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MercThrasher

Listed below are comments made by MercThrasher between Thursday, 27th August 2009 and Sunday, 20th December 2009.

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Think before you carve 5:29pm on 20 Dec 2009 Yeah, yeah - 'ethics' as cruelty to animals. What else happened on the ethical front while you were faffing about with quorn, mate? Did you get to notice the religion that has no name on the attack? Did FOLKS getting blown to hamburger all over the world engage your attention for a moment or two? How about the Nobel going to a bloke that sent 30,000 soldiers into battle and launched several cruise missile at a sovereign country within days of accepting the 'peace prize'?

Yes, there are strong connections to be made between eating (too much) meat and the the ecological decay/famines that drive people to war, but you never made them in any real terms, and neither has the Beeb.

Why is it that all modern experience has to be organised? Kind of thinking 'What would it be like if....?' when there's a whole world out there to experience and report upon. Problem is, the dumb left has shifted the lexical goalposts so far that the words of shock, outrage, anger and frustration we need so badly are now tabu. So we have to hide under the blankets with our pet turkey. In more ways than one.

I solved the veggie ethics problem by not eating any meat that I hadn't reared, killed, dressed and cooked myself at least a couple of times, then trying to treat meat as the luxury it is, rather than an anachronistic demonstration of social status ('rich enough to put meat on the table seven days a week') - another part of the discussion that anyone, repeat anyone, involved in this particular debate touches upon - unless they blog for the Beeb, in which case a little superficial emotion, a couple of anecdotes, and a very slightly bloody pic are enough to secure a good postbag, the only measure of success. Pathetic.
India's bizarre sex surveys 7:56pm on 19 Dec 2009 Tomsu - you have a Freudian finger 'a sacred act. It is not just a "drink" when we have thrust' is just delicious.

As for the blog, it is, as usual, super: superfluous, supercilious, superficial and super-boring. In a country where every second city lamp-post advertises sexual quackery and everybody lies about everything, what price a sex-survey.

