Goldilocks Was a Hipster

a work in progress

3

When someone claims to like bad books or bad movies, they are not using "bad" as a description of quality. They are using it as a label for the kind of book that they like. 

At some point in the past "soap opera" was simply a cuss word meaning "bad drama". "Space opera" was what clever science fiction fans called the stuff that they didn't read. We'd now happily say that Iain M Banks was writing "space opera" without even the slightest implication that he really ought to have been trying harder. "Pulp" used to be a literary slur directed at stuff written quickly and printed on cheap paper: it's now a perfectly neutral way of describing stories about detectives and barbarians and pirates. 

("What a shame we are no longer allowed to go out into the garden and admire all the homosexual flowers and listen to a homosexual tune on the wireless!")

People who like "bad" books might perfectly well draw a distinction between good "bad" books and bad "bad" books. And we could point to any number of bad "good" books. The possibility of bad good "bad" books and good bad "bad" books is left as an exercise for the reader.

Some people think that a long literary novel with a forty page digression about the smell of the protagonist's granny's nightie is basically a pulp novel done badly. "Silly man" they say "He understood so little about pacing that he honestly thought we wanted endless pages about a Russian psychopath wondering the streets thinking about predestination and existentialism when he obviously should have cut straight to the actual murder." (This condition, known as "subtext blindness", is more common than you'd think.) And some people think that a pulp adventure novel is what you are left with when someone tries and fails to write a serious literary psychological doorstep. "Why didn't the writer focus on the effect of shell-shock and PTSD rather than wasting our time with endless descriptions of medieval cavalry charging down orcs with lances?" they ask.

The blessed Germain Greer thought that the Spider-Man movie took a wrong turn when Peter Parker decided to use his powers to fight crime. Surely it should have been about the Kafkesque alienation of an insect person? (She also felt that Master and Commander was too focused on boats.) Paul Merton claimed that Lord of the Rings was the worst book he'd ever read because it didn't contain any laughs; which is a bit like John Cleese telling Malcolm Muggeridge that Chartres cathedral wasn't a very funny building.

Germain Greer didn't really say that the Aubrey-Maturin series was too much about boats. What she said was that setting a story in the Nelsonic navy is a choice: in this case, a choice to tell a story which is mainly about manly men being macho and hardly at all about womanly women being feminine. Only caricature feminists have ever said that Moby Dick, Hornblower and Master and Commander ought never to have been written or that they ought to have had alternate chapters about what the mostly female civilians were doing while the mostly male sailors were out annihilating aquatic mammals and flogging each other, or that they would have been improved by the addition of one of those folk song ladies who dressed up as a boy and went to sea. What feminists actually say is "There are great number of books of the first kind, and very few of the second kind. And only the first kind seem to get turned into movies. Why do you think that is?"

Fanny Price only gets to spend three chapters agonizing about what necklace to wear to a ball because there aren't any French people firing cannon balls at her head. 

4

My go-to example of loving and forgiving something which I believe to be bad is, of course, my MP3 collection of the 1940-51 Superman wireless serials. There are about a thousand 15 minute episodes and I adore every one. (Well, maybe not the alien cook who speaks in rhyme.) I understand that it went out 5 evenings a week, to be listened to by American kids when they got home from school. Episodes are simultaneously breathlessly fast paced and excruciatingly padded. The kids have got to be engaged; but the story has got to be drawn out for as long as possible. Copy boys run to Perry White's office with urgent messages; but it can take a whole episode for anyone to actually get around to reading them. "Message you say, can't you see that I'm too busy to read a fool message?" "Gee, chief, but there might be something important in it, we haven't heard from Lois for three days" "I can't nursemaid every girl reporter on my newspaper! And don't call me chief!" "What about the message?" GET ON WITH IT!

In this kind of format, it's essential that you can tell which character is which the minute they open their mouths. So practically everyone is a stereotype. Henchmen speak in that "de spring is sprung de grass is riz" Brooklyn accent. Policemen begin sentences with "to be sure, to be sure". Cab drivers sound like de black fella. Butler's are English cockneys. Jimmy Olsen says "swell" a lot. On one occassion the villain leaves a white rose at the scene of the crime and Clark Kent questions the florist. Sure enough, he sounds English and effeminate.

