Conversations With A Conservative.

If you've been wondering where Elroy has been lately, well, the answer is hard at work going undercover in Wingnut World to bring you authentic and real, first hand rightie logic through a series of conversations with his chum Hawkeye® over at View From Above. Hi, Hawkeye®!

They canvassed many subjects – the War on Terror™,, OBL, capitalism, Iraq, Israel, Islam – and so without further ado, here is the first of a few...

On 9/11.

HAWKEYE®: Was it the conservatives in the MSM that blamed Bush for 9/11?

ELROY: No, it wasn't – conservatives blamed OBL.

HAWKEYE®:And they were correct in their assessment.

ELROY: Not according to the FBI or Dick Cheney

HAWKEYE®: The world is an ugly place for sure. But it's not ugly because one man in the White House made tough decisions on how best to prevent another 9/11. It's ugly because guys like Osama bin Laden plot and plan about the best way to kill tens, hundreds, or thousands of innocent people – was it our "arrogance" that caused Osama bin Laden to order the deaths of nearly 3,000 Americans?

ELROY: Well, if we allow that it was Osama, I submit that he did it to get the US out of Saudi Arabia, and guess what – it worked!

HAWKEYE®: OBL didn't perpetrate 9/11 "to get the US out of Saudi Arabia", but let me get this straight. On the one hand you want me to believe that OBL used the excuse of U.S. troops in Mecca (which they weren't) to justify 9/11 in order to get the troops out of Saudi Arabia, which you claim forced Rumsfeld to pull our troops out.’

Then, on the other hand, you want me believe that OBL wasn't behind 9/11, even though he admitted to it on several occasions, and which is contrary to your previous assertions. Which is it? Can't have it both ways.’

ELROY: I don’t need to have it both ways – I don’t want it both ways. Here's what happened – following the first Gulf War, US troops were stationed in Medina and Mecca, Saudi Arabia – this is pretty hard to deny, because it’s true. OBL and his Al-Queada buddies demanded their removal – it’s on their web site – then 9/11 happens, OBL gets blamed, the War On Terror™ ensues and US toops are pulled from Medina and Mecca.

However, this doesn’t mean that OBL did it – just that it was assumed he did. Was OBL the fall guy? We know he was a CIA asset. Was removing the troops from Medina and Mecca the pay-off for taking the rap? I don’t know, but there are many unanswered questions about 9/11. Did OBL admit it? Not definitively. Not beyond reasonable doubt. When? Where?

According to Dick Cheney, OBL didn’t perpetrate it at all! ‘We've never made the case, or argued the case that somehow Osama bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11’ said Dick in 2006. ‘That evidence has never been forthcoming.’


And according the FBI, OBL didn’t do it.
FBI agent Rex Tomb let it slip in 2006 that "9/11 is not mentioned on Usama Bin Laden’s Most Wanted page. He has not been formally indicted and charged in connection with 9/11 because the FBI has no hard evidence connecting Bin Laden to 9/11.’

HAWKEYE®: You misinterpreted Dick Cheney's statement that there was no "smoking gun" connecting OBL to 9/11 as proof that Cheney said "OBL was not responsible" for 9/11.

ELROY: I didn’t misinterpret anything. I quote Cheney as per. It seems pretty clear to me.

He said nothing about a ‘smoking gun’ – that’s YOUR misinterpretation. What is there about ‘We’ve never made the case that somehow OBL was directly involved in 9/1’ that is ambiguous?

Which words in ‘We've never made the case that somehow Osama bin Laden was directly involved in 9/11’ are open to interpretation?


HAWKEYE®: But that is not what Cheney meant.

ELROY: Well what DID he mean then? Do you know? Have you asked him?

HAWKEYE®: Lack of hard evidence does not necessarily constitute lack of culpability…

ELROY: No, but it doesn’t prove culpability either, yet this is the standard of proof being used for OBL. 



HAWKEYE®: …although it does make prosecution rather difficult…

ELROY 
Well yes, thank you, it DOES make prosecution rather difficult, doesn’t it?

HAWKEYE®: …and to suggest otherwise is intellectual dishonesty.

ELROY: As is suggesting that it does. If you walked into a court of law as a prosecution attorney and said, ‘Well, we don’t actually have any hard evidence as such, you honor, but that doesn’t mean he didn’t do it!’ you’d be up on contempt charges. Not that it stopped Dick, Don and Georgie-boy any! Evidence? Pah! Who needs it? And so we have Afghanistan.

HAWKEYE®: There is plenty of anecdotal and circumstantial evidence to tie OBL to 9/11.’

ELROY: ‘Anecdotal’ evidence is not permissible in a court of law, and any case built solely on circumstantial evidence would collapse. But that’s why Bush went to war I suppose – he didn’t have anything on OBL.



Don’t you think that if Bush et al had even the barest skerrick of evidence they’d sing it from the highest hilltop? And what, pray is this ‘circumstantial’ evidence anyway?


And if not OBL, who? I am, however, glad to see you admit there is no evidence for OBL’s complicity in 9/11 –there’s hope for you yet! It’s glimmers of sense like this that make it all worthwhile! 



HAWKEYE®: Although OBL initially denied any involvement; he later claimed responsibility for 9/11 on at least two occasions. For example, in videotape shown on Al Jazeera, October 29, 2004, he said:

‘God knows it did not cross our minds to attack the towers but... As I watched the destroyed towers in Lebanon, it occurred to me to punish the unjust the same way (and) to destroy towers in America so it could taste some of what we are tasting and to stop killing our children and women.’

In an audiotape posted on the Internet in May 2006, OBL said: "[Zacarias Moussaoui] had no connection at all with September 11... I am the one in charge of the 19 brothers and I never assigned brother Zacarias to be with them in that mission."


ELROY: But are we 110% sure that these are OBL? Really? On what basis? Is the circumstantial evidence you speak of? Furthermore, it could be argued that because OBL had figured by 2004 that the whole world had declared him guilty, he might as well take the rap and get whatever out of it that he could. It’s all possible…


HAWKEYE®: Osama bin Laden wanted to be a Muslim super-hero. He thought he could do that with the 9/11 attacks. He didn't anticipate that GWB would go after his sorry butt.

ELROY: 
Yeah, how’s that ‘gonna catch him dead or alive’ going? What did George say? ‘We don’t really think about him much anymore?’ Yup, y’all really got his sorry butt.

HAWKEYE®: Now he's the super-hero that's hiding out in a cave.

ELROY: Oh, is he? Is that a fact? Or just something you made up? Anyhoo, he was in a cave before 9/11 – maybe he just likes caves. Not that y’all were that interested in catching him anyway – "The goal has never been to get Bin Laden."
—General Richard Myers, chairman, US Joint Chiefs of Staff.

 ‘I don't know where he is. I just don't spend that much time on him.’ – GWB.


HAWKEYE®: From his own lips, he vowed to kill any and all Americans long before 9/11... "To kill the Americans and their allies -- civilians and military -- is an individual duty for every Muslim who can do it in any country in which it is possible to do it."

ELROY: Hardly ‘from his own lips’ – this letter has many authors and it was written, not spoken, but anyway…the interesting thing about this document is what it goes on to say after ‘…possible to do it…’ which is ‘in order to liberate the al-Aqsa Mosque and the holy mosque [Mecca] from their grip’ which, on the 29th of April, 2003, is exactly what happened. 



According to OBL, OBL didn’t do it. Bin Laden says he wasn't behind attacks’ – CNN.
’I would like to assure the world that I did not plan the recent attacks.’— Usama bin Laden, September 17, 2001 from, as you say, his own lips.

ELROY: Rummy announced the US withdrawal from SA the day before ‘Mission Accomplished!’ and it was that, if anything, that stopped 9/11 from happening again. Who said the US won’t negotiate with terrorists? And who said negotiation doesn't work?


HAWKEYE®: I hereby appoint you Elroy to negotiate with al-Qaeda. Let me know how that works out, OK?


ELROY: That job’s done, buddy – see above. And in any case, Al-Qaeda is the least of your problems right now – the Taliban taking Pakistan, now THAT’S a problem.

However, even if was pulled off by OBL, KSM or the tooth fairy, 9/11 was not an act of war; it was an act of terrorism, a job for Interpol and not the Pentagon.

HAWKEYE®: Shooting somebody on the street is a job for Interpol.
Hijacking an airplane is a job for Interpol. Killing thousands of innocents is "war".

ELROY: No, it’s an act of terrorism. ‘War’ must be declared by a nation state, and neither Afghanistan nor Iraq attacked, nor declared, war on the USA, but you are right – killing thousands of innocents is "war". The US has sadly proved this true.

HAWKEYE®: The US treated terrorism like a police matter from 1972 until 2001, and what did it get us?

ELROY: Looks to me like it got you 29 years of relative peace. You caught some bad guys who are now in jail. Life went on.

If a serial killer is on the loose in, say, New York, what do we do? Catch him by police work? Or carpet bomb Manhattan? Have you any idea what the chances of being killed by a terror attack actually are? Less than dying in a car accident, walking across the street, drowning, fire, falling or by being murdered. 5,000 people die in America each year from e-coli poisoning due to the meat industry’s successful lobbying to have abattoir standards relaxed, but is there a war on meat? No.



However, let’s have a look at what this change in policy has wrought – 4,000 + US military dead, hundreds of thousands more maimed, injured and insane, 1 million + dead Iraqis and Afghans, 4 million + Iraq refugees, a completely de-stabled ME, a US occupation with no end in sight, Islamists a home run from Pakistan’s nuclear armory and a bill of 3 trillion dollars and rising.

