use these three stark examples only to establish that cause and blame are not coterminous. This should be obvious enough, but as George Orwell pointed out, a restatement of the obvious becomes a duty in such times as these, when ideological struggles kick up such a dust that the obvious becomes difficult to see. Recently, for instance, there has been a tendency, especially in connection with the war in Iraq, to fail to distinguish between cause and blame, in order that the one might be construed to imply the other. Consider the following example from Soumaya Ghannoushi in The Guardian:

Whether political Islam develops in a more peaceful or violent way is in the hands of the west. . . .

. . . London and Washington must decide which Islam they want: a peaceful, democratic Islam, crucial to any pursuit of global stability, or the anarchical and destructive Islam of al-Qaida and its ilk. The shape of contemporary Islam will largely be determined by the environment within which it is forced to operate.

Soumaya Ghannoushi, “Many faces of Islamism”, The Guardian, 5th October 2005.

I shall not here attempt to answer the question of the extent to which the West is the cause of the development of contemporary Islam, except to say that positing the West as the main casual factor is misleading insofar as it leads us away from consideration of the main attributes and conditions that inhere in the Muslim world. If we were to assay an answer, however, we might wish to start with a quick mention of the Koran, just to get things rolling; but this is only a suggestion. Nor shall I say anything about the extent to which the West is to blame, if at all, for the ills of contemporary Islam. These things I shall leave aside.

Given that there is an advantage-seeking propensity on the part of ideological types to make the meaning of blame coterminous with that of cause, I should like rather to make plain some suspicions of mine; for I do not believe that I am being too cynical in suspecting that Ms Ghannoushi and her ilk would like us to assume that the West is not only largely the cause of but also largely to blame for the development of violent forms of Islam. Nor do I think that I sit alongside old Diogenes when I suspect that there is no wrong in contemporary Islam that she could not blame on the West, even on its very existence; for the import of Ms Ghannoushi’s words is plain enough: namely, that moral responsibility for the fate of contemporary Islam lies largely in the hands of the West, whereas in its own hands lies very little.

Ms Ghannoushi has no monopoly on this moral irresponsibility, however, and we could, if we wished, turn the whole thing round and say that whether the West develops in a more peaceful or violent way is in the hands of political Islam, with the consequence that we in the West might blame Islam for our wrongs, including those committed against Islam! Moral scruple, however, might prevent us from stooping so low. Ms Ghannoushi, on the other hand, has no such qualms about sinking for the sake of her own argument; but I wonder what her argument would look like if contemporary Islam were to develop into a unified doctrine of peace, productive of cultural and scientific wonders. If that happened, should we be surprised to find that Ms Ghannoushi would forget her words about Islam’s development being largely determined by the West, and hear her talking instead about the self-determining triumph of contemporary Islam?

I’d bet Mohammed’s beard and my flying pig on it.

Shelter for Scoundrels

One of the most widely misunderstood quotes is Samuel Johnson’s “Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, a presentment that many a journalist or flapping ignoramus takes to be an indictment of patriotism itself. Dr Johnson meant no such thing, however, as James Boswell was careful to tell:

Patriotism having become one of our topicks, Johnson suddenly uttered, in a strong determined tone, an apophthegm, at which many will start: ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel.’ But let it be considered, that he did not mean a real and generous love of our country, but that pretended patriotism which so many, in all ages and countries, have made a cloak for self-interest.

(James Boswell, Life of Johnson, entry for Friday, 7th April 1775.)

Elsewhere in his Life, Boswell tells us that Dr Johnson “was at all times indignant against that false patriotism, that pretended love of freedom, that unruly restlessness which is inconsistent with the stable authority of any good government” (ibid., entry for Wednesday, 6th July 1763).

Now that patriotism is broadly thought to be a vice – and it is gainful to one’s sense of irony to contemplate the small part that Dr Johnson’s misconstrued quote has played in effecting that change – one will find hardly a scoundrel in sight of it; for scoundrels scurry whither virtues cast deep shadows, whither they might find some finery behind which to hide, and thus we may take Dr Johnson’s cue as pointing us towards the understanding that behind every widely acknowledged virtue lurks a multitude of scoundrels, like an infestation of woodlice behind fine panelling.

Doves of Prey

In consideration of the recent “anti-war” protests in Washington, Christopher Hitchens decries the involvement of militant leftist groups that portray themselves as pacifists, and he castigates the press for being complicit in this description:

To be against war and militarism, in the tradition of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, is one thing. But to have a record of consistent support for war and militarism, from the Red Army in Eastern Europe to the Serbian ethnic cleansers and the Taliban, is quite another. It is really a disgrace that the liberal press refers to such enemies of liberalism as ‘antiwar’ when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side [1].