This tendency to very broadly drawn characters is part of the show's texture; part of the aesthetic; part of why I adore it. It wouldn't be improved by telling me about the florist's background; or by casting against type and making him a big tough guy with tattoos. But the line between broadly drawn characters; stereotypes; and out-and-out racism can be quite a wiggly one. There's a 1942 episode in which Clark switches two prisoners and remarks. "All Japs look much the same, after all." My attitude to the series might be rather different if most of the wartime episodes were not lost to posterity.  

But then again. In a pulp war story, all the enemy have to pretty uncomplicatedly baddies. That's part of what makes it a pulp war story. If you stop the action to wonder who the Jerry you just shot was, and where he came from; and if he was really evil of heart; or what lies or threats had led him on the long march from his home, and if he would really rather have stayed there in peace, well, you might possibly have a better story, but you'd have a much worse pulp war story. 

So perhaps the person who says "I like this even though it is rubbish" is not talking about aesthetics or genre. Perhaps he is admitting that his pulp books are bad because they are, or sometimes are racist -- or sexist, or morally simplistic. He's not talking about literary quality, but morals. He is much more like someone saying  "I must admit that I enjoy looking at pornography, even though I know I ought not to" than someone saying "I must admit that I like this painting, even though the lady's head is out of proportion and her leg twists round in a direction it couldn't actually go."

continues in this vein for pages

Goldilocks Was a Hipster

A work in progress

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix, angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
1

Do you remember Thunderbirds? 

That is a rhetorical question. Of course you remember Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds?

That is also a rhetorical question. Of course you liked Thunderbirds. 

Did you like Thunderbirds even though you could see the strings? 

Did you like Thunderbirds because you could  see the strings? 

Are you pretty sure that most of the time you couldn't actually see the strings?

Or did you just wish everyone would shut up about the bloody strings?

I mean, it would be perfectly reasonable to regard the strings as an insuperable barrier to enjoying Gerry Anderson. This is an action adventure series where the characters are obviously dolls and where no-one has gone to much trouble to conceal the fact that they are dolls, so remind me, why is anyone watching this thing to start with? 

It would be also be perfectly reasonable to watch it "ironically": to watch it because you can see the strings, because it is funny that you can see the strings, to endlessly replay sequences where the strings are see-able, and to pat yourself on the back for being so much cleverer than those silly people in the 1970s who couldn't have spotted a string if it had leapt out and bit them on the nose. 

And it would be understandable if a Gerry Anderson fan got all defensive and said that actually you can't see the strings most of the time and televisions were much smaller in those days and lots of people were watching in black and white and they were meant for children who just accept this sort of thing for what it is and just shut up about the strings, okay? 

It's a while since I last watched Thunderbirds. If I recall correctly, for the first ten minutes the strings are intrusive, but you rapidly slip into a state of mind where you are perfectly aware that what you are watching are puppets but somehow you bracket off the puppetyness and accept it as an exciting science fictiony James Bondy disaster movie. At which point the one with the aliens in the pyramids is quite claustrophobic and the one on the bridge is quite tense and Lady Penelope is always a hoot. 

Yes: of course they are puppets. Any fool can see that. Why did you think it was even worth mentioning? 

See also: Clone Wars.

2

People sometimes say that they like a particular book or movie or television programme "even though it is terrible". 

Sometimes they sat it in a self deprecating way. "Ha-ha silly me I love trashy horror novels!" 

Sometimes they put it in a defensive way "I love the Twilight series and yes I know it's rubbish." 

And sometimes they are positively aggressive: "What I like BEST is to find some RUBBISH to read and the BIGGER LOAD OF RUBBISH it is the BETTER I'll like it." 

Can you like something and consider it bad? I would have thought that "Works of art I like" and "Works of art I think are good" are pretty much synonymous. Wasn't it Plato who said that no-one considers themselves to be evil, apart from Galactus?

Everyone agrees that Moby Dick is the greatest novel ever written — certainly the greatest long American novel about whale hunting. Everyone also agrees that it is is long, uneven, repetitive, digressive, pretentious and repetitive. But no-one can quite agree what the editor should have done to improve it. The minute you say "Well, he could have ditched the 40 page sermon about Jonah for a start" someone else well say "But that's my favorite chapter."

Moby Dick is seriously flawed. But then, everything is seriously flawed. (I think Theodore Sturgeon said that.) If you are only going to read flawless books, your reading list is going to be quite short.

