Some people are obviously tired of life.

[zotz]

There's a rather interesting article in today's Grauniad.

Annabel volunteers the opinion that Asian immigrants are a "bloody bore" while black people are "ghastly". "I'm a racist," she declares proudly. "We've got to keep little UK basically Anglo-Saxon."

She pauses, and asks whether I agree. "Well madam," I reply, "I am the central London organiser of the British National party ..." .

And also, as it happens, an undercover Guardian journalist. I'll be interested to see the BNP's comments on this.

Last night I was helping Alison pick up stuff for the solstice bash and we nearly got mown down by a high-speed reverser in the car park. This was the sort of reversing I'd do to get a hundred yards back to a passing place, not right outside a supermarket's front door. The driver mouthed "sorry" and sped off. I guess she didn't see us and didn't realise that we'd had to get out of her way.

Still, I got a New Statesman out of it - with an article by Clive Stafford Smith and a story by Ursula le Guin (thanks to whoever pointed that one out), so the risk was probably justified.

Comments

[devalmont.livejournal.com]

The sheer rage I feel when I hear people spouting racist claptrap... fighting... against my belief that everyone has the right to free speech...
Brain.. won't...work..

Gah. No, I've decided, they're racist c*nts who deserve to all live together on their own little WASP-only island. Preferably somewhere where they do nuclear testing. Maybe that's vaguely genocidal, but hell, I'm allowed my right to free speech!

[zotz]

Just because you have a right to say something doesn't mean that you're not a shit for saying it. The BNP are still steaming turds even if they are being more cautious with their phrasing these days.

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Isn't there a minor island in the Western Isles where they did a lot of anthrax experiments...?

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

Gruinard Island. More the north than the west.

[pickwick.livejournal.com]

Heh. I thought that was another Grauniad anagram, there. Would have been fitting, somehow.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

They will die happy in the absence of anybody more than two molecules of melanin different from themselves, and the rest of us won't have to listen to them. I think it's a brilliant compromise.

Keep the UK ango-saxon

[pigeonhed.livejournal.com]

Send all those bloody Normans back! And all those Celts* Vikings and Jutes too.
At a guess that would include a large proportion of these idiots themselves.

(*oops weren't we here first?)

Re: Keep the UK ango-saxon

[zotz]

AFAICT the Celts go back about three thousand years in these parts. There were previous inhabitants.

Right - all of us, back to Africa. It's gonna be damn crowded in those trees.

Re: Keep the UK ango-saxon

[inulro.livejournal.com]

Then there's people like me who are probably more Anglo-Saxon than they are, but I'm not even English...

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

I wonder what sort of crypto they were using? He is told a passphrase to use as the CD is handed over, so it isn't PGP/GPG - or at least if it is they're not using the public key stuff...

[djm4]

If they were sending massages *to* him, he'd need a private key which might conceivably have a passphrase, wouldn't he?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Yes, but you would usually expect to generate your own key and choose your own passphrase. Maybe they do that in advance to make it easier for people? It's not exactly best practice...

[djm4]

It's not best practice, but it's exactly the way I'd expect a control-freak organisation with non-tech-savvy members to do it. And if they generate all the keys, they have the ability to read all the e-mails.

[zotz]

We could mail him and ask.

[devalmont.livejournal.com]

The very fact that a so called political party is using clandestine techniques more acquainted to a terrorist cell is rather concerning. I mean, I'm sure all political parties use encryption, but passing across 'The Red Fox hunts at night, and the Eagle flew yesterday' style passwords by word of mouth? That's creepy. But then again, as I mentioned earlier, I think they are a big bunch of wankers.

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

Actually that was an aspect of the article I was quite uncomfortable with. It's perfectly legitimate for any group of people with very unpopular opinions to use encryption, counter-surveillance techniques and so on, and I'm not sure it's fair to demonise them for that. Though I'm sure part of the point is that it gives the members a cheap thrill.

On your last point I agree entirely.

[feanelwa.livejournal.com]

You know, I think a lot of these problems would be a lot less bad if it wasn't for MTV. The (white) neighbour upstairs when I was living in Bermondsey was pretty racist, and whenever any kids vandalised anything she'd say they were so rude, like black people. But all the black people I ever saw in Bermondsey were polite, tidy, kind and generally pleasant, and wouldn't drop litter, never mind vandalise anything. The only place she could have got this idea from that they were the complete opposite is these people waving guns around shouting about "da bitches and da ho's" on television. If she'd actually talked to them instead of watching mad-celebrity-world on TV all the time, maybe she wouldn't have had these racist ideas at all.

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

I'd think about what paper she read, first. If she was that bad, wouldn't she have turned off MTV whenever any rap came on? Whereas The Mail (for example) is full of nasty racist shite.

[zotz]

It was probably worse before MTV, although I'm sure the whole gangsta thing doesn't help. It sells records, though.

[devilgate.livejournal.com]

That's a great article. I love the way he openly names people, and reveals user ids and passwords. But it feels as if it ought to be much longer. Any idea whether there's going to be more?

[zotz]

There's going to be more. I think it's going to go on all week.

[lsur.livejournal.com]

Very interesting article. Did you catch '100% English' on Channel 4 (apparently repeated last night - I don't know if it's viewable online). A group of people believing themselves to be of pure blood (ie descended directly from the Anglo-Saxons) submit their genes for testing to show the mix of sources in their family history. Very amusing.

(No link - the C4 website is very slow at the moment)

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

I did watch that, and to be honest I thought it wasn't great.

It's perfectly possible for someone to be as hereditarily English as can be and have Southern European in their genetic makeup - we were conquered by the Romans after all. Ok, you'd expect them to have been dliuted down a fair amount, but probabilities can throw up some funny things.

Eddie Izzard's series, Mongrel Nation, was wonderful, however.

[zotz]

Having descent from all over the place is fine, except in the specific case that you're claiming not to. Then it becomes quite amusing.

[valkyriekaren.livejournal.com]

Oh yes - for all the possibly weak science, it was worth it to see the looks on their repellant little faces.

I was particularly taken with the racist comedian who revised his estimate of how long someone's family should have been in the UK to count as 'British' from 10 generations to just two, once he realised that parts of his own family might not have been here so very long.

[lsur.livejournal.com]

It wasn't brilliant, I agree, but certainly entertaining. I would have liked to have known more about the methods used and the theory behind them. It was pretty shocking as well, to hear an 'educated' person such as a lawyer express belief in her own pure origins and then to find that she was largely East European (= Romany). She then threatens to sue the programme makers, which made her look even more ridiculous.

[lovingboth]

I like the way the 'useful links' at the bottom of the webpage do not include the BNP's own site.

Doesn't the Guardian trust its own readers?