Another lurch to the bottom - by Richard... Sunday, May 08, 2011

Another lurch to the bottom - by Richard... Sunday, May 08, 2011

Rod Liddle in The Spectator tackles the Osama Bin Laden controversy, with a piece entitled: "The 24-hour rush to certainty leaves plenty of room for conspiracy theories". This is a commentator whose heart is in the right place, so the conclusion he draws is vaguely sound. There is "a greater tendency to swallow things whole, for the sake of the story, than was once the case", he writes. He wants "a little less avid, panting credulity from our journalists" and for them to stick by the old journalistic credo.

The essence of this, Liddle tells us, is that when someone tells you something has happened, and you haven't seen it yourself, "you report that they have told you something has happened, rather than reporting baldly that it actually has happened".

This, of course, was exactly the line I took when the news broke, only to attract the scorn of the clever and sophisticated Tim Montgomerie and his soul-mate Tom Harris MP, the former dubbing me an "OBL denier" and the latter a "nutter". Following this penetrating analysis, incidentally, we have heard no more from them, and e-mails go unanswered.

Nevertheless, Mr Montgomerie was quick to applaud his hero Dave, who broke off from his partisan obsessions also to take the US claims at face value, recording a welcome for something which, to this day, is not proven. However, relying on the "wisdom of Twitter", Mr Montgomerie is content to rely on this to tell him what to think. So much for the intellectual wing of the Conservative Party.

This excursion aside, we return to Liddle to find that, while making the right noises – and in particular that journalists should not report as a certainty that which has only the status of a claim – he seems to fall into the familiar trap of assuming that disbelief (or, more accurately, lack of belief) is necessarily the harbinger of the conspiracy theory.

He shows no sign of understanding that refusal to accept an unsupported assertion does not of itself require the formulation of an alternative hypothesis – the null hypothesis is self-generating. Yet there lies our stance. Mr Obama's claim is interesting. It may or may not be correct, but we would like to see some evidence. And that, to this day, remains our position.

To give the man his due, that same lack of evidence sticks in Liddle's craw, as well as the bizarre decision to dispose of the supposed corpse at sea – behaviour which positively invites scepticism if not total disbelief.

But, on top of events as always, Liddle then merely comments on the refusal of the US government to release a recording of the live feed supposedly watched by Obama's team. He is unaware that there was no live feed, and that the much publicised scenario of Obama watching the demise of Bin Laden was wholly false.

It is this, amongst other things, that sticks in my craw. Having displayed the gullibility of naïve six-year-olds, the newspapers that have fallen for the falsehood and published the story – or analyses dependent on it – have sailed on regardless, with no attempt to correct their copy or offer anything approaching an apology or expression of remorse. Being the MSM, it seems, means never having to say you are sorry.

Here, once again, we see the leadership coming from the blogs, while the MSM gallops lemming-like over the cliff. How ironic it is - to the point almost of impertinence - to have the faith-laden media then pontificate about the spread of conspiracy theories. And they are still at it, the pomposity exceeded only by the mind-blowing ignorance.

There is no conspiracy theory about the state of the media though. We have over the last week seen another lurch to the bottom, the lamentable childishness of so many journalists and their editors now coming to the fore, as they displayed their total lack of editorial judgment, and their reporting incontinence.

The sadness is that the media show no signs whatsoever of learning from their recent experience and are continuing just as before. Thus do we mark the decline and fall of an industry.

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An abdication - by Richard...

Booker in his column today confronts the "farce of an AV referendum" which ignored the point of who really governs us. The voting system is not the flaw in our "democracy": it's the abdication of our powers to unelected politicians in Brussels, Booker says.

This is not a new theme to readers of EURef, but the sentiment may be new – or newly framed – for a lot of Booker's readers, although it is hard to believe that it will be unfamiliar to his regulars.

Essentially, the pretence that tinkering with our voting system might somehow have given us any greater degree of "democracy" always was absurd was In no way did it address the real crisis of our politics, which is that any real semblance of democracy in how we are governed has all but drained away.