All that can be deduced from the article is that Biswas is definitely from Patna and there's a one in four chance that he participates in surveys.
Prizes and good intentions 06:09am on 10 Dec 2009 Prez B. Hussein Obama's right in there with Arafat and, let's face it, doing nothing is a lot better than kicking off another intifada in the face of a 99% successfully negotiated peace. I think it's the karma of the explosives - that kind of money simply can't mesh with peace, no matter hard self-righteous, po-faced Swedes try to make it.
East and west still divided? 8:22pm on 31 Oct 2009 We're all forgetting (or ignorant of) a couple of very important facts. Firstly, Germany has an excellent constitution, a legal system that works, and a police force that seldom pulls its punches. The Germans are quite capable of looking after themselves without Auntie BBC twitching the curtains and banging on about extremism. Secondly, of all the countries in Europe, Germany has best come to terms with World War Two. It took time, for half of which the East was in the intellectual freezer of totalitarian socialism, a sickeningly racist regime; if a few of the lads take their time defrosting, so be it. None of our business. But we do very much need to get our terminology sorted out; an excellent blog on 'fascism' elsewhere last week should be left to stand for all of us, if only to prevent repetition. I'm a right-winger. Like the original Tories, I believe in land. Unlike them, I also believe in free commerce. I don't like state control. I distrust education directed by the state and am helpless with frustration at what has become of a health service run by politicians and (other) jobsworths. I hate what the 'left' has done to my language, the quality of debate, and my country of origin (I can't live there now - I want my daughter to grow up healthy, literate and tolerant, so I moved out). Does this make me a racist? Is someone going to use the 'fascist' epithet because I detest Marx, Engels and all the harm they have done the world? I'd like to think not, but I'm pretty sure I'm wrong.
Nutt gets the sack 8:54pm on 30 Oct 2009 Here we go again. The following is long, but worth reading. It is an extract from the most sensible, balanced book on drugs - including alcohol and tobacco - that I have eve read. No politician or journalist should be without it. Under the rather unfortunately over-clever title of 'Drug Scenes' it is the work of the Royal College of Psychiatrists, first published in 1987. This is from the beginning of the chapter on cannabis.
Open quote
"Every now and then an official committee manages to produce a report which turns upside-down all the usual expectations that government reports must for ever be boring and platitudinous. On such an occasion society is presented with an incisive or even disturbing analysis of a particular problem which provides an important example of how important social issues should be analysed dispassionately. The tone of public debate is enriched. In hard days comfort can be drawn from the evidence of the qualities in our society such a report provides.
The Wootton Report on Cannabis, issued in 1968, was undoubtedly a publication of that stature. Its distinction owed much to the chairman of its committee, Baroness Wootton, who is not only a social scientist of renown but a critic and commentator famous for her independence of mind. The background review of the literature was carried out by Sir Aubrey Lewis, whose name was a byword to generations of psychiatrists for unforgiving scientific exactness. The committee's membership represented a spectrum of scientific and public experience. Its provenance was the Advisory Committee on Drug Dependence (a government-appointed body which preceded the present Advisory Council) and Barbara Wootton's cannabis committee was a working group of the main Committee.
After a painstaking review of the evidence the Wootton Committee concluded that the dangers of moderate use cannabis had been exaggerated, while emphasising that cannabis was not free from risk. The report explicitly recommended against legalisation of the drug but suggested that penalties for smale-scale possession should be reduced.
It might have been expected that such a piece of writing with its few, well-reasoned, and clear conclusions would have been widely welcomed as a basis for temperate and informed debate. It is the essential argument of this chapter that such an expectation is naive; the cannabis debate has not been very much concerned with the facts but has been the stage for a fundemental clash of values. Facts, science, objectivity, truth, dispassionate analysis have all been obscured in the resulting confrontation.
It is a sad reminder that a society which can on occasion produce a brilliant committee report is commonly the same society which will display a crass inability to respond to the challenge of fresh thinking."
Quote ends.
There follow quotes from the press, not all of it tabloid, that make me ashamed to have been a journalist. There are also quotes from Hansard that are utterly cringeworthy, including the ludicrous suggestion by James Callaghan (then Home Seceretary, later P.M.)that Baroness Wootton had somehow been 'nobbled' by the pro-pot lobby. The song was the same - inability to recognise evidence in the face of prejudice and a media dedicated to alcohol on a massive scale (anyone remember 'Lunchtime O'Booze' and 'Arry 'Ardcastle'. I worked with 'em for years, and worse.)
Find 'Drug Scenes' somewhere, anywhere. Scan it, put it on the net, send it to your MP, whatever. But read it. It may be a touch dated, but it's the best balanced summary of everything that's appeared here so far that you'll ever find.
Here endeth the sermon. Wake up at the back and let us all out for a smoke. Well, actually, no thanks, friend, it leads to unhealthy, addictive, life-destructive things, like tobacco. Try this chocolate mix......
Does Obama blame Britain? 09:08am on 26 Oct 2009 Britain influenced the States under Bush? Come on, Mardell, that's just cheap fiction make column-inches and you know it. Bush, the man who put on a bomber jacket to go see the Queen, who shot toothpaste jokes (really rather apt) at Prozac-rictus-grinning Blair, a president so deeply Republican that he was still fighting the War of Independence. And now Europe holds its breath for what? As the man said, the pathetic few underequipped British will fight, the Germans will pay, the Italians avoid and the French calculate and none of them - NONE - will be a drop in the ocean compared to the massive effort the Americans are putting in, unthanked and reviled from all sides. Obama wants to drop Europe right out of his calculations, but since France and England are such fertile ground for terrorist plots against his country, he's got to keep an eye on us: Inside the tent 'facing' out, rather than outside the tent 'facing' in, like dumb Monty after D-Day. Obama's not going to last, and he knows it. His sole ambition in the struggle against terrorism is that it doesn't happen on his watch. He will appease, wriggle, flatter, disarm, sacrifice brave men and sack the competent and those who see the threat, all in the interests of passing a murderously incompetent buck to the next unfortunate to sit in the White House, preferably a Republican who can be blamed when Iran gets the Bomb, the irhabis (that's Arabic for terrorist, better than 'jihadi' which affords resepct where none is due - Beeb take note) kill a few thousand and Britain finally stops using Afghanistan for live-firing practice and goes home to where the Yanks are financing a recrudescent IRA. That's Obama's style. Mark my words, Mark.
The BNP and the white working class 2:29pm on 25 Oct 2009 Only a Beeb correspondent could write at such length about a 'racist' party without mentioning its root, basic, from-the-very-origins, pillar-of-existence anti-Hebraism. The BNP (and the other clots of alphabet soup that the Hitler-worshippers use) even supported (supports?) the Palestinians for their perceived struggle against a paranoid vision of 'the international Jew'. The fact that the old 'anti-Semite' insult has now been finessed to 'Islamophobe' leaves the field open to the rest of the closet anti-Hebraics - the Beeb, of all people, should step carefully. People might start thinking they're biased....
Plotting Czech-mate? 8:49pm on 08 Oct 2009 There's more to this than Czechs 'thinking that Klaus is a litle arrogant'. He's a black-belt, fully-trained Moscow hood of the old school. He went to an 'Economics School' sponsored by the KGB and specialising in destabilisation. He has betrayed his country's reputation countless times, not least when he organised the vote of no confidence that brought down the government in mid-term of their presidency of the EU, destroying the last shreds of credibility left over from the Havel days. He's maundering on about how we must 'get closer to our natural allies, the Russians' now, and using the whole debate to discredit the Constitutional Court, a perennial natural obstacle to his magalomaniac style of presidency. He denies global warming, insults his own scientists and openly collaborates with elements of government mega-corrupt even by the abysmal standards of this end of the world. And for me, worst of all, he has become the figurehead for opposition to the EU, an organisation I detest.
And BTW, can a BBC 'editor' (whatever that means) please lay off the cheap puns on the word 'Czech' - we're sick of them here, especially when they don't even have any logical relation to text (who, exactly, is 'check-mated' round here? Certainly not Klaus). And the qualifier 'caretaker' should be added to ALL government titles right now. The Czech Republic will not have an elected parliament for at least another couple of months - again thanks to Klaus and his little cabal. Do your homework, Gavin, and try and pretend to be a journalist once in a while. The BBC needs one or two of them.
Damaged Special Relationship? 10:36am on 10 Sep 2009 @ LarryWagoner