See also: Cerebus.

Some people do seem to read with their eyes ever vigilante for the chink in the armour that will reveal that this is not the Perfect Book and therefore does not need to be read. "Well, I started reading this book, but on on page 3 the elephant hunter used a rifle that didn't go into production until 1898 even though the book is set in 1897 so naturally I didn't read any further." "On page 54, the writer used a word I didn't know so naturally I tossed the book to one side." I forget who it was who stopped reading Lord of the Rings after Elrond said "This is the doom we must deem".  

F.R. Leavis used this method to reduce his reading list to four English novelists. You have limited time on this earth; and most great novels require several readings, so why waste your time on any book except the great ones? 

C.S.Lewis, on the other hand, felt that the correct approach to a study of sixteenth century English literature (excluding drama) was to read every surviving scrap of literature from the sixteenth century plowing through pages and pages of "drab" writing in order to track down the occasional good bit. I don't suppose Lewis would have said that he liked 16th century literature "even though it's terrible". (He would probably have said that he was a scholar, and "liking" and "not liking" were neither here nor there.)

Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad. Of the four dead white males two were female although one of them had a boy's name. When asked if there was anything special he wanted for his fiftieth birthday, Lewis replied "I suppose the head of F.R Leavis on a platter would be rather too expensive?" 

Continues indefinitely....

Confused about your national identity? Reeling a bit after Last Night of the Proms? Wondering how George VII should style himself in a federal United Kingdom?

Now would be an excellent time to listen to my podcast about patriotic music.

Part 1 - Take Down the Union Jack

Part 2 - Roots


ITunes

RSS

What Has Gone Before

Many people think that "political correctness" means "politeness" or "inclusive language" or "avoiding words that hurt people's feelings". It follows that "political correctness gone mad" means "taking that to a crazy extreme, objecting to language that no one has ever objected to"; but that people who complain about "political correctness gone mad" are often rude people who think they should be able to say bad words if they fucking well want to. If Mrs Whitehouse came back to earth and tried to stop the television saying bum and bloody and ding-a-a-ling, the news people would almost certainly accuse her of being politically correct. And also mad, which she very probably was.

However, "political correctness" is also in use to describe a conspiracy theory in which the world is secretly run by a Marxist cabal based in Frankfurt. "Political Correctness" -- and 20th century literary theory, and human rights legislation, and health and safety at work rules, and, very especially and, the idea of man made climate change -- were created by this Marxist clique in order to destroy civilization. What they have in common is that they rationalize unreasonable behavior, and make people do obviously bad things in the name of the greater good. It is obvious that Christian civilization is based upon citizens having cars, refrigerators, and central heating, and air conditioning, so the Marxists have invented the fiction of "global warming" -- which no reasonable person could believe in, and for which there is not a shred of scientific evidence -- in order to make people feel bad about owning these things. PC is an overarching term for the whole plot: believers very often say that it is Political Correctness that says that children have to wear crash helmets to play conkers, or that there is a modern Politically Correct notion that we should reduce carbon emissions. (*)

Obviously, not everyone who has ever used the word "Political Correctness" believes in the conspiracy theory. (I myself have occasionally said things like "some of the older children's books are not very PC"). But believers in the conspiracy theory talk a lot about Political Correctness. And lots of people do believe in the conspiracy. The Daily Mail went so far as to run a headline "How the BBC fell victim to a Marxist plot to destroy civilization". I took this as rather strong evidence that the Daily Mail believed that there was a Marxist plot to destroy western civilization and that the BBC had fallen victim to it, although some people thought that I was reading a bit too much into it.

So. It is possible that when people say that something called "Political Correctness" ("the evil doctrine of Political Correctness" according to Norman Tebbit) was to blame for the Rotheram child abuse scandal, they are talking about "Political Correctness" in the sense of "not saying stuff that hurts other people's feelings, being careful about what words you use". I suppose that what they have in mind is that "you have to be so careful about what language you use about race that it's really hard to talk about race at all; so when there actually is a racial component in some specific crime; it's easier not to talk about it at all and if you can't talk about it, well, obviously, you don't see it."