HAWKEYE®: It got us 9/11.

ELROY: Did it? Haven’t we already ascertained that there is no way to prove this hypothesis?

HAWKEYE®: Now with the potential for terrorism using WMDs, the stakes are much higher. We cannot wait until an American or European city is smoldering in ruins to start looking for fingerprints. By then, it's too late.

ELROY: You have little choice – you can’t run around nuking whoever it is you think might be wanting to have a pop at you. But no one ever wanted to use WMD on the USA in the first place – this was a fear planted and generated by Bushco in order to go to war, so your wars have increased the chances of the very thing y’all wanted to avoid. Good result!

There are only way to police this eventuality – reduce the rest of the world to pavement or work out why anyone would want to reduce an American or European to smouldering ruins and act to head it off. People, you might be interested to know, do not do these things for fun – they have reasons.

So, did anyone win? Or lose? or is more true to reflect that a conversation is not a winning/losing proposition but it is an activity by which we stimulate our thought processes and get to question both our own assumptions, beliefs and prejudices and those of others, an opportunity to defend positions we hold to be true and to concede them when they are defensible no more? Well?

Whatever, don't forget to tell, or ask, Elroy™!

Good God, Y'all!

Very good Friend Of Elroy™ Emmanuel has asked Elroy several things several times, but since the administrative arm of the Let’s Ask Elroy!™ editorial taskforce executive saw fit to outsource the ‘reply’ functionality to a prison workshop in a north-west province of Murkistan it could be argued that the punctuality of this service has been marginally compromised.

So while this small but crucial element of Let’s Ask Elroy!™ has it teething problems ameliorated (something to do with thumbscrews), the Let’s Ask Elroy!™ editorial taskforce executive has taken it upon itself to address Emmanuel’s dilemmas and ease his existential disquiet, starting with this simple request:


1. Does god exist or are you a Dawkins espousing atheist?

Elroy likes old Dickie Dawkins well enough, but the problem with Dick is that he is a little too ambivalent, a tad too equivocal and shy for Elroy's tastes – why can’t he just make his mind? Why can’t he just say what he really thinks?

So Elroy is happy to declare that God does not exist, but having said that it all depends on what your definition of ‘God is – that’s right, God is relative. However, if you mean God as defined by doctrinaire Christianity, God as defined in his best seller the Bible and the question of whether it was fiction or non-fiction then no, God does not exist, God does not have a big white beard, God did not create the Earth in six days, God does not love Elroy, Jesus is not God's son and neither Elroy's life nor anyone else’s is preordained by Him.

Elroy gave up on Christianity at about ten years old when the local vicar took his class for Religious Education. Vicar Stamford was a groovy, sleeve-rolled young Anglican minister intent on dragging Christianity into the 20th Century and showing to the youth that the Bible was real, and so to that end he thought it was a good idea to admit to its faults. Oops!

‘When was Jesus born?’ he asked the class and so Elroy, always a sucker for the low-hanging fruit, stuck his hand up.

‘Me sir, no sir, me sir, me sir, sir, me!’

‘Yes! That boy! What’s the answer?’

‘Sir sir, Christmas sir, twenty-fifth of December sir!’

This was a shoe in. Elroy had made his stage debut in a nativity play as a sheep at kinder and had been starring in them ever since in every role possible – donkey, cow, ox – so if there was any question he knew the answer to, it was this one.

‘No!’ cried a triumphant Vicar Stamford’, ‘Wrong answer!’

Vicar Stamford was delighted with the classes reaction as he could now go on to prove how the Bible was a living, breathing document, but how could that answer be wrong? And if not then, when?

‘We think’ he continued ‘it was some time in October’.

What? He doesn’t even actually know? And that was that – Elroy figured that if the Church couldn’t get that bit right, how much more of their message was nonsense? And how much more was it prepared to lie about? If the Bible is the truth then it’s the truth, he thought, but don’t tell Elroy it’s the truth and then say it isn’t, especially after years of all that ‘It’s a sin to tell a lie’ routine. After that, chemical chance and random chaos made a lot more sense because at least no one was swearing blind that something was true when they knew full well it wasn’t.

However, it’s actually hard to know what parts of the Bible are true and what aren’t as it has many authors – it is a book not just written and edited by committee but by many committees, megalomaniacs, dreamers, charlatans and vested interests over the centuries, and Elroy can’t help wondering what happened to bits that were left out. What’s wrong with the gospel according to Thomas? Or Judas? Surely we should be given ALL the ‘facts’?

The Bible is a worthy enough tome, but it does seem to all things to all comers – it contradicts itself to such a degree that the Rastafarians use it to prove that Ethiopians are the lost tribe of Israel while the Klu Klux Klan use it to prove they have the God-given right to kill them. The Bible, we are told, is the inerrant and literal word of God and we must obey its every word – we can’t, apparently, ‘pick and choose’ – but even the most extreme fundamentalist draws the line at selling their daughters into slavery or stoning their neighbour to death for wearing a nice wool blend suit or eating a cheese burger (See The Book of Deuteronomy for details).

The Anglicans, among others, decided over time that this hardcore fundamentalism was repelling new generations and it thought it could attract the young ‘uns by updating the message, but what they really needed to update was the way the message was delivered – it wasn’t what was being preached in the chilly old damp-ridden, mouse-infested churches that was the problem, just that it was being preached in chilly old damp-ridden, mouse-infested churches.

It took the radical fundamentalist Baptists of the USA to exploit youth’s innate superficiality and wrap up their cold, hard, unforgiving God in a bunch of bells and whistles, color and movement, while the Anglicans thought that merely a softer, more metaphorical, more understanding God would fill the pews of their chilly old damp-ridden, mouse-infested churches but they were, as Hillsong has so emphatically proved, wrong, and yet again form triumphs over content.

Meanwhile, creationism has gone all PC and is now known as Intelligent Design, but that immediately throws up the question ‘Who designed the designer? The whole ID argument is really just an exercise in arrogance – its proponents just cannot accept that their magnificent selves could possibly have come about accident so they seek a explanation that they can cope with like, for some reason, an invisible and infallible sky being.

Why this make them feel better Elroy doesn’t know – he’s quite happy knowing that life is empty and meaningless and that our planet is but one of billions of others, and he’s more than happy with the notion that chemicals are capable of reorganising themselves in a billion different ways order to survive, and he’s more than happy with the idea that he is a collection of those chemicals.

Does this make Elroy any less moral than his religious peers? Do they have a monopoly on morality? No. Much as they might like to argue otherwise, the idea that the prohibition of murder, theft, adultery etc was a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition does conveniently ignore the tens of thousands of years of civilisation that went before and the fact that mankind has only got as far as it has due to co-operatio.

Still, the proposition that God is relative is easily proved by just counting how many religions there are in the world, not to mention those that have been. Their devotees will tell you that theirs is the one true path, but they can’t all be right – they can, however, all be wrong.

The most problematic of these are the children of Abraham, a triumvirate of trouble that is the cause of so much misery, suffering, pain and death, but as Christianity, Judaism and Islam are all branches of the same tree, why they can’t get it together and be friends? Celebrate the many things they have in common and not the things they don’t? What the fuck, says Elroy, is their problem?

It’s been done before. There are periods in history when Jews and Muslims lived cheek by jowl in glorious epochs of cultured learning, learning and so is it not possible for the Jews and Muslims to realize that their enmity is based only on some bizarre religious self-loathing and some real estate issues?

Actually, in the end they might have to, as Israel’s refusal to contemplate a two-state solution can only ever lead to an inevitable to a one-state solution and, the with the Palestinian birth rate being so much higher than the Israeli one, a one-state solution will mean the end of Israel as a Jewish state.

Conversely, the Christians and the Jews were at each other’s throats for centuries, but now look at them, bosom buddies, the richest Christian county in the world bankroll the only Jewish one with billions upon billions of USD, but it must be noted that the Christians adoption of Israel as it’s BFF is somewhat cynical – the Christians are only making nice with Israel until Israel eventually crushes Palestine, because it is only when the Jews are in control of the entire region that Jesus can come back and kill every motherfucker on the block that doesn’t agree with him, Jews included.

Really, the monotheists really have to stop wrecking the place, but with the the Christians and, by proxy, the Jews bombing the living bejesus out the Muslims, peace is getting further away as Daisy Cutters and Apache Gunship Helicopters are hardly going to convince the Muslims roll over and say ‘Gee! You’re right! What was were we thinking?’

Argue all you want, says Elroy, but do it like the rest of us over a bottle of claret and stop fucking up the world for those who do not buy into your nuttiness – you are not the only people on Earth.

That doesn’t mean that there is nothing out there and nothing going on that we do not understand – indeed, the more science investigates the more it discovers it doesn’t know, but that’s fine – the only real absolute is that it is absolutely wrong to believe in absolutes. Psychics, for instance, do some crazy stuff that is, on the face of it, unexplainable, but that doesn’t mean they are frauds anymore than they have transcended the plane of mortality, it just means that it is unexplainable.

Do John Edward and his cohorts really talk to the dead or are they just master magicians? If it’s all fraud then it’s a conspiracy on a mammoth scale, and if it’s not then maybe they have tapped into some sort of telepathic facility humans have lost contact with over the years – after all, animals do some spooky stuff too, so why not us? Or maybe Edward et al ARE talking to the dead – all we know is that there is something going on, but does that prove the existence of God? No, it just proves that we can’t explain it – a known unknown.

