Links and stuff from between March 20th and March 23rd
Just what tickled my fancy in the last few days…
- Knives out at New Statesman as Alastair Campbell editing stint sparks 'crisis of faith' – …it's ironic that he chooses to relaunch his magazine… with that celebrated left-liberal institution, the war criminal.
- China looks to Labour to learn secrets of spin – Anybody else find this creepy?
- BBC NEWS | Politics | Number 10 gets rid of PM's e-mail – The thing is, why would you want to email him anyway?
- Evil IDF – Mike Power's Website – Bloody hell.
Posted from my delicio.us links.
Posted on March 23rd, 2009 at 10:23am under Miscellaneous dross
The publisher deliberately courted controversy by putting Campbell in charge of an issue and publishing the piece by Blair. A usual strategy when trying to revitalize an exhausted periodical – get the readership riled up by putting their hate figures within its pages.
The IDF piece is a punch in the face.
The nickname “The Staggers” for the New Statesman does not refer to its frequent crises of funding and changes in owners and editors (as it says in the Guardian article and on Wikipedia, from where the Guardian journalist presumably nicked that factoid). It was known as “The Staggers” even when it was a successful perdiodical. This comes, I think, from a strange language game played by pre-war Oxbridge students in which they replaced the second half of certain words with -ggers. The nickname for the NS would appear to be the only remaining trace of this game.
The BBC headline is lazy and bullshit. Gordon’s email service has not been removed, it is merely up on blocks. Granted, the mechanics are taking far too long to fix it, but that’s not the same as what the headline conveys.
Time to design them a flash new set of alloys, Tim?