It is also very possible that Flying Rodent (**) is correct and that after a shocking cock up where serious child abuse was taking place under the police's noses, someone, by way of a damage limitation exercise, said "I know! If we pretend that we can't do anything about dark skinned people molesting little kids because Political Correctness Gone Mad, the papers will swallow it because they love that kind of thing." I can just about believe that PC Copper honestly thought that dark skinned people were free to molest kids if they really wanted to because it was part of their culture and Political Correctness meant that the law couldn't touch them. I don't believe that the entire police hierarchy believed that. (It's also hard to believe that any officer would independently come up with the idea  think that "you have to let them rape kids" followed naturally from "you aren't allowed to call them Pakis" unless he had already been told that "Political Correctness" and "Human Rights" were basically the same thing.)

But I think that it is also very likely that when people say that the child abuse scandal was the result of "Political Correctness" they mean that a shadowy group of Marxists was secretly controlling the police, and forcing them to act against "Common Sense" as part of an active plot to bring down Civilization and replace it with a communist superstate. Tebbit definitely thinks that there was a plot to establish an enclave in England that functioned under Pakistani law, as if that followed on naturally from "please use inclusive language".

It seems to me that a lot of these claims -- that Isis or Rotheram or the Girl Guide Oath are "caused" by Political Correctness -- read like nonsense if "Political Correctness" means "the belief that it is nicer to say 'black person' rather than 'n----r'". But they make a kind of sense if you believe that Political Correctness and Common Sense are two dueling ideologies, the one committed to destroying "civilization" and the the other committed to preserving it.

But maybe they are simply nonsense.



(*) I grant that Political Correctness could in those contexts mean simply "Prevailing Orthodoxy."

(**) http://flyingrodent.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/chicken.html Note that the New York Times essay that Mr Rodent links to is rather more nuanced than he give it credit for

Fluffy Bunnies

The Rabbits of Watership Down are rabbits. They are as rabbitty as Richard Adams can make them. Everything they do is based on real rabbit behavior. However, Mr Adams asks us to imagine -- well, not imagine, but take for granted as a scholarly fact -- that these rabbits have human intelligence, culture, language, even religion. Well no, not these rabbits -- rabbits in general, and foxes, and sea gulls. How this works we can’t question for a moment. (Could a leoporine mouth even form the syllables El-ahrairah? Is a rabbit brain big enough to develop that kind of consciousness?) It’s funny, actually, how easily our mind accepts this kind of thing. It gets you into philosophical hot water if you aren’t incredibly careful. If a rabbit or a hamster had human consciousness, then obviously vivesection would be wrong. But they don't, so it's not a good argument. I think Richard Adams develops this fallacy at some length in his later books.

Peter Rabbit is also a rabbit, possibly with a fly upon his nose. And the anthropomorphicisation has gone a lot further than it has in Watership Down. He wears clothes. His daddy smokes a pipe, forsooth. But he also lives in a hole, and steals cabbages from a farmer's garden, and if I remember correctly there is an implication that the farmer has sometimes made his relatives into pies. If Watership Down asks us to imagine a world in which rabbits have human minds, the Peter Rabbit books asks us to imagine a world in which, instead of Rabbits, there are tiny, Rabbit shaped people.

Again, we don’t have any trouble getting our heads around this weird-ass parallel universe. We don’t say for goodness sake they have culture and language and you are going to put them in a pie what kind of weirdo are you? We just take it for granted that that's a normal way of writing about rabbits.

The Hare in Aesops Fable is even less animal like than either Hazel and Fiver or Peter Rabbit.  It's not really even an animal at all. I mean, we take it for granted that tortoises and hares can communicate, and place bets, and that owls can adjudicate races, and all the birds and beasts can come and cheer them on their way. But I suppose he's not really a hare because the Hare and the Tortoise isn't really a story. It's just a thought experiment or a proverb, with the Hare meaning “fast thing” and the tortoise meaning “slow thing.”. You could do it just as well with a motorbike and a Virgin train.  