Nice points, honestly made, but you need to sort out your terminology. Nazis and communists are not opposites - they are part of the same thing, loosely termed 'socialism' in the European, rather than the Brit, sense. The term 'nazi' is, after all, an abbreviation for 'national socialist' in German. I don't think Ms Schikelgruber's little boy or any his playmates would have allowed the main word in their party title to carry connotations of anything opposite. And one can harldly plead dissimulation - the nazis were far from shy about their ideology. Their opposition to the German communist party was pure power politics - a battle for the streets and the hearts and minds of the trade unions. The nazi Germany-Soviet Russia pact at the beginning of WW2 was a seminal and negative turning point of the 20th century. Further, the term 'fascist' is a leftist coining, largely from the Soviet propaganda machine, derived from the name of Mussolini's political group in Italy, used to denigrate anything that opposed the Beastly Bolshevik Revolution. It is meaningless, apart from serving to identify leftist fellow travellers using outmoded lexis to promote their redundant ideas. Google John J Ray + Hitler and follow your nose for more.
After the Ashes 8:48pm on 27 Aug 2009 Cricket, what cricket? Let's turn to the choker of all time, Casey Stoner, World Motorcycle Champ (ex) who's got whine flu and can't race any more without his horsepower advantage and secret fuel stash. Perhaps we might like to switch to the tennis. Or the swimming. Fact is, all the academies, obscure chemicals, rule-bending and money aren't working any more and Oz is being called to compete on a level (if worn) playing field - and not making the grade any more. We Brits are used to being the target, used to twerp government that only supports sport for its own personal gain and thinks that the answer to obesity is a poster campaign and support from Auntie Beeb. What irks our southern cousins is that we sometimes win despite our masters and our media (largely Oz-owned), despite lack of facilities and money, while they find it difficult even with 'emergency' backing right and left. Swivel, Bruce - you're fading.

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