We now have a system of government we can no longer call to account or change through the ballot box, and it has reduced most of what goes on in our Westminster parliament to an empty charade.

But we actually have another problem, one about which we rarely speak, as we continue to be handicapped by the lack of an alternative to the main parties, marked by the continued and now quite spectacular success of UKIP in any elections other than the euros.

In this round of elections, with all three main parties apparently detested by an increasing number of people, UKIP managed to lose one council seat and, despite high expectations, they failed to make a mark in the Welsh Assembly elections, blaming a "strategic error", and managed to pick the wrong side on the AV referendum.

Generally, the small parties did badly, as did independents, which would appear to afford some small excuse, except that not all the small parties did badly, the Greens becoming the largest single force on Brighton and Hove City Council - a year after the city returned the UK's first Green MP – gaining ten 10 councillors. The party now has 23 councillors, while the Conservatives have 18, down from 26, and Labour remains with 13 members.

Clearly, UKIP's tactics must have something to do with their predicament and it was thus interesting to note, before the election, the comments of Raedwald, who listed the party's failings. Amongst these, it was not "intellectual enough" and, in particular, it is too "against" stuff and does not communicate or project a set of positive values he can buy into.

This hooks straight into my own views, where I have more recently argued for a new "ism" and for a long time railed against UKIP's lack of vision.

That latter complaint goes way back, at least ten years, and the single most important blockage, preventing the party developing its intellectual base, its vision and its move towards a new "ism" is the current party leader, Mr Nigel Farage. Over the last decade, he has turned the party into his own personal plaything, dispensing patronage as mood takes him and holding back the party development. Thus, while the Greens prosper, the Farage Party is stuck in the doldrums.

Our liberties and our exit plan, however, are far more important than Mr Farage, and it is not only our mainstream politicians who have abdicated our powers to unelected politicians in Brussels. It looks very much as if he has abdicated his responsibility to create a viable Eurosceptic party. And if he cannot do the job – and clearly he has not so far – he needs to stand aside and make room for someone who can.

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The next steps - by Richard... Saturday, May 07, 2011

It's started. Then there is this from Reuters, and even this. I told you this would happen. This is the exit ticket, which is why no Western government (or any other, if they have any sense) is going to question the Obama version.

Meanwhile, we are told that video footage of Osama bin Ladenn supposedly shot in the Abbottabad premises, has been released by the Pentagon. Described as "home videos", it is claimed to be amongst the material seized following the raid by US troops last week.

There are four sequences – available on the BBC site, and the first is Bin Laden in the as Sahabvideo from 6 September 2007 (above), and is obviously material that has been broadcast. It has the station identifier on it.

The second shows a grey-beard, watching old news clips of Bin Laden. He is wrapped in what appears to be a blanket and is wearing what seems to be a black woollen hat. He is operating a remote TV control. If this is Bin Laden he looks very much older than anything else we have seen previously and it would be interesting trying to match that face with known photographs, using recognition technology - or even the Mk1 eyeball.

There is some background in this sequence, and as the camera sweeps down, we see a clutter of wiring and equipment (above) and also what appears to be a computer monitor. The window appears to have a blackout curtain, and the bare-painted walls do not give us any recognisable clues as to location. From the picture, the man himself does not look particularly recognisable.

In the third and fourth images, we are back to a very much younger man, looking very similar to the images in the 2007 sequence. A plyboard sheet and a wrinkled curtain are the respective backdrops, so there are no clues that we can recognise as to location - in any case, they may have been taken 3-4 years ago.

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No shit Sherlock! - by Richard...

Vince Cable, the Government's most senior Liberal Democrat, has today attacked his Tory coalition partners as being "ruthless, calculating and thoroughly tribal".

This is from The Times (online) today. One has to say, though, if Mr Cable has only just found this out, he has lived a very sheltered life.

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