God, in the end, is whatever you want him/her/it to be. God is nature, God is the universe, God is a bloke with a big white beard who writes best sellers and has an uncanny knack for designing and constructing bio-mechanisms to a strict deadine, God is Allah, God is Buddha, God is the couch at the bottom of Elroy’s garden, God is a necessary invention, God is you and God is Elroy, so is there a God? If you want there to be one, yes there is. If you don’t, no there isn’t, and you’re not allowed to shoot me for saying so.

Flat n' all that.

HI kids! As a part of the new service a certain amount of outsourcing will occur, starting with this rather rib-ticklesome essay on the dreaded Thomas Friedman. He's something of a smug bugger who writes for the New York Times who, being reviled by both left and right alike, one might imagine to be somewhere near the truth, but no – Elroy's never liked him, and after this you won't do. Fuck him.

Now, should I merely link to it? Or reporduce the whole thing? Please advise, and meanwhile enjoy:

FLAT N ALL THAT.

Well, it’s been a while but here we are – back.

Elroy has made a new years resolution to post often and not, as is his wont, write ream upon ream on a subject until either the situation has resolved itself or changed completely, or the interwebs crashes because of the word count. No, the new Let’s Ask Elroy!™ will be full of up-to-the-second thoughts and ponderings, links, quotes and just…more. Hooray!

On a personal note, Elroy would like to extend an apology to Emannuel, a reader from Elroy’s hometown who made some very kind comments and asked some very pertinent questions. Elroy did attempt to reply – he wrote it down and everything – but it has only just come to the attention to his dedicated team of Interwebs manipulators that, for reasons unknown, it never made it onto the screen/website as such and instead disappeared into the cyber-ether after being posted. Grrr! Stoopid Cyber-ether!

So sorry Emannuel, and please don’t take it personally – the team noticed the omission because Mad Dog logged in to agree with you, and so Elroy says ‘Ta everso!’ to him, too and begs Emmanuel’s forgiveness. Elroy’s sorry, really, and will reply again shortly.

Meanwhile, onward and upward – more posts, little ones, big ones, links, other people's posts, whatever – welcome to the all new looking Let's Ask Elroy!™

His Word Is His Bond.

So, what’s been happening? I believe that a Republican took the White House in November – indeed, the landlord gave him the keys just today – so let's have a look at how that went down....yes...I see....gee, he pulls a crowd, doesn't he?...yes...hmmm...and...that's it! $160 million gone down the Potomac!

Yes, it has been the cause of much wailing and gnashing and teeth, that bill. $160 m! Four times more than Bush's 2005 bash! It's an outrage! etc, except of course it's all bollocks. Obama's inaugaration actually cost $42 m, a tidy sum I'll grant you, but still less that Bush's $45 m, so where does the $160 m come from? Well, for Obama's costs, New York's Daily News helpfully added the full and as yet unknown costs of security and threw in the lethally ambiguous 'could approach', as in 'costs could approach $160 m' which is where the figure comes from. That's right kids, they made it up. Well, not quite...

Given that Obama's $45m and Bush's $42 was raised privately, the security is what the tax-payer springs for and in 2005 it was a healthy $115 m – so the full cost of Bush soiree was actually a paltry $157 m, give or take a balloon or two.

Now, either the Daily News, FOX et al knew this and deliberately skewed the sums, or they were just pulling it out of...the air, but either way it shows a duplicitousness that the Pres is going to be treated to in spades over the next eight years – good job he's not a leftie or things could get really ugly.

On the other hand there is no mention of how much the White House rent is, and Elroy certainly didn't see Obama handing over a security deposit at the inauguration, so we can only assume that his word is his bond.

Socialist Dis-ease!

Palin/McCain have whacked Obama upside the head with any amount of tall tales and untruths since the Straight Talk Express™ got gassed up and ready to roll. ‘He’s inexperienced!’ He’s a secret Muslim!’ ‘He’s a terrorist!’ ‘He’s a Muslim terrorist!’ ‘He’s a vote rigger!’ ‘He’s an Indonesian!’ and the latest ––He’s an inexperienced secret Muslim terrorist vote rigging Indonesian SOCIALIST!’

Now, don’t think for a moment that the moneyed elites of the USA don’t believe in socialism – it’s just that they believe in for themselves. The poor folk can have capitalism, at gunpoint if necessary, as what the rich like to do is privatize gain and socialize loss, but this meme has gotten the odd couple a little traction with lately, as inspired by Obama’s alteration with Joe the Plumber, that Barak Obama is a socialist; however, it’s all a bit late because the jig is, more or less, up. Rampaging hordes of Bolsheviks have overrun previously redder-than-redneck states and plastered the hammer and sickle over Old Glory from sea to shining sea while Palin/McCain are engaged in a final dance of death by irrelevancy, pulling out of more and more states as they hunker down in Pennsylvania, their best last hope, betting the farm that working class whites will be too racist to vote for the black man and too stupid to vote for themselves; however, the comprehensive demolition of the American Dream™ by the USA’s ‘elected’ criminals and their coterie of assorted miscreants has awoken the great unwashed to a terrible truth – that the promises of the last thirty years were complete bollocks and that life doesn’t have to be this hard.

Like a six-year-old figuring out that there ain’t no Sanity Clause, suddenly they have realized that the lazy fuckers who couldn’t be bothered to pull themselves up by their bootstraps are them, that they have been swindled out of their retirements, their homes, their jobs, their health and their kids’ futures by an establishment that should have known better and who did, in actual fact know better – they knew better than Johnny Subprime and Suzy Foodstamps that they would make out like bandits while everyone else whistled Dixie for their lo-fat petrochemical by-product – and the teeming mass and ain’t too happy about it.

When Grumbleguts accuses Obama of being a socialist, many fervently hope that Grumbleguts is, for once, telling the truth – Americans, or at least a crucial majority of them, have had a gutful of conservative ‘individual responsibility’, particularly when they are being held individually responsible for maintaining the lifestyles to which Wall Street wish to remain accustomed; now when they hear Sean Hannity splutter ‘We're going to become European socialists, we're going to be France, and wave the white flag of surrender, and we're going to nationalize health care and we're going to spread, redistribute the wealth, that's our patriotic duty’ many are thinking ‘Good!’, ‘Why not?’ and ‘About time!’

Americans are, quite frankly, a mess of contradictions. For instance, they have always boasted of being the most technologically advanced and modern of cultures while brandishing an allegiance to a vengeful God that Europe ditched just after the Mayflower heaved-to in Plymouth Harbor; they deny and decry the concept of Darwinism and the origin of the species but celebrate Social Darwinism and the origin of squillionaires, and they revel in being borned in the USA and a turbo-charged patriotism but deeply resent having to contribute financially to the country’s physical well being, up-ending the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s proposal that property is theft and declaring instead that taxes are theft – of property.

This is why the French are considered the USA’s enemy No.1 – the ruling elite are terrified that the star spangled suckers from the Land of the Free® might learn the truth about their continental cousins and their tax-happy ways, that they might discover the French, for a mere three percent more tax than is squeezed out of Johnny Subprime, enjoy free universal healthcare, free childcare, free universities (all of them, even the posh ones) and four months maternity leave, thirty days mandatory holiday and unlimited sick days, all on full pay, that it must be possible to live in an industrial and/or post-industrial nation without having to put the preservation of shareholders’ rights above those of their own children, the sanctity of the Free Market™ over that of their own health or throw starving citizens out onto the street.

It has for years been crucial to American power that US citizens remain ignorant of places such as la belle France, places where the entire automotive industry is not for sale on e-bay. where working more than thirty-five hours a week is illegal, where they have, after long and detailed study, noticed that eating cheap processed food will kill you, where unions are strong and proud, where the peasants understand that handing over their modest wealth to the captains of industry in the hope that this aristocracy, once they have done every other conceivable thing with it, might not invest it in infrastructure and production capacity after all and so do not give them the option and where any attempts to mess with these vital elements of daily life are regularly met with flaming riots and armed insurrection. and so Johnny Subprime is told tales of snobbery, snails and cheese-eating surrender monkeys.

But the captives of the Home of the Brave have much more in common with their Gallic counterparts than they realize; they are both, despite each displaying varying veneers of sophistication, have elements which are deeply racist, coarse, vulgar and violent and, most importantly, both gained their freedom via bloody revolution – indeed, the French bankrolled the American Revolution as a means of annoying the English, and the French though it such a hoot that they had a crack at it themselves helped, ironically, by the wretched effect the American frolic had on King Louis’ coffers – but the great difference, however, is that the French have not forgotten how their freedoms were achieved and as ready to lob half a brick in defense of the Republic as ever.

Or the yanks could take a peek at the Danish way of doing stuff. The Danes, without bragging about it to the world at interminable length, have developed a patriotism that relies less on singing about lapel pins and more on actually being a united people with a combination of free market individuality and welfare state collectivism they call a very post-modern ‘Flexicuirty’.

There’s something in it for everyone; 85% of workers are on collective agreements worked out on the job or across the town’s bosses, and those bosses can flex their muscle and feel superior because they can hire and fire at will with no redundancy payments and can raise or cut their worker’s hours from week to week, so long as the workers average a, get this, 37 hour week.
But what’s in it for the workers? Well, if you do get fired, dole payments are up to 90% of your previous wage and you become immediately eligible for government-financed retraining and/or education to train you for a new gig, and employers and unions have agreed to give employed workers the right to leave their job temporarily on 85% pay to undertake relevant training.
On the family front, new mums get up to 29 weeks of paid maternity leave and daddies get five weeks paternity leave from a fund financed jointly by all employers, while the state provides free child care so mothers can combine work and parenting, and teachers and child care workers are treated with the respect normally reserved for clergymen, not real estate brokers.

