The Golden Strawberry

Thanks to the Trots, this  is one of the funniest things I've found in ages!

Cory

Who would I invite for my ideal New Years Eve dinner party?

I'm pretty sure George Orwell would hate the whole dinner party atmosphere, he'd much prefer a drink at the pub. I'm sick to death of Christopher Hitchens, so he wouldn't get invited.

J.K Rowling would be first on the list. With the wine flowing she might reveal whats going to happen in the next Harry Potter book.

Next: Ricky Gervais, because he is very funny.

Voltaire, because he was witty and charming - everything I'm not. Learn from the master.

Penultimately, my 5 housemates. They would do all the hard work of engaging with the other guests whilst I sat back and absorbed the atmosphere and wisdom.

Maybe I should have a really serious guest? Someone along the lines of Leo Tolstoy or George Eliot? Nah, they would get a bit heavy. Picture the scene: You are pleasently nibbling on the Hors d'œuvres, minding your own business, thinking about possibly having a glass of mulled wine before dinner. Relaxed and comfortable.

All of a sudden, Leo, complete with huge beard, ambushes you and dives into a monologue on non resistance to evil and other such deep things. He compares himself to Christ and laments the fact that the Russian government hasn't yet made him a martyr.

You try and escape, but bump into George Eliot who is in the middle of giving a long speech about Christian morality and blah blah blah blah.

No. Instead I'd have Mark Corrigan from Peep Show. I must be in a trivial mood. Triviality makes life worthwhile.

Oh, and this is worth reading. The Royal Exchange is a remarkable space for theatre. This too, about reading big books to look cool.

-posted by Adam

To all of you have a marvellous festive period.

Cory

From David Osler, the top ten Trotskyist chat-up lines:

(10) You mean you share my critique of Mandel's interpretation of Kondratiev's long wave theory? Wow, we have so much in common!
(9) Let’s get out of here. I know a much cozier little Marxist bookstore downtown.
(8) I bet I can guess your party cadre name.
(7) Sorry, but I just wanted to tell you how stunning you look in that secondhand donkey jacket while carrying a bundle of Socialist Workers under your arm ...
(6) I used to read Trotsky ... but then I drifted.
(5) Is that the Transitional Programme in your pocket, or are you just pleased to see me?
(4) That secondhand donkey jacket of yours would look great on my bedroom floor.
(3) What's a nice girl like you doing in a lousy union fraction like this?
(2) Do you sell papers here often?
(1) So, babe ... just how degenerate would your ideal workers' state be?

Iain Dale has his top ten political chat-up lines (the first in a series, we are led to believe). I especially like number three.

If anyone actually tries one of these, please let us know the results...

Cory 

Peter Hitchens has something interesting to say about the Church of England:

Yet many are not keen, but are interested. The man or woman who has been out in the world a little, and now in the light of experience feels the stirrings of a long-ignored, long-suppressed curiosity about Christianity, wants to be able to slip quietly in at the back, to hear familiar words and sounds. He or she may also want a little beauty in music and architecture, a certain permission to be less than specific, a chance to savour the spaces between words, the paradoxes, rhythms and ambiguities in which truth is often to be found. Such people do not want to be hugged, handshaked or approached by enthusiasts on their way out and pestered to socialise or fill in forms. They even welcome those little patches of unmodernised shadow, behind a pillar or in a corner, so that they can slip out as unobtrusively as they went in. If allowed to do so, they may actually come back.

The Cathedrals, for the most part, still provide most of these things. And if, this Christmas or at any other time, you are lucky enough to be near one of these buildings, which in many cases are among the great historic treasures of all mankind, not just of this country, may I make a suggestion, even if you are an atheist? That you try to attend the service called Choral Evensong? You may - just - catch something, very faint, very distant and very old, that is worth hearing and worth thinking about. In any case, I do not think anyone will bother you or demand to know if you are saved, born again or anything like that.  And in any case, Happy Christmas.