Of these groups, Mr Hitchens censures in particular the Answer Coalition, a front-organisation of the Workers’ World Party, which, he tells us, is “the product of a split within the Trotskyist movement . . . the ones who felt that the Trotskyist majority, in 1956, was wrong to denounce the Russian invasion of Hungary” [2].
.....Mr Hitchens describes himself as an ex-Trotskyist, though judging by his recent hagiography of the eponymous “old man”, one should not assume that this self-description amounts to a full apostasy from the faith. With such intimate knowledge as he possesses, therefore, Mr Hitchens should not be surprised to find that Trotskyists pursue their ends by any means – whether by terrorism, war or the watchword of peace; for they follow the example as set by their founder:

[T]he revolution does require of the revolutionary class that it should attain its end by all methods at its disposal—if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by terrorism [3].

The watchword of peace undoubtedly played an enormous part in our struggle; but precisely because it was directed against the imperialist war. The idea of peace was supported most strongly of all, not by the tired soldiers, but by the foremost workers, for whom it had the import, not for a rest, but of a pitiless struggle against the exploiters. It was those same workers who, under the watchword of peace, laterlaid down their lives on the Soviet fronts [4].

Mr Hitchens gives us to understand that there is a wholly different tradition of opposing war and militarism, at odds with this Trotskyite sham, namely that of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht; for they too directed their energies against the “imperialist” First World War; and if we were to be lured by the words of Mr Hitchens, we should think this opposition was in the spirit of principled pacifism and jolly picnics. It was not so, however:

Karl Liebknecht: Seize the quarters of your officers; disarm them immediately. Make sure that your officers sympathize with you. In case they do so, let them lead you. Shoot them immediately in case they betray you after they have declared themselves supporters of your cause.

.....Soldiers and marines! Fraternize! Take possession of your ships. Overpower first your officers. Place yourselves in communication with your comrades on land and seize all harbours and open fire, if necessary, on loyal groups [5].

Rosa Luxemburg: It is only the overcoming of war and the speediest possible enforcement of peace by the international militancy of the proletariat that can bring victory to the workers' cause [6].

Being against war and militarism in this tradition appears little different from being thereagainst in the tradition of the Trotskyists; for both traditions use pacifism as an expedience towards the fulfilment of the socialist state, and both are prepared to use ruthless militancy towards this end, should circumstances allow it. To paraphrase Mr Hitchens, I should say that it is a disgrace of definition that anyone could refer to such enemies of liberalism as “antiwar” when in reality they are straight-out pro-war, but on the other side.
.....It is no wonder that these traditions appear as one, however; for they are but strands in the poisonous tangle of Marxism, in whose very roots the meanings of peace, terror, militancy and principle are twisted. Engels, for instance, tells us that “[a]n end to wars, peace among the nations, the cessation of pillaging and violence - such is our ideal”[7], but also that “[t]he war of the poor against the rich will be the bloodiest ever waged” [8] and that “[t]he next world war will not only cause reactionary classes and dynasties to disappear from the face of the earth, but also entire reactionary peoples. And that too is an advance” [9]. Marx tells us that “there is only one way in which the murderous death agonies of the old society and the bloody birth throes of the new society can be shortened, simplified and concentrated, and that way is revolutionary terrorism” [10]. Lenin, for his part, is quite plain about the need for Marxists to be open to all expedient means by which socialism might be attained:

Marxism differs from all primitive forms of socialism by not binding the movement to any one particular form of struggle. It recognises the most varied forms of struggle; and it does not “concoct” them, but only generalises, organises, gives conscious expression to those forms of struggle of the revolutionary classes which arise of themselves in the course of the movement. Absolutely hostile to all abstract formulas and to all doctrinaire recipes, Marxism demands an attentive attitude to the mass struggle in progress, which, as the movement develops, as the class-consciousness of the masses grows, as economic and political crises become acute, continually gives rise to new and more varied methods of defence and attack. Marxism, therefore, positively does not reject any form of struggle [11].

It troubles me, therefore, that while Mr Hitchens finds it disgraceful for the liberal press to be complicit in false descriptions, he finds no similar disgrace in describing Leon Trotsky, Marxist-Leninist, founder of the Red Army, butcher of Kronstadt, and apologist for terrorism, as a “prophetic moralist” [12]; moreover, that he feels no shame in trying to slip us the lie that Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht stand in a different tradition. It is no wonder that Mr Hitchens wakes up every day “to a sensation of pervading disgust” [13]; for the stench of his own hypocrisy must be quite strong.