Not that any of this is really socialism – it is merely using the power of the state to provide a bottom line of existence for their citizens so that they are free to create opportunity and happy, fulfilling lives, what the vindicated Keynesians among us call a ‘mixed economy’ a very popular and successful system of organization for a good fifty years after the last capitalist clusterfuck – but the baying hordes of the Republican base do not or cannot recognize that it was this kind of society that their precious founding fathers had in mind I the first place, not mention various subsequent heroes of the conservative movement.

A socialist? Thomas Jefferson? By modern GOP standards, absolutely! ‘Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property’ he wrote to James Madison in 1785, ‘is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise.’

And how about Roosevelt? No, not the communist FDR – his Republican uncle! ‘I believe in a graduated income tax on big fortunes, and in another tax which is far more easily collected and far more effective’ said Teddy before hitting it right between he eyes and sending Grover Norquist off to blub to his mommy with ‘…a graduated inheritance tax on big fortunes, properly safeguarded against evasion, and increasing rapidly in amount with the size of the estate.’ A Republican death tax! Woo hoo!

Who next? What other traitors can we dredge up? Oh no! Come on down, WW2 hero and father of the American middle class, Dwight D. Eisenhower! Whaddaya like, Ike? ‘Every dollar spent by the government must be paid for either by taxes or by more borrowing with greater debt. The only way to make more tax cuts now is to have bigger and bigger deficits and to borrow more and more money. Either we or our children will have to bear the burden of this debt. This is one kind of chicken that always comes home to roost.’ Wow! Roosting chickens? Sounds like Barack Obama and Malcolm X! Got any more? ‘An unwise tax cutter, my fellow citizens, is no real friend of the taxpayer.’

Golly! Jefferson? Roosevelt I? Eisenhower? Who else we can get to round out this gang of four? Well, when Ronnie Ray-gun passed the earned income tax credit for low-income workers that hiked take-home pay above poverty levels and reduced the impact of payroll taxes he said ‘It's the best anti-poverty, the best pro-family, the best job creation measure to come out of Congress’

Of course, it must be mention that it was Ronnie who doubled payroll tax on the lower orders in the first place and set this whole ‘Let them eat caviar!’ ball rolling for the rich, but even he had the top tax rate set at 50%! And Eisenhower hit ‘em with 91%!!! Seeing as Obama only wants to return it from the current 35% to Clinton’s 39%, I should expect the loyal Republicans are relived to be well shot of those wretched communist anti-Americans Ike and Ron.

But Grumbleguts has a handle on history too, and he is now telling us that he is FDR to Obama’s Herbert Hoover, which would make him, McCain, the socialist! What the…? Conservatives hate FDR more than Karl Marx, as Rush Limbaugh said ‘Roosevelt is dead. His policies may live on, but we’re in the process of doing something about that as well!’ and for Obama to be Hoover then Obama would have to be of the party that created the clusterfuck, but that’s…oh nevermind, McCain is liable to say just about anything now, no matter how bizaare, so best not to worry too much. Unless…

Palin says that ‘Now is not the time to start experimenting with socialism!’, but that’s strange because The People’s Democratic Socialist Republic Of Alaskanistan has been experimenting with it for some years now, and with great success. For all their bluster about being the last frontier full of bootstrap pullin’ rugged individuals, Alaska’s very existence is due to the largesse of the Federal government whose funding accounts for 80% of it budget and who gives it $2 for every $1 Alaskanistan coughs up in that nasty tax stuff.

Meanwhile Palin has stuck the oil companies with a windfall profit tax which is then mail to every man, woman and moose in the state, not to mention a couple more thousand in state goodies…now, let me see…employment dependent on the federal government…redistribution of oil wealth…yup, it seems the biggest socialist around right now is none other than…Governor Sarah Palin!

And if anymore irony could be possible, it turns out that Sarah and her hubby have for years been involved with the Alaska Independence Party, a motley crew of separatists who have sworn blind to relieve themselves of the ‘lower forty-eight’ no matter what, which makes them revolutionary separatist socialist terrorists and leaves us wondering what they will spend their remaining pocket money on.

And as the sun sets on the McCain’s campaign and career, his advertising in these dying days is getting kind of, well, sad and desperate. Now it turns out that being a secret Muslim is OK – hell, the USA was founded on the freedom of religion – and being a terrorist ain’t so bad as, ‘y’know, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, and being Muslim terrorist, well, in this day and age that’s a legitimate lifestyle choice, isn’t t? Is he a vote rigger? Oh,…who isn’t these days, and as for being an Indonesian, gosh – we’ve all been to Bali too. Socialist? No more than Teddy Roosevelt and Ike Eisenhower!

No, the MCain campaign has given up on all these and returned to where they started, back to before it hired a tyrannical housewife who says she can stare down the world but who cannot stare down her own teenage daughter, back to a simpler world where Barack just doesn’t have the runs on the board, where he just doesn’t have the experience.

But it’s sadder than that – in his last ad McCain is even throwing Palin’s 2012 presidential run under the wheezing wheels of the Straight Talk Express™ as he implores voters that it’s not even as if Obama won’t be a good president one day, it’s just that he’s not ready…’yet’.

‘Yet.’

‘Give me one go, just one go on the bike and I don’t give a %^$# who gets to ride it next time. Hire ‘That one’ next time – he’d be good next time – but please, please, hire me now. I deserve it. Because I said so. I’m John McCain, and I don’t care anymore. Look, I‘m begging now. Begging. Is that what you want of your war veterans? Get off my @*^$ lawn!....’

Socialism. It’s what saved capitalism from itself in the ‘30s and what will save it again now. We all know that socialism is what works when all else fails and that America will embrace it again ¬– as Winton Churchill said, ‘In the end, America will do the right thing . . . after she's exhausted all other possibilities’.

Beyond The Palin.

There has been much high dudgeon at Let’s Ask Elroy!™ as we, the LAE Editorial Taskforce struggle to pin the guv’nor down on everything that has been up – the rise and fall of Ice Queen of Nowhereville, Alaska, the rise and rise of Barak Obama, the fall, rise and fall of John ‘Grumbleguts’ McCaiin and the falling, falling, ever falling western capitalism, otherwise known as the End Of The World As We Know It®, who will win, why, what will happen if they do, or don’t, and a host of other intellectual and philosophical conundrums intentions, inventions, interventions, introspections, contentions and contraventions that have Elroy’s head fair exploding with informational tidbits of every dimension.

The thing is that as soon as something happens something else does, and Elroy is such a dann completist and perfectionist that the LAE™ Nerve HQ is nose high with waste paper as the definitive say on the future of the free world is written, rewritten and re-rewritten for you, our dear reader’s, edification and education; however, as it looks as if election day will come and go with Elroy still chewing his crayon in despair, the Editorial Taskforce has taken it upon themselves to sort through the entrails of 568 reams of Reflex and attempt to approximate his intentions.

We know that it is now unfashionable to have a crack at the Thriller From Wasilla – dissing Sarah Palin is sooooooooooo October – but hell, what’s to lose? Palin was originally a stroke of brilliance, a malevolent act of evil genius by the Bush/McCain campaign team; with McCain supplying the privileged-scion-of-the-establishment-with-a-prodigious-ability-to-drink-fuck-and-be-rescued-by-daddy part of the equation (go here for a good low low-down on the John McCain story), Palin completed the candidate by being a folk-ready yokel whose main claim to power is an uncanny ability to mangle the English language and the belief that all you need to know about the world you can learn in Fuckbucket, Idaho.

The hardcore GOP faithful initially had concerns about Grumbleguts’ ‘maverick’ status – they thought this temerity to challenge the lock-step status quo meant he was maybe just a touch too lib’rul – so the McCain campaign hired a ‘leader’ with the redneck touch to counter this paranoia, a Washington cleanskin whose hands were not smothered in the crimson currently coursing from erstwhile titans of Wall Street, a conservative everywoman and a sop to enraged Hilla-crats, a dedicated hockey mom who got into politics because, gosh durn it, those politicians obviously jus’ don’t how to run a railroad.

Never mind the litany of her gross mismanagement, abuses of power, maniacal spending, tax-raising, bribery, dereliction of duty, hypocrisy, deceit, extreme religious convictions and terminological inexactitudes that have characterized her time as mayor of the snow-bound speck she turned from sleepy Santa stopover to debt-ridden, dead drunk and drug-fucked dump, and her general lording it up as Governor of Alaska – and if you’ve missed it there’s a handy-dandy fact-sheet available here – the fact that her actions in these endeavours manifestly contradict everything she is now espousing does not in anyway preclude her from high office – in fact, by GOP standards it made her most eminently suitable.

Palin coasted into Alaskan high office by challenging the cosy little den of corruption enjoyed by the Republican incumbents – she was a ‘reformer’ which meant, by biting the hand that fed her, she was a ‘maverick’ too, but she soon leant how to manipulate her newly acquired power with the best of them. McCain, of course, never wanted her on the ticket – he wanted fellow namby-pamby bed-wetter and sometime Democrat Joe Lieberman to be his VP ¬– but to demonstrate just what a ‘maverick’ he really wasn’t he rolled over like a big old houn’ dawg and allowed the top GOPsters to have their wicked way, and so we have been subjected to the Palin/McCain roadshow, a ‘team of mavericks’, if such a thing is not a contradiction in terms, promising to overthrow Washington and git some Wasilla kinda’ thinkin’ in there, you betcha!

And if you’re wondering what ‘Wasilla kinda’ thinkin’’ is, look no further than Palin’s, um, novel interpretation of the first amendment. According to Saint Sarah, her rights are being trampled if anyone criticizes her calling Barak Obama a secret Muslim Marxist terrorist, that ‘free speech’ means she be allowed to say whatever she likes about whoever she likes and be unchallenged – Obama’s free speech right to defend himself do not, apparently, count.