Now, the only rabbity thing about Bugs Bunny is his carrot, and that carrot is pretty much only there to be a place holder for a cigar so Bugs can be a sort of cartoon version of  Groucho Marx. He isn’t even really rabbit shaped, any more than one of those child's drawings of a cat looks anything like a cat. But we still sort of accept that he's a bunny because that's what rabbits look like in cartoons. In the days when Walt Disney still made cartoons, kids used to ask “What Kind of An Animal Is Goofy?” The answer is, well, he isn’t really any kind of animal, and it wouldn’t make any difference if he was. (I suppose he's a country bumpkin?) I think there used to be a rabbit in the Disney Mythos, but it was retconned out during the Crisis. There is a famous example of false memory syndrome in which subjects are persuaded to believe that they met Bugs Bunny at Disneyland, even though Bugs Bunny isn’t owned by Disney, or wasn’t then. But cartoons are probably a different kind of thing to prose narratives and fables and anyway, I have run out of rabbits.

Bears. Paddington Bear. Except that again, he really isn't. He wears clothes, talks English and although he causes chaos wherever he goes, its the sort of chaos that a very naughty child would cause, not the sort of chaos that would occur if a large South American carnivore got loose on and English Railway station. The only bear like thing about him is that he likes marmalade, which comes in jars, and is spread on toast, like honey, which is proverbially likes by bears, at least since Pooh.

Does anyone but me remember Mary Plain? She was a sort of proto-Paddington, a two legged bear who could talk English living in a suburban home. She did mostly did human things -- entered fancy dress competitions, joined the boy scouts, and, after the series had jumped the entirely non anthropomorphic shark, solved a mystery and get shipwrecked on a desert island populated by natives that would, if it were reprinted today, cause the PC Brigade to cancel all leave.

Now Yogi Bear, he's more like Peter Rabbit. I can see in what way he's a bear. He wears clothes and talks and can interact with the human world but he lives on a nature reserve, and steals goodies from visitors picnics. He's a human being -- Yogi Naughty Petty Thief Man -- who stands in the same relationship to the Park Ranger on the one paw and the tourists on the other (in one specific respect) as an actual bear would. (On my one visit to an American national park I was warned to hang any food out of reach of the bears or put it in a metal crate, so evidently it's a thing.) The same goes for Tom and Jerry. They are really only a cat and a mouse in so far as one does the chasing and the other does the running away. 

The least bear like of all is Rupert the Bear (everyone sing his name). He is, basically, not a bear. He isn’t even a teddy bear. He is twelve year old boy with a bear’s head; whose friends are twelve year old children with elephants heads and badgers heads. I don’t recall that he even particularly likes honey. Cartoonist Alfred Bestall said that you couldn't ever send Rupert to the seaside, because putting him in a bathing costume would force you to decide to he was furry all over. 

I never quite understood why clever men like C.S Lewis and A.A Milne and Pink Floyd were quite so keen on WInd in the Willows. I’m not sure I ever got to the end of it. I think Lewis was right about why Mr Toad had to be a toad rather than and English country gentleman, even though he’s obviously an English country gentleman and not a toad. If he was a human, he would have to have servants and employees and we’d have to at least have a hint about where his money came from. As long as he’s an animal, we can sort of skate over that. (Lewis thinks he’s both a child and an adult: a child in that food sort of just turns up and no-one asks where it came from; and adult in that he gets to choose what he wants to do and there’s no-one to tell him off.) And the shape of a toad’s face is a sort of fixed caricature of a certain kind of human. 

I don’t think that there is any reason to suppose that Owls are wise, particularly; I don’t even know if they are cleverer than other birds of prey. But they are always wise in stories because the big eyes look like we imagine a wise human ought to look. So stories about animal-shaped humans lend themselves to a kind of fable where everyone has a more or less fixed personality and it can’t really develop. (A.A Milne said that you only had to look at the toy pig and the toy donkey and the toy tiger to see their personalities -- timid and gloomy and bouncy.)

It is perfectly true that if a child behaved like Paddington Bear, he would get punished or injured or given pills. (If an adult behaved that way, he’d be arrested or put in a home.) This is not to say that you can’t do stories about naughty or accident prone children in a realistic setting, but they either have to get some sort of comeuppance, like Dennis the Menace, or they have to be devious enough to avoid it, like Just William, which introduces an element of cynicism which isn’t funny in quite the same way. But I don’t suppose that Michael Bond said to himself that he wanted to write a story about the kind of child who floods the bathroom the first time he needs a wash, but then thought it wouldn’t be that funny if an actual child did that kind of thing and then thought I know I’ll make him a bear instead. I think he started to tell a story about a bear, and the rest followed naturally. And that's what's so odd. Once we start to tell stories about bears or rabbits it somehow becomes natural that they wear duffle coats and tam o shanters and like honey and marmalade. We can’t look at an animal without anthropomorphising it.