——————

[1] Christopher Hitchens, “Anti-War, My Foot: The Phony Peaceniks who Protested in Washington” Slate. 26th September 2005.
[2] ibid.

[3] Leon Trotsky, Dictatorship versus Democracy: A Reply to Karl Krautsky, 1922. Chapter 4. (English Translation of the Workers Party of America. Published online at The Leon Trotsky Internet Archives.)

[4] ibid., Ch. 7.

[5] Karl Liebknecht, “Call for Revolution” 1st November 1918, Source Records of the Great War, Vol. VI, ed. Charles F. Horne, National Alumni, 1923. Online at FirstWorldWar.com (Primary Documents)

[6] Rosa Luxemburg, “The War and the Workers”, The Junius Pamphlet, 1916.

[7] Friedrich Engels, Letter to August Bebel, London, 13th Sept. 1886, Marx & Engels: Collected Works, Vol.47, p.487. Quoted online at the website of the Communist Party USA.

[8]. Friedrich Engels, The Conditions of the Working Class in England, Leipzig 1845 (Panther Edition, 1969, from text provided by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow), online at Marxists.org. Ch. 13.

[9] Friedrich Engels, “The Magyar Struggle”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 194, 13th January 1849. Online at Marxists.org.

[10] Karl Marx, “The Victory of the Counter-Revolution in Vienna”, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 136, 6th November 1848.Translated by the Marx-Engels Institute. Online at Marxists.org.

[11] V.I. Lenin, “Guerrilla Warfare”, Proletary, No. 5, September 30, 1906. Republished in Lenin: Collected Works, Vol. 11. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1965. p. 213. Online at Marxists.org.

[12] Christopher Hitchens, “The Old Man”, The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004.

[13] Christopher Hitchens, Love, Poverty and War: Journeys and Essays, Atlantic Books, 2004.

Fewtril #29

If the weight of intellectual advocacy were taken into account, the scales of justice would come down on the side of tyranny.

Fewtril #28

That the modern “non-judgmental” and “tolerating” species of man spends much of his time in raging denunciation of views that might upset his own, should tell us enough about his character to leave us wondering which of his other avowed principles hide their opposites.

The Simpleton's Sage

If you have ever awoken in the morning and thought, “in order to be an active subject, I have to get rid of — and transpose onto the other — the inert passivity which contains the density of my substantial being”, then most likely you are an inveterate gobshite or a professor of sociology; — though it would take a man of rare perspicacity to tell the essence of the one from the other.
.....The words quoted are those of Slavoj Žižek (“The Interpassive Subject”, online at the European Graduate School, n.d.), the Slovenian philosophunculist and windbag-professor of sociology. His biography at the European Graduate School describes him as “an effective purveyor of Lacanian mischief” and claims that “he has an encyclopedic grasp of political, philosophical, literary, artistic, cinematic, and pop cultural currents — and . . . has no qualms about throwing all of them into the stockpot of his imagination — [which is why] he has dazzled his peers and confounded his critics for over ten years.” Consider this dazzling mischief, for example:

The pure multiple of Being is not yet a multitude of Ones, since . . . to have One the pure multiple must be ‘counted as One’; from the standpoint of the state of a situation, the preceding multiple can only appear as nothing, so nothing is the ‘proper name of Being as Being’ prior to its symbolization.

(Slavoj Žižek, “Psychoanalysis in Post-Marxism: The Case of Alain Badiou” The South Atlantic Quarterly; Spring 1998. Published online at the European Graduate School.)

Now, if I might venture here upon an expression of my own view, I should say that professor Žižek is a purveyor of ugly, senseless and frivolous tat – in other words, everything one expects from a celebrated intellectual fraudster – and that reading his dumbfounding works is the closest one is ever likely to get to an armchair lobotomy. Moreover, if encyclopaedic knowledge is to be mentioned in connection with him at all, then I should think it more appropriate to mention it only in relation to a children’s pictorial encyclopaedia in which some tyke has augmented the pictures of the monkeys with doodled genitalia. I hardly need add, therefore, that he is the philosopher of choice amongst film-students.

Fewtril #27

One of the greatest wonders of the world is that a man can lie to himself and get away with it.