Meanwhile, The Palin/McCain double act of accelerating erraticism got funnier by the day; in the face of a global governmental effort to bring the four horsemen of the economic apocalypse down at the second or third fence by indulging in massive Keynesian deficit pump-priming and public spending, the Ice Queen of Nowhere, AL, promised to balance the budget. Now they think of it! At just the moment where deficit spending is required, after however many years when deficit spending wasn’t required but done anyway – ‘Reagan’ snarled Dick Cheney in 2002 over a lunch of live puppy and barbequed welfare dependent, ‘proved deficits don’t matter’ – she wants to somehow pay off the ten, count ‘em, ten trillion dollar debt!

Then they called for more regulation for the financial system while exhorting government to ‘git out the way!’, with no hint of irony, and generally put themselves in the bizarre position of being in opposition to their own party – ‘Throw the bums out!’ out they cry, hoping that no-one will notice that they are themselves the bums in question, while that other Christian fundamentalist’s fundamentalist, the New English ‘Texan’ rube who has winked, mugged and howdy-doodied his way though eight years of economic, human and constitutional carnage is, yet again, AWOL., safely gaffa-taped and stashed under the White House sink.

The Palin/McCain show has been a train-wreck of epic proportions, like watching Grandpa Simpson in a remake of ‘Fargo’, but as we get closer to ‘the day’ the wheels of the Straight Talk Express™ are a-wobbling more than somewhat. The have opted for a strange kind of populism which stands up for the rights of millionaires to hang on their cash while the people at their rallies don’t know if they if they will have homes to go back to, but the irony is that if Grumbleguts had just had the courage of the convictions that made him a ‘maverick’ in the first place, like the opposition to the Bush tax-cuts, torture and, in these weird economic times it might have got him over the top with all those fence-straddlin’ independents and vacillating undecideds, and rejecting the bailout would have made him a hero without risking anything as there was no way that wasn’t going to pass.

However, as Grumbleguts is ultimately an opportunist cruising down the path of least resistance, he thew those convictions under the wheels of the Straight Talk Express™ and joined the barking mad Palinites bid for lowest common denominator. Mixed messages be damned, they turn the fruits of the cherished meritocracy into the detested ‘intellectual elite’, where having an education is some crime against humanity and there is something clever about being stupid, and pledge undying allegiance to the unborn while not giving a flying fuck about what happens after God’s miracle has occurred and the now all-too-born is living in a car and eating out of dumpsters, all of which has but the most one-eyed punter smelling several dead and festering rats.

And as the Straight Talk Express™ swerves off the campaign highway and ploughs flaming into the ditch of electoral oblivion, Palin has done what she has always done, and what she accuses Barack Obama of doing, and stuck her finger into the air to see which way the political wind blows. As a result she has gone rouge and is now deliberately ignoring and contradicting whatever McCain’s people tell her people but, as can be seen from her history in Alaska, this should come as no surprise. ‘I’m not doing this for nought’ she told the ABC, and while some McCain staffers told the media other things, like she is a ‘Diva’ and a ‘Whack job, there can be no doubt that she is a also megalomaniac who now sees herself as deserving of the top job and so is setting herself up for a tilt in 2012.

This will at least give her a chance to come to terms with the real world and the evil it contains. In another example of free speech being, as Dubya would have it, just a bit too free, she took a personal call from France’s President Sarkozy in the last days of the campaign and spoke freely about how dangerous is hunting with Dick Cheney, how much fun is shooting baby seals from a helicopter, how hot is Carla Bruni and how ace was Hustler’s soft porn video’ documentary’ Who’s Nailin’ Paylin?, a conversation broadcast across the airwaves by the Montreal radio station CKOI-FM because she was not talking to Sarkozy – she was talking to the Maked Avengers, two Montreal radio pranksters. ‘But it’s a radio station in France!’ she can be heard telling the aide who had relieved her of the phone. Grrr! Stoopid first amendment! Needs to whopped upside it's head with the censorship stick – hell, it worked for the Wasilla public library!

Who do Americans want answering the ‘phone at 3AM? Someone who can tell when they are talking to comedians.

But Palin is not the only everyperson out on the make on the trail – somewhere along the line there materialized out of nowhere the phenomenon of Joe The Plumber, an average Johnny Subprime who nailed a doorknocking Obama on his tax plans and how they would effect the business Joe was about to buy. Grumbleguts was delighted by this and made Joe an overnight sensation; Joe was symbolic of all that the McCain campaign represents, which quickly became ironic indeed as it turned out that Joe’s name was not Joe, he is not actually a plumber, he had a much chance of buying the business he worked for as Elroy does of buying General Electric, he is a registered Republican and is related to the same Charles Keating who got McCain into so much hot snot over the Savings and Loan scandal of the late ‘80s that cost US taxpayers billions. Again.

Ah well, you can’t say McCain doesn’t help the working man – Joe now has a book coming out, a record deal, an agent and plans to run for congress in 2010 – he’s so busy he can’t be fucked turning up to Grumbleguts’ rallies, leaving Grumbleguts to yell ‘Come on up, Joe the Plumber!’ to a bewildered, embarrassed and silent smattering of die-hards; never mind, perhaps he can phone it in.

And meanwhile the more sober and serious conservative intellectuals, if such a thing is not a contradiction in terms, are shaking their heads in despair, a small coterie which grows larger every morning and who, as the loonies take charge, spend their waking hours paraphrasing both erstwhile GOP high priest Ronnie Ray-gun and goddamn Democrat LBJ. ‘I didn’t leave the Republican Party – the Republican Party left me’ they mutter into their triple single malts, and ‘There goes the entire country for several generations….’ as they slide off the vote...for Obama. Even Fox News,, with the obvious exceptions of Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity, is busy sliding over to the Democrat side of things…Rupert Murdoch does not like being on the losing side.

Ah, what a shame. Poor pl' Grumbleguts. Yet we find no tears on Elroy’s manuscript...

The King Is Dead – Long Live The President!

And so it came to pass that the post-election crisis that has seen the Liberal Party flounder in and a by whatever measure of public opinion one cares to name caused by Dr Brendan ‘The Locum’ Nelson scoring spectacular own goals with the bullet riddled feet wrenched from his own copious jawbone with such priceless acts of political absurdity as loudly demanding that the government follow a certain course of action that he then, with his very next breath, declared that he would never follow were he ever Prime Minister, is over; The Locum, the ex-ALP Liberal Party try-hard that Libs had suckered into being ‘leader’ while they indulged in hissy-fits various, stabbed each other in the back and licked their wounds, has been sent back to where he so rightfully belongs, i.e. the backbenches, to contemplate what it’s like to be had while the rest of the chaps get on with being serious again.

Yes, it’s all change as Big Mal Turnbull, the Valcuse battler squillionaire barrister, merchant banker and scourge of concerned conservatives everywhere proves that money can, indeed, buy anything if one tries, and has, enough. Big Mal tried to purchase the presidency when he hijacked the Australian Republican Movement and, when that little balloon was punctured by Mal’s nemesis, the erstwhile Liberal and extremely conservative Prime Minister ‘Honest’ John Howard, Mal popped out and bought himself a seat in the House of Representatives with an eye to becoming PM himself. Now it's his party, which he'll buy if he has to, Ambitious? Mal? He will be king, goddamn it! Whatever it takes.

Surprised? Not if you read Let’s Ask Elroy!™, but will Mal make it all the way to The Lodge? Not so fast, Elroy, not so fast. For a start there is the man himself, a gung-ho hip-slinger who shoots first and finds out who’s dead later and who also flirted with the ALP when it suited him; Big Mal is a lone wolf who has all the propensity for consensus and collaboration as Pol Pot, is what other electorates in other places call a ‘maverick’, is a bull-dozer who sweeps all before him, colleagues and all.

And this will not please his peers – remember, even though The Locum’s poll ratings were lower than his shoe size, and he is not a big man, Big Mal only got four (4), count ‘em, four more votes than The Locum, so it’s either fight against every fibre of his being and – eww! – consult with his colleagues or spend the next year making the eventual ascension of The Smirking Wimp a mere formality.

And who, pray, be The Smirking Wimp? Why, it’s none other than the riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma and available in hardcopy from that remainder shop near the station, Peter Costello! It has occurred to Elroy that he who dares not has not, as yet, actually exited stage right – he is still mooching around the backbenches, possibly sharing play-lunch with The Locum, and taking solace from the tales of such titans that played the long game and spent their years in the wilderness as Winston Churchill, Bob Menzies and – eek! – John Howard himself.

It took eons for these legislative leviathans’ parties to whack themselves on their collective foreheads and see the light, so stay tuned – The Wimp is going nowhere but the members’ bar to wait for the Liberals’ faceless men to come beg, nay plead, nay, demand that the smirkster lead them to victory come whenever.
Mal has ambition and cash to burn, but his head is just as super-heated who has only just arrived; he has only been in parliament four years – our own Obama/Palin – while The Wimp is a lot more battle-scarred and has endured plenty of downtime in the house in which to study his well-thumbed Machiavelli.

Costello maybe lazy, he may suffer from delusions of grandeur and a sense of entitlement that would make Prince Charles squirm, but he is not entirely stupid; he knew there would be a bloodbath if the Liberals lost the election and so has contrived, via the excuse that he was ‘working on his memoirs’, to remain above the fray and await the call when all other contenders are dead in a ditch.