Churches are often very beautiful and I am constantly astonished by the aesthetic quality of many places of worship. I have visited many of Europe's greatest religious buildings - the Vatican, St Marks in Venice, Milan's Duomo, Notre Dam and St Michaels Church in Munich. Whilst I believe these great works of art were built under the mistaken belief of a deity, they are still wondrous to look at.

The Church is the possessor and keeper of much (in my view false) wisdom and knowledge passed down through the ages. It would do well to not throw all that away in a last ditch attempt to regain the followers who have (righty) abandoned it because of its reactionary nature. They are lost forever.

-posted by Adam

This is seriously cool.

Check it out.

-posted by Adam

There is an immensely sad and revealing photo gallery here about the legacy of the Chernobyl disaster.

Watch it.

How could we have let this happen?

-posted by Adam

The Israeli right must be loving what is happening in the West Bank and Gaza. Palestinians fighting amongst themselves. This, as well as being desperately sad, was absolutely predictable. Hamas and Fatah have irreconcilable differences. 

Fatah recognises the right of Israel to exist - this gives it international recognition and a certain amount of respect. Hamas does not and will not accept that Israel exists; this has resulted in the exteremely damaging international economic boycott of the Palestinian territories ever since Hamas won the Palestinian elections.

Fatah is corrupt and useless at governing, Hamas is an Islamic fundementalist group that will never negotiate with Israel.

Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian President, has called for elections to defuse the situation.

Whether this will improve things (and there are no guarantees of elections, because Abbas does not have the constitutional power to call an election - here he has only recommended one) remains to be seen. Obviously the election of Hamas was a disaster, but Fatah had proved itself incompetent and unfit to govern. Perhaps this period in opposition will convince Fatah to get its act together? Let us hope so, because there can be no progress with Israel when the Palestinian Authority is run by a political group that does not recognise Israel's right to exist.

It continually astonishes me that, 60 years on from its founding, the debate continues amongst many people about whether Israel still has a 'right to exist'. I find that quite obscene. Of course the ultra-Orthodox Messianism of the Jewish settlers in the West bank is equally disgusting, as is the policy of collective punishment the Israelis have pursued towards Gaza.

It sems to me also that, at its core, this is a dispute about land. Of course land disputes are always eventually ironed out through compromise and negotiation; but this land is diffenrent. It is 'Holy' land and therefore, because one group of peoples magical being says so, another group of people cannot be permitted to live on it. Quite astonishing, as well as dispicable.

-posted by Adam

Chcek this out:

Perhaps now, as a serial killer picks off a few more women from their drugs-fuelled trade, we could at last have the debate Miss Widdecombe tried to launch six years ago. Mr Duncan Smith, in his report, talks of the need for better rehabilitative treatment. I am sure that is right. However, to intervene dramatically before the stage for rehabilitation is reached might be even more effective.

Drugs use is against the law because of its appalling social consequences. The law should be enforced in an exemplary way. If that means nice middle-class people – possibly like some of those in the shadow cabinet – going to jail, so much the better. It was scandalous, but typical, that Kate Moss was not punished for her recent promiscuous cocaine use, because it indicated that the trade is acceptable too, with heaven knows what results for those who idolise her. If drugs use is made more difficult, there will be fewer pushers. If there are fewer pushers then life will become harder for those further up the food chain.

Punishing drugs users would also be likely to give the police more information about their suppliers. The prisons cannot be too full for such people, who are the most destructive in society. Can we not see this blindingly obvious truth? Of course, even if drugs use were eliminated, there would still be tarts, and there would still be people who kill tarts. There would probably, though, be gratifyingly fewer of both.

And people pay Heffer to write this kind of rubbish? The man is so completly divorced from reality as to make you think this is some kind of caricature run by the Onion or something. I used to enjoy reading Heffer, he took no shit and insulted everyone who disagreed with him, but his politics are utterly odious. I bet he has no mates.

As for the Telegraph, I used to enjoy reading that as well, but since Mark Steyn left it doesn't even have any Lefty-baiting Court Jesters left. Heffer is a poor substitute as well as looking like a pig-in-a-wig.

-posted by Adam