A Monument of German Stupidity

“The public had been forced to see [in Kant] that what is obscure is not always without meaning; what was senseless and without meaning at once took refuge in obscure exposition and language. Fichte was the first to grasp and make vigorous use of this privilege; Schelling at least equalled him in this, and a host of hungry scribblers without intellect or honesty soon surpassed them both. But the greatest effrontery in serving up sheer nonsense, in scrabbling together senseless and maddening webs of words, such as had previously been heard only in madhouses, finally appeared in Hegel. It became the instrument of the most ponderous and general mystification that has ever existed, with a result that will seem incredible to posterity, and be a lasting monument of German stupidity. ”

(Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Volume I, (Tr. E.F.J. Payne) Dover, 1966. p. 429.)

The Bash of the Buffoons

It should gladden our hearts and behope us all that blackguards can put aside their differences long enough to identify their shared blackguardry. When, for instance, in May of this year, George Galloway described Christopher Hitchens as “a drink-soaked former Trotskyist popinjay”, he spoke with unwonted verity; and when Hitchens retorted with, “You're a real thug, aren't you?”, the words rang forsooth. (Quoted in “Galloway and the Mother of all Invective”, The Guardian, 18th May 2005.)

.....On Wednesday night the two great self-regarding buffoons met again to swap insults in front of an audience at Mason Hall in New York. In an article written on the eve of battle, Mr Hitchens began to skirmish:

He says that I am an ex-Trotskyist (true), a “popinjay” (true enough, since its original Webster's definition means a target for arrows and shots), and that I cannot hold a drink (here I must protest). In a recent interview he made opprobrious remarks about the state of my midriff, which I will confess has—as P.G. Wodehouse himself once phrased it—“slipped down to the mezzanine floor.” In reply I do not wish to stoop. Those of us who revere the vagina are committed to defend it against the very idea that it is a mouth or has teeth. Study the photographs of Galloway from Syrian state television, however, and you will see how unwise and incautious it is for such a hideous person to resort to personal remarks. Unkind nature, which could have made a perfectly good butt out of his face, has spoiled the whole effect by taking an asshole and studding it with ill-brushed fangs.

(Christopher Hitchens, “George Galloway is Gruesome, not Gorgeous”, Slate, 13th September 2005.)

The opportunity of providing a solution to the meaning of the cryptic – and some might say disturbing – reference to vaginas, I shall forgo; and I shall pass straight onto noting how in the space of one paragraph, Mr Hitchens goes from an aloofness from stooping to insults, to stooping to insults in a most entertainingly stooping way. As for Mr Hitchen’s reply to Mr Galloway’s earlier insult, I must point out that the ex-Trotskyist can still get dewy-eyed about old Leon, whom he recently described as a “prophetic moralist” about whom a “saintly penumbra still emanates”. (Christopher Hitchens, “The Old Man”, The Atlantic Monthly, July/August 2004.) I find it a little odd, however, that he should feel it desirable to concur that the word “popinjay” does indeed apply to him, though only in Webster’s etymology (“so called from the popinjay or figure of a bird shot at for practice”) and not in Webster’s primary definition (“a vain and talkative fellow”); but then perhaps he is so vain and talkative that he cannot resist stating that the word does in some way apply to him. With the accusation of being “drink-soaked”, he makes no contention, unless a feeble miscontrual counts.

.....Come Wednesday night, when battle commenced, Mr Hitchens was still rankled by the May-time insult, and fell foul of a misplaced modifier: “I believe it is a disgrace that a member of the British House of Commons should . . . insult all those who try to ask him questions with the most vile and cheap guttersnipe abuse”. (Quoted in David Usbourne, “Hitchens vs Galloway: The Big Debate” The Independent, 16th September 2005.)

.....Mr Galloway for his part was as willing as ever to trade insults, telling Mr Hitchens that he had “fallen out of the gutter and into the sewer”. (ibid.) And on Hitchens’ change from Trotskyite peacenik to Trotskyitish war-supporter, he averred that, “What you have witnessed is something unique in natural history - the first ever metamorphosis of a butterfly back into a slug”. (Quoted in James Bone, “Galloway and Hitchens get down and very dirty”, The Times, 15th September 2005.)

.....By all accounts, it was a night of splendid entertainment; but if you had expected more in the way of enlightenment, then I ought to tell you that you should not have placed your trust in a puffed-up popinjay or in a thug with a face like an arse.

Fewtril #26

A modern totalitarian rarely makes so crude an Orwellian statement as “freedom is slavery”. His is a beclouded and garrulous soul, and he would rather say instead, “Freedom is an ideological mask for the protection of existing structures of domination”. He has been to university after all, and would like to show it.

Fewtril #25

In explaining the vast improbability of our existence, we have tended to settle on one of two unprovable propositions: either that this is one universe amongst an infinite number of universes; or that there is a God. The first has the explanatory virtue that it does without God. The second, that it does without an infinity of universes.