If there is one thing The Smirking Wimp hates more than the Australian workforce it is Honest John Winston Howard, and he will be buggered if he will let Johnny deprive him of his birthright. Revenge being a dish best served chilled with a light Chianti, the Whimpy one is merely on ice – waiting, waiting, waiting – as the fat lady has not yet even finished her lunch. Watch this space.

S-S-S-SARAH!

What? I din' say nothin'!

The Axis Of Evidence!

It strikes Elroy that there is a certain amount of hypocrisy abroad in the world, and that double standards abound on some very, very big topics which annoy Elroy more than somewhat. What counts for one issue does not matter for another, so in the name of consistency, truth, justice and the humanist way, Elroy would like to iron out a few of these wrinkles and make the case for applying principles in a manner which is, well, principled.

So, what are the issues? Well, in no particular order, here are three big ones that more or less define the post-modern condition, the axis of evidence that spill from one into the next – the Iraq War, Global Warming and 9/11.

Nothing much then, just the most volatile, contentious and partisan, bi-partisan, cross-partisan and non-partisan subjects of public debate currently on the table, so what’s the problem?

The problem, dear reader, is one of approach, of truth, of working out the who-what-why-where-when of it all. Let’s take the Iraq War. We were told, back in 2002, that Iraq was a threat that could not be denied or ignored, that the cost of doing nothing was far greater than the cost of doing something and, if we didn’t act now, the cost of acting then would be too much too bear, that humanity could not afford the risk, after all, with all those WMD with Saddam, the future of the entire planet was at stake etc etc, blah blah blah, waddaya waddaya, and the naysayers and doves who argued and asked for proof, who found experts that knew full well Saddam had as many WMD as the Easter Bunny, were shunned, ignored, sidelined and ridiculed.

So many people, faced with what they were told was incontrovertible proof that world was in eminent peril, went along with the invasion and occupation of Iraq – shame that it was completely bogus, but that’s not the point – the point is that the threat was too, too great and so literally untold billions of dollars have been spent to mitigate said threat.

Which brings us to another issue which has some similarities with the Iraq war in that it is also a threat that cannot be denied or ignored, that the cost of doing nothing about it is far greater than the cost of doing something and, if we don’t act now, the cost of acting then will be too much too bear, that humanity could not afford the risk because, after all, the future of the entire planet is at stake and we are faced with incontrovertible proof that world was in peril, but the people that sold us this logic to go to war with the WMD menace are the very ones that deny the existence of this other highly pressing subject.

The climate change deniers, those that were the head cheerleaders for war, take all the arguments that the peaceniks used to talk the hawks out of combat – the financial cost, the human cost, the lack of verifiable scientific evidence – and use it to beat environmentalists over the head, despite the remarkable volte face it requires.

The logic used to argue for action against global warming is the same as was used to prosecute the Iraq war, but for some reason those that once urged haste urge caution, and visa versa, but there is a crucial difference – the WMD of Saddam Hussein, if they ever actually existed, which they didn’t, could never have actually turned the lights out from pole to pole, whereas global warming actually can.

Another feature of those intent on lightly poaching the globe in its juices is their sudden expertise on all things climatic; even the most rationally challenged blogger has become ofay with the intricacies of climatologising, and one can hardly peek at a conservative website these days without being barraged by arcane scientific data of the most intricate and obscure variety which desperately tries to prove that it’s all a big con put up by evil, tree-hugging climatologists hell-bent on retaining their funding and living it large at the tax-payers trough.

‘It’s a conspiracy!’ cry these devotees of Newton and Galileo who also generally exhibit a distinctly unscientific allegiance to an all-powerfull, all-seeing, all-knowing unknowable ‘creator’, ‘They’re just after the cash!’, while spurning any suggestion that the Iraq war was set up in part as the mother of all boondoggles for the military/industrial complex. They also whine that they are merely asking for proof, that they have found experts who know full well that the planet is getting colder, and that the are being shunned, ignored, sidelined and ridiculed, yet if the anti-war mob got the kind of media coverage the climate change sceptics have been accorded there would still be running water on the Tigris.

Indeed, one of their ‘experts’, the ‘mathematician’ (cue approving nods) Mr David Evans, has been widely quoted as whining that ‘The world has spent $50 billion on global warming since 1990’, but when one takes into consideration that the entire global GDP is approximately $64 trillion, that works out to more or less $3 billion per year which, when spread across all 6-odd billion, of us is chump change!

$3 billion a year for a whole planet? Where else are you going to get a bargain like that? It’s certainly better value than the warlords plan for global preservation, currently running at $3.5 billion per week.

Naturally there is nothing to prove the climatologist/research complex conspiracy theory, but so what? That just shows you how crafty them there scientists are, but not all scientists you understand – the scientists that deny the reality of global warming are totally altruistic and not really in the pay of big oil. Like our friend Mr Evans, many are not actually climate scientists either, but never mind – they’re clever, that’s what counts, and that’s what makes them eminently quotable.

However, when it comes to the third corner of our trio of tribulation, science is suddenly back in its box and Osama Bin Laden’s true believers return to their faith-based approach to investigation and mercilessly mock those campaigning to discover the truth about 9/11; the ‘troofers’, as they are so sneeringly referred to, have many quite reasonable points to make about 9/11 and what really happened that fateful morn, but their opponents are having none of it – the troofers are as batshit crazy to them as the The Lavoisier Group are to Friends Of The Earth and the US Marine Corp appear to Code Pink.

Suddenly quoting experts, real experts, honest-to-god physicists, civil engineers, architects, jet pilots, demolition riggers, military personnel of every stripe and the fundamental laws of Newton and Galileo is cause for much scoffing and derision, as one is precluded from using any such evidence unless one actually has the relevant doctorate and not even then.

There are many ostensibly sane people who argue that they are not advocating a conspiracy theory so much as viable hypothesises that attempt to include all of the known facts, that are merely asking for proof, and they have found experts who know full well that buildings do not drop straight down through the path of most resistance without help, but they are being shunned, ignored, sidelined and ridiculed.

Of course, like the anti-war movement, if the troofers were granted the same amount of media oxygen as the climate change deniers – there are more docos that go out of their way to slam down the former next president of the United States on the telly than Australian soap operas, all in the name of free speech, doncha know – there would likely be a run on pitchforks as a million man mob advanced on the Capitol Hill with menace aforethought, but those that bleat about scheming weathermen are too busy yelling about tin-foil hats and Elvis driving the Roswell spaceships to care, or notice the irony.

Another problem is that these issues do not break along partisan lines. There are many lefties who originally supported the ousting of Saddam Hussein ¬¬¬but who are committed environmentalists, committed environmentalists who repudiate the alternative 9/11 propositions, pro-war advocates who agree that 9/11 is not all it seems, anti-war global warming sceptics, pro-war troofers and all stops inbetween; indeed, the one common bond they have is that the tactics that they complain are used on them are the exact same ones they use on everyone else.

And so here we are, where evidence is permissible unless it isn’t, the laws of physics are immutable until they aren’t and that cold, hard science is the ultimate arbiter unless God is, where groups that demand to be heard demand others aren’t, where experts aren’t experts unless they are, or not, where quoting said experts is legitimate or proscribed, where the interwebs is either a vital conduit for the free flow of information or a free-for-all cesspool of errant nonsense open to every miscreant nutter to stagger down the pike.

But does it matter? So what if these disparate bands of hard-disk jockeys go adjective and verb at each other? Well, in a word, yes, because if 9/11 was not perpetrated by 19 malcontent Saudis then the entire Bush presidency becomes even more illegitimate than it already is, if that’s at all possible, and because the case for the Iraq war, proven or otherwise, could have been solved in ways other than wholesale slaughter had Dick Cheney not been in charge, if it had to be solved at all.

It was successfully argued that there was no alternative to the chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark furture for the youth, instability on a generational scale and general death that the Coalition of the Willing™ has visited on Mesopotamia and that, without immediate action, chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark future for the youth, instability on a generational scale and death in general would be visited upon us.

Well, it turns out that not acting on the so-called ‘threat’ of Saddam Hussein would have actually brought about a wave of wealth, happiness, wisdom, a future for the children and life in general, as would averting global warming. Indeed, NOT averting global warming could well bring chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark future for the youth, instability on a generational scale and general death in general while action will bring wealth, happiness, wisdom, a bright future for the children and life in general. And if it doesn’t, well, it can’t hurt. Can it? We don’t even have the quaint old ‘diplomacy’ option on this one, so can we risk not doing it?

Can avoiding climate change cause chaos, poverty, misery, ignorance, a dark future for the youth, instability on a generational scale and general death? Surely cutting down on the use of fossil fuels can only help mankind? Anyone out there care to argue the opposite? Elroy assures you that all evidence will be heard and listened to, and challenged where applicable, if you can promise to do the same.

All we, the world, need is the will and the decency to hear the case for and against war, for and against global warming, for and against the origins of 9/11, soberly, sincerely, dispassionately and without regard to our own petty biases and beliefs to ascertain the truth and stop the endless churn of the axis of evidence before we all fry for one reason or the another.

You Hate Macs? I Hate PCs.

A while ago, The Grauniad newspaper in England published a vindictive, scurrilous and unprovoked attack on Apple Mac users by a man obviously suffering from several psychological disorders. Now, Mac users do not particularly seek or invite such abuse – we are more than happy to be left alone to get with the higher cerebral cortex functions that make us tick – and we certainly do not make such unwarranted assaults on PC users. We normally don't bother attempting to reply either, but this time Elroy has had enough. Please, take in Charlie Booker's ill-considered savaging and then savour Elroy's erudite and comprehensive demolition of same.

