Linkspam thinkspam
Things that I, on the whole, agree with:
David Mitchell, There's too much harping on about respect and banning. What about the huge gulf of toleration in the middle?:
There's altogether too much harping on respect and banning these days. If you can't respect something, you should ban it. If it's not banned, you should respect it. Bullshit. There is a huge gulf of toleration between respect and banning. In a free society, people should be allowed to do what they want wherever possible. The loss of liberty incurred by any alternative principle is too high a price to pay to stop people making dicks of themselves. But, if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so.
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It bears restating that it's not bigoted to disagree vociferously with people's choices, as long as you're even more vociferous in defending their right to make them.
How much do I particularly like and approve of 'if people are using their freedoms to make dicks of themselves, other people should be able to say so', even if I don't in fact, agree with his remarks about people with tattoos?
Sloane Crosley, [I]t is almost impossible to have a single experience that you can pick from the lot and say here: this is what made me me. Quite.
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Dept of, okay, this may be mean, but sometimes I enjoy a good fullout snark:
Review of new bio of Agatha Christie:
After reading Duchess of Death, Richard Hack's biography of Agatha Christie, I can't help but wonder whether his name might also become a byword for a particular kind of book: an unauthorised, speculative muddle of fact and fantasy spiced with a pinch of salacious misrepresentation. A hack job, say. It might catch on.
This is a tremendously bad book. It manages to be both dull and unpleasant; to describe in exhaustive detail almost everything Agatha Christie ever did without coming close to revealing her as a person or a writer.
But alas and alack, I cannot find on the Observer website Barbara Ellen's codfishing of 'rom-bomb' movies about couples who 'exude the raging sexual chemistry of urinal cakes.... radiate the passion of two corpses accidently slung on the same mortuary slab.... spend the entire move looking as though their only urge is to disinfect each other'.
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This is shocking, but not really, unfortunately, surprising: Female circumcision will be inflicted on up to 2,000 British schoolgirls during the summer holidays - leaving brutal physical and emotional scars. What is perhaps a slight encouraging gleam, however, is the extent to which opposition to the practice appears to growing in the communities in which it is traditional, and and the development of resistance.
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