Doesn't the trailer for the Paddington movie look appalling? Like Winnie-the-Pooh reimagined by Peter Jackson.

Anyway, I hope this clears up all the confusion. I was as surprised as anybody to find out that Hello Kitty had a personality. I assumed it was just something you stamped on notepads and teeshirts. But I don't have a problem with the recent bombshell that she's not a cat. Of course it isn’t. Anymore than Bugs Bunny is a Rabbit or Pooh is a bear.

Bored now.

1: If you have analogy, take an antihistamine

This is the complete text of the first part of an essay I wrote a very long time ago, about last Tuesday. People on the internet are unlikely to read an article of more than about 500 words in one go, so I have taken to splitting up my longer pieces into sections. However, I tend to come at an argument from three directions at once, so that things I say in part 1 may not make sense until part 3. So I thought that it would be a Good Thing to ask my readers to hold off on making comments until all the sections were published. However, this had the result that all the discussion has so far focused on the final installment -- in fact, on one sentence of the final instalment. (This was, in a good way, exacerbated by the fact that a link to part 4 "went viral" on Twitter, meaning that ten times as many people read my admittedly tentative conclusions than read the ploddingly closely argued build-up to those conclusions.) I am therefore re-printing the essay over the next few days, and positively soliciting feedback.

I do a podcast about music. Some people think it's OK.

English is my native language. My words mean what I intend. If you read them differently because of "social context" that's your problem.
               Prof Richard Dawkins

Analogy is to a man arguing on the internet as a banana skin on the pavement is to a fat lady in a silent comedy.

In 2012, One Of Those Clergymen was reported as having said that gay marriage was just as wicked as slavery. He won an award for being the most homophobic man in the UK.

Naturally, this wasn't quite what he had said. What he had said was that his church though gay sex was taboo, on religious grounds, and that he didn't agree with gay people getting married as that gave religious approval to the taboo thing. (He may not have phrased it in quite such temperate language.) People told him that this was okay; he was entitled to his beliefs; no church was going to have to solemnize same-sex marriages if it didn't want to. He retorted that this was neither here nor there: you can't defend legalizing a bad thing on the ground that you aren't making the bad thing compulsory. 

And he was quite right. You can't. "X is not compulsory" is no kind of a response to "X should not be permitted." If you are against bringing back slavery, then you are against bringing back slavery even if you personally won't have to own any slaves if you don't want to. 

Rilstone's third law states that when someone says something very stupid, the internet will immediately claim that they said a different very stupid thing. Rilstone's second law states that the person who points this out will immediately be suspected of agreeing with the very stupid thing that the original person didn't say. When I suggested that, well, no, Father O'Bigot hadn't really said that gays were as wicked as slave owners, the Spartist wing of my fan-base claimed that I was using the concept of analogy to "give him a pass".

I am not entirely sure what "give him a pass" means. We don't use the expression in this country. I think it has to do with American school children getting permission to leave the classroom to go to the toilet.

It is very clear that Father O'Bigot had, in fact, said something very stupid. The analogy between slave-ownership and allowing gay couples to get married in church is a tenuous one. If it is wrong to own slaves, then it is wrong for anyone to own slaves, because slave ownership does obvious harm, mostly to slaves. If you personally believe that gay sex is taboo then it is hard to see how other people doing the taboo thing harms anyone else. (When the equal marriage debate was at its silliest, some religious groups attempted to claim that allow gay couples to get married would somehow make straight couples less married: I don't understand what they meant, and still don't.) 

And he deliberately chose an incendiary example. If what you want to have is a  discussion as opposed to a shouting match, then incendiary examples are not terribly helpful. And if your example is sufficiently toxic, well, naturally, everyone is going to focus on the example, rather than the substantive point, however valid the substantive point might be. If an MP says "I think that Prime Minister should roll up his sleeves and the give the striking dock workers a jolly good black eye, just as he would to his own wife if he got home and she didn't have his dinner ready" then I don't think we would be very surprised if the story in the papers the next day was that an MP appeared to take wife-beating for granted. Even if he had a good point about prosecuting the strikers with utmost severity.  