I Hate Macs
By Charlie Booker.

Unless you have been walking around with your eyes closed, and your head encased in a block of concrete, with a blindfold tied round it, in the dark - unless you have been doing that, you surely can't have failed to notice the current Apple Macintosh campaign starring David Mitchell and Robert Webb, which has taken over magazines, newspapers and the internet in a series of brutal coordinated attacks aimed at causing massive loss of resistance. While I don't have anything against shameless promotion per se (after all, within these very brackets I'm promoting my own BBC4 show, which starts tonight at 10pm), there is something infuriating about this particular blitz. In the ads, Webb plays a Mac while Mitchell adopts the mantle of a PC. We know this because they say so right at the start of the ad.

"Hello, I'm a Mac," says Webb.

"And I'm a PC," adds Mitchell.

They then perform a small comic vignette aimed at highlighting the differences between the two computers. So in one, the PC has a "nasty virus" that makes him sneeze like a plague victim; in another, he keeps freezing up and having to reboot. This is a subtle way of saying PCs are unreliable. Mitchell, incidentally, is wearing a nerdy, conservative suit throughout, while Webb is dressed in laid-back contemporary casual wear. This is a subtle way of saying Macs are cool.

The ads are adapted from a near-identical American campaign - the only difference is the use of Mitchell and Webb. They are a logical choice in one sense (everyone likes them), but a curious choice in another, since they are best known for the television series Peep Show - probably the best sitcom of the past five years - in which Mitchell plays a repressed, neurotic underdog, and Webb plays a selfish, self-regarding poseur. So when you see the ads, you think, "PCs are a bit rubbish yet ultimately lovable, whereas Macs are just smug, preening tossers." In other words, it is a devastatingly accurate campaign.

I hate Macs. I have always hated Macs. I hate people who use Macs. I even hate people who don't use Macs but sometimes wish they did. Macs are glorified Fisher-Price activity centres for adults; computers for scaredy cats too nervous to learn how proper computers work; computers for people who earnestly believe in feng shui.

PCs are the ramshackle computers of the people. You can build your own from scratch, then customise it into oblivion. Sometimes you have to slap it to make it work properly, just like the Tardis (Doctor Who, incidentally, would definitely use a PC). PCs have charm; Macs ooze pretension. When I sit down to use a Mac, the first thing I think is, "I hate Macs", and then I think, "Why has this rubbish aspirational ornament only got one mouse button?" Losing that second mouse button feels like losing a limb. If the ads were really honest, Webb would be standing there with one arm, struggling to open a packet of peanuts while Mitchell effortlessly tore his apart with both hands. But then, if the ads were really honest, Webb would be dressed in unbelievably po-faced avant-garde clothing with a gigantic glowing apple on his back. And instead of conducting a proper conversation, he would be repeatedly congratulating himself for looking so cool, and banging on about how he was going to use his new laptop to write a novel, without ever getting round to doing it, like a mediocre idiot.

Cue 10 years of nasal bleating from Mac-likers who profess to like Macs not because they are fashionable, but because "they are just better". Mac owners often sneer that kind of defence back at you when you mock their silly, posturing contraptions, because in doing so, you have inadvertently put your finger on the dark fear haunting their feeble, quivering soul - that in some sense, they are a superficial semi-person assembled from packaging; an infinitely sad, second-rate replicant who doesn't really know what they are doing here, but feels vaguely significant and creative each time they gaze at their sleek designer machine. And the more deftly constructed and wittily argued their defence, the more terrified and wounded they secretly are.

Aside from crowing about sartorial differences, the adverts also make a big deal about PCs being associated with "work stuff" (Boo! Offices! Boo!), as opposed to Macs, which are apparently better at "fun stuff". How insecure is that? And how inaccurate? Better at "fun stuff", my arse. The only way to have fun with a Mac is to poke its insufferable owner in the eye. For proof, stroll into any decent games shop and cast your eye over the exhaustive range of cutting-edge computer games available exclusively for the PC, then compare that with the sort of rubbish you get on the Mac. Myst, the most pompous and boring videogame of all time, a plodding, dismal "adventure" in which you wandered around solving tedious puzzles in a rubbish magic kingdom apparently modelled on pretentious album covers, originated on the Mac in 1993. That same year, the first shoot-'em-up game, Doom, was released on the PC. This tells you all you will ever need to know about the Mac's relationship with "fun".

Ultimately the campaign's biggest flaw is that it perpetuates the notion that consumers somehow "define themselves" with the technology they choose. If you truly believe you need to pick a mobile phone that "says something" about your personality, don't bother. You don't have a personality. A mental illness, maybe - but not a personality. Of course, that hasn't stopped me slagging off Mac owners, with a series of sweeping generalisations, for the past 900 words, but that is what the ads do to PCs. Besides, that's what we PC owners are like - unreliable, idiosyncratic and gleefully unfair. And if you'll excuse me now, I feel an unexpected crash coming.

This week: Charlie watched some episodes of Larry Sanders (on his PC). He played the customised Fawlty Towers map for Counterstrike (on his PC). He listened to the Windows startup jingle every 10 minutes as his PC repeatedly rebooted itself.

However, Elroy has not let him get away with such libel. Ahem...

I Hate PCs
By Elroy


PC users don’t use Macs – they wear them. While Mac users waft around their expansive white loft conversions reading Baudelaire and Keats the PC element eke out drab little lives in their parents’ houses in Dagenham and Hull, the highlight of their miserable existence being a Saturday morning computer swap-meet where they buy arcane bits of compu-gizzards from another bespectacled lard-arses and then scurry home like fretting moles to, yet again, pull apart their long suffering odes to beige in order to make it half as fast as a Mac ten years its senior.

And it must be noted that, on that self-same Saturday morning, the Mac user is settling into his second Notting Hill ‘Latte while gazing into the adoring eyes of the very handmaiden of God whose image Mr. PC just spent three days failing to download. I guess it’s all a matter of choice.

PC users are always bleating that Macs are too expensive, but here’s a little secret: do you know how us superior beings afford our Macs? By having more productive hours in our day. And how do we achieve that? By not having our noses poked under the hood of our CPU for most of it. The savings made by not constantly buying obscure little plug-ins and other nasty little shards of silicon to make render our computers operative allows the Mac owner the luxury of seeing daylight on occasion, but it’s also true that the Mac pays for itself because of the invaluable WriteBook 1.9, a nifty app that effortlessly knocks out searing indictments of our times while one is taking a light lunch on the terrace, tomes which happily cover the cost one’s thirteenth century Tuscan monastery. Ah, the dignity of honest labour.

I hate PCs and their users because both are stubborn, righteous, boring, annoying and ugly both inside and out. They are unstable masochists who spit out the serial numbers of their SAD Pf54u364iX fatherboards along with generous amounts of spittle and last night’s Hawaiian Supreme, impotent and frustrated little drones who dare to berate me about the inadequacy of my very being because I choose to use a machine that works while they ferret away on computers that are so insecure that they have to ask the user to verify the action at every little teeny single step. I hate them, utterly and completely.

And I hate Charlie. I hate how he purports to be a man of the people, championing ‘loveable’ contraptions against the crushing might of an imaginary elite, as if the world’s PC ‘enthusiasts’ were being rounded up into re-education camps and trained to love the one true workstation, and I hate how, like all true fascists, he really knows that the exact opposite is true.

Every populist demagogue knows there is immense power in the tyranny of the masses and Charlie cynically manipulates it for all he’s worth, trying to convince us that PC users are but good and noble folk battling the sinister forces of the Mac-black pack, but PC users are not the rugged cyber-warriors of Charlie’s fond imaginings – they are cyber-trainspotters. When Mac users swish by in the first class carriage of a Eurostar Class 373 heading for a mini-break in Avignon, only the huddled masses on Gillingham Station know that they are not headed for Brussells because they have noted that the train is not a Class 373/1. These people own PCs.

Charlies’s notion of PC user as underdog is somewhat smudged by fact that Ubernerd squillionare siver-spooner and corporate monopolist William Henry Gates III had to license the best bits of Windows from Apple anyway. For all his ‘genius’ he turned out to be a follower and, furthermore, being as imitation is no longer the sincerest form of flattery but a devious form of intellectual copyright infringement, Apple had to sue Billy for his blatant theft of the other bits he thought he’d just pain steal. Even so, Mac users must still suffer the relentless abuse and prejudices of an army of PC dweebs who do as they are instructed by Billy-boy and Big Blue, a beige brigade who, although they have everything, still whine, even though PC users have Macs to thank for their very existence.

The Nazis thought they were victims too and, talking of fascists, it really does require both some heavy-duty wielding of unelected power and some seismic style shafting of the US Anti-trust laws to have the government take you down for running a monopoly – what was that about elites again?

So Charlie depicts the braying mob as poor, quivering underlings repressed by the privileged haut monde but, far from being an elite, it is Mac users who are oppressed by the common herd – the Apple Mac is the black man of computers, a status reflected by their users’ preferred shade of costume. Macs are a tiny minority who are shunned and ignored by software developers and the Establishment at large but, like other subjugated cultures, they are the engine room of creation; just as Al Jolson and Vanilla Ice made their mark by appropriating black culture, so IBM-compatibles have gained a foothold in the wider world by a gruesome aping of the Mac visage – ‘Windows’, so-named because it goes ‘Crash!’, was no accident.