So. The question before us today is whether or not Prof Richard Dawkins should be allowed to visit the bathroom over his recent twitter pronouncements about sexual assault and pedophilia. 

Read: Where Dawkins Went Wrong -- The Book

MY CRITICAL FACULTIES ARE IMPAIRED. I CANNOT READ. MY CRITICAL FACULTIES ARE IMPAIRED. I CANNOT READ.

I make a joke comparing Dawkins to the Borg, the Cybermen and the Daleks. ("He's like a rather ridiculous hyper logical robot in TV science fiction serial.")

Someone takes me to be insinuating that Dawkins wants to kill everyone who doesn't agree with him, as due to my use of the Dalek catch-phrase "exterminate". He goes so far as to invoke the blood libel, forsooth.

I read back over the essay, realize that gosh-dammit you could read it that way because I hadn't done enough set-up for the "Dalek" gag. If I had written "exterminate! exterminate" or "ex-ter-min-ate" instead of "exterminate" the ambiguity wouldn't have arisen. I clarify my point, and make an alteration to the text to fix it.

The original critic continues to repeat the original point (which I have conceded) as if nothing had happened.

Some time ago I wrote an essay called "The Impossibility of Argument in the Mind of Someone On the Internet". I do rather wish I'd stopped at that point.

Yes, indeed it is "only a joke"; and yes indeed you can say hurtful things under the cover of "joking". But respond to the joke I actually made, not the one that I have made it clear that I didn't make.  "Ha-ha Dawkins is a bit like a robotic sci fi baddie" not "Ha-ha Dawkins wants to kill everybody in the whole wide world."

Even if you think that the exact letter of the text could be read in the second way, it's not fair to continue reading it that way after I have explained how I intended it to be read. It means you are focusing, at best, on a stylistic problem (Andrew sometimes allows ambiguity to creep into his jokes) rather than on substantive point (Andrew thinks some of the new atheists are ridiculous because of their obsession with logic and nothing but.)

It is a little like arguing with a Dalek about religious texts.

"CHRISTIANS BELIEVE THAT NAUGHTY SCHOOL CHILDREN SHOULD BE EXECUTED."

"Er, no, actually, I have never met one who does believe that."

"CHRISTIANS BELIEVE THAT NAUGHTY SCHOOL CHILDREN SHOULD BE EXECUTED. IT SAYS SO ON PAGE 143 VERSE 16 OF THE APPENDIX TO THE APOCRYPHA".

"But they don't interpret that passage as meaning that, and never have done; in fact, they specifically think that those pages have lapsed."

"AREN'T YOU LISTENING? CHRISTIANS BELIEVE IN STONING NAUGHTY CHILDREN. IT SAYS SO IN THEIR BOOK. IT SAYS SO IN THEIR BOOK. IT SAYS SO IN THEIR BOOK."

See also: flying horses.

Not that the interpretation of my internet essays is as complex and controversial as Biblical hermenuitics, of course.

It just sometimes feels that way.

If we are quoting C.S Lewis, something which we hardly ever do in this forum, surely the relevant passage is from The Four Loves:

"Another time, when I had been addressing an undergraduate society and some discussion (very properly) followed my paper, a young man with an expression as tense as that of a rodent so dealt with me that I had to say, "Look, sir. Twice in the last five minutes you have as good as called me a liar. If you cannot discuss a question of criticism without that kind of thing I must leave." I expected he would do one of two things; lose his temper and redouble his insults, or else blush and apologise. The startling thing is that he did neither. No new perturbation was added to the habitual malaise of his expression. He did not repeat the Lie Direct; but apart from that he went on just as before. One had come up against an iron curtain. He was forearmed against the risk of any strictly personal relation, either friendly or hostile, with such as me. 

Behind this, almost certainly, there lies a circle of the Titanic sort—self-dubbed Knights Ternplars perpetually in arms to defend a critical Baphomet. We—who are they to them—do not exist as persons at all. We are specimens; specimens of various Age Groups, Types, Climates of Opinion, or Interests, to be exterminated. Deprived of one weapon, they coolly take up another. They are not, in the ordinary human sense, meeting us at all; they are merely doing a job of work—spraying (I have heard one use that image) insecticide."

Is Richard Dawkins Planning To Kidnap Little Sir Hugh Of Lincoln and Throw Him Down A Well?

No.