This deliberate attempt to cash in on the hard work performed by those innovative iconoclasts over Apple has now given us shops crammed with a plethora of grotesque Mac-inated PCs, slightly funk’ed-up looking CPUs that that have grown cyber-sideburns and are screaming ‘Dude! I’m nearly a Mac!’ in a sad attempt to fool the gullible and ill-informed that it will perform as well as the real thing.. Like those coppers that used to dress up as hippies to pass unnoticed during love-ins and peace rallies, the PC is desperately trying to be ‘groovy, maaan!’, but real hipsters know when beige is in the house and what really lurks below the blueberry paint job.

But so what if mainstream software developers despise the Mac? Who needs them? This week’s brand new Mac operating system, the one that Apple promises might still even be current by Tuesday next, now comes bundled with the simply divine application suite EliteWanker 3.0 including not only the latest WriteBook update but also MakeMovie 1.9 and GongWinner Pro 2.0! This may mean building an extension to one’s Loire Valley Château to house all the Oscars, the Bookers, the Pulitzers and Nobel prizes heading one’s way, but such is the price of fun.

PCs may well be the ‘ramshackle computers of the people’; citizens of the former East German Republic will tell you that they had a similar description for their national car, but now that they have other driving options the Trabant has curiously fallen from favour. Fancy that! However, I’m sure some PC krauts still shuffle their decaying Dells around in otherwise unloved Trabbies which are, like their PCs, customised ‘into oblivion’ (if only), although a Trabant with a spoiler, mag wheels and a hood scoop is still, at the end of the day, a Trabant. See: silk purse/pig’s ear. Verstehen Sie?

When Mac users breakfast on Catalonian muesli and triple-fermented Tibetan yak yoghurt in their steel and platinum meal preparation zones, the toaster that sits next to their Mac works. It gleams, it is wildly expensive and it makes good toast. Hot and brown. Yum. However, this toast would not be good enough for PC users, as they could not eat a slice of lightly browned organic mung-bean and flaxseed Sour Dough unless had been cooked in a toaster lovingly reconstructed from the guts of thirty-nine other dead toasters retrieved from various car-boot sales that only works if you slap it.

Actually, they couldn’t eat organic mung-bean and flaxseed Sour Dough at all because they can’t afford it ¬– they spend all of what passes for a disposable income on spare toaster parts and going to toaster building conventions, and anyway, they are not aware and they do not care that any other form of bread other than Wonderwhite exists which is fine by me – the quicker they all die of bowel cancer the better.

But really, what is the glory in putting together a machine from scrap if it inherently and invariably fails to perform its function? Surely the victory in producing an item from rubbish is to make one that actually works? I am aware that it can, in theory, be achieved, but the only PCs that ever run for any reasonable amount of time, i.e. over 30 minutes, are buried in pre-loved pizza boxes, owned by fanatical caffeine-addled insomniacs and filled with so-called ‘games’, the loading of which has necessitated removing from the hard disc such extraneous fripperies as anything approaching anything useful.

This is what passes for ‘fun’ in the land of the Big Blue ¬– the ability to crack the ninety-ninth level of SmackaMac 2: Death to the MachinePeople and bring the magic bong back to the Gatesmeister, a skill which might buy heaps of Kudos on gameloser.com and impress the Pizza delivery guy, a close personal friend of the family by now, and but it’s uses in the real world, i.e. outside the bedroom, are limited. In that real world, where Mac users dwell in neo-modern expressions of urban dissonance with harbour views, fun is booting up one’s Porche and heading off for a meeting with one’s publisher to choose exactly which legendary Hollywood director will be allowed to film one’s latest WriteBook generated novel before calling Orlando, and maybe Nicole, to share a couple of the driest of martinis and enjoy some particularly challenging but ultimately satisfying performance art.

Do they insist that PC users join them? No, they do not. They leave the PC users at home to continue booting up their CPUs, again, bump into their parents accidentally on the way to the toilet, call up for another Hawaiian Supreme and settle in for a long night attempting to reach that ninety-ninth level which, unbeknownst to them, does not actually exist. Which world did I choose? James, warm up the Boxter!

It is a common conceit that dogs look like their owners, or owners look like their dogs, and while this is debatable it cannot be denied that the phenomenon is also true with computers. Witness, if you will, the sleek disposition of the slim, simple, elegant and uncluttered Apple Mac and the beret-bearing sophisticates that utilize them, versus the clumpy, knob laden and indomitably beige PC and the cardiganed, raincoated tragics who call it ‘friend’.

Even heath issues are in play! Mac users radiate a certain glow, a fine fettle born of bio-dynamic tofu enemas while PC users seem to enjoy a permanent sniffle, always dabbing at their bright red noses with Mum’s damp hanky and swallowing buckets of Payless Vitamin C.; likewise, PCs spend 24/7 quaking in fear that a malevolent teenager in Xingtao province with a broadband connection and a bad attitude will choose that day to unleash a virus that will instantly turn the world’s PCs to landfill while Macs merely issue a languorous yawn of an AM and set about saving the planet, unencumbered by worries that they might catch cyber-cold because no one writes malicious code for them – to know Macs is to love them and their masters.

Mac users create things – PC users create things to create things with. Eventually. God willing. After they’ve rebooted. Again. After they’ve played Exterminate: Zlad of the Pluuud Nexus 1.9. Again. Macs are for getting round to writing novels on while PCs are ostensibly to enable the enhancement of the possibility of thinking about maybe getting round to writing novels on. If the thing can stay booted that long. Whatever. No matter how much PC users soup up their wheezing crates, they will never be able to run EliteWanker 3.0 as it is resolutely not cross-platform for the simple reason that PC users have nothing to say. PC users have nothing to say so they spend their time in cyber-worlds, spending real money on things that don’t exist, for fuck’s sake, rebuilding their softdrives and rebooting. Again.

If Macs are, as Charlie asserts, the Fisher-Price Activity Center of the computer world then PCs are the plastic Meccano; flimsy, fiddly, irritating and fruitless ‘projects’ which never look like they do on the box and which require their constructors’ constant attentions. Look, us kids blessed with the Fisher-Price Activity Centers had our the right side of our brains nourished, resulting in our holistic approach to life, our grasp of the abstract, of language, art and music; the children of Meccano, however, were saturated in left-brain activity which promoted their linear, concrete thinking and encouraged them to delight in making fundamentally useless things with little bits and pieces, an experience which admittedly set them up perfectly for a life time of transistorised tinkering.

PC users love switches, knobs, potentiometers, sliders, actuators, whatever; these simple devices serve as distractions from actually getting on with some work, but the only Mac owners are interested in is the one that turns the G7 on, and they kind of loose interest in that after the first day or two because, quite frankly, they never need to use it again. Their machines just sit and purr, ready to spit out a chick-lit pot-boiler any time their black-clad, goateed, running lackey-dog-of-the-bourgeoisie gets around to opening WriteBook after all their other exciting and lucrative projects have been fully realised.

Like Macs, Fisher-Price Activity Centers are a means to an end whereas PCs and Meccano are a means in themselves. The sons of Gates never really ever got over that Meccano stage of pre-adolescence, leaving them with the exasperating latent desire to fuck with stuff. This truth is vehemently denied by the tech-anoraks, but it explains why they constantly refuse to act in their own rational self-interest. I mean, why anyone would drive a Robin Reliant when a Lamborghini is available little extra cost unless the act of driving is not really his or her primary concern?

Sigmund Freud, a Mac-man if ever there was one, would have had a chuckle or two over Charlie’s wild-eyed screed, not for its dangerously unhinged tone so much as how it goes to prove Sigmund utterly correct. PC users types also have some very serious personal identification issues; they suffer from either the unearned high self-esteem of the typical bully who thinks himself superior to those he torments, or the low self-esteem of the perennial victim who has to imitate his tormenter to bolster his self-worth – I don’t know which yet; maybe I should get around to using that AutoDoctorate function? – and they pretty much wear their penis envy on their sleeves as their obsession over ‘whose is bigger’ is hard to hide. They, and particularly Charlie, their self-appointed ‘spokesman’, sputters with incandescent rage and indignation at the idea that someone else’s ‘rig’ might be more powerful than theirs, their very manhood threatened to the core by the thought that someone else may have more RAM. It’s very sad.

Denial is another trait easily identifiable in poor old Charlie and his acolytes; the Apple Macintosh is, by all know criteria, the superior machine, and faced with this threat to their collective ego they do the only thing they can do – deny its truth, and rationalise it away by whining that the Mac must be the lesser consumer durable because it doesn’t have two buttons on its mouse or some such pettiness. Bugger the fact that the Mac does what it’s told when its told to do it, THE PC’S GOT TWO MOUSE BUTTONS! Why do PC owners get so mad with Macs? Why, its reaction formation of course! According to Siggy, PC owners that froth at the mouth in their commendation of Macs are merely demonstrating their own inferiority! Wow! It all makes sense! See what you can do with a Mac? Intelligently examine the evidence. What can you do with a PC? Um…

Or is it projection instead? Maybe its projection as well! Let’s have a look. Do PC users accuse Mac users of the very crimes they commit themselves? Yes? Bingo! Projection! Or, if you prefer, hypocrisy. PC users like to paint Mac lovers some sort of pack of corporate drones while maintaining the conceit that they themselves are all mavericks and iconoclasts, crazy young kids livin’ for the now because they prefer to acquire their hardware from the tip, but don’t forget kids, IBM-style edifices are not called clones for nothing.

Before computers had really taken the world hostage I had an extended stay in hospital, and during this ordeal I was befriended by a nurse named Ian. He had an extensive Jazz collection on vinyl and video, and would stop by at dinnertime, just as my favourite show came on the telly, to tell me about it. Well, when I say tell me about it I mean tell me about how he had catalogued it, on index cards which crossed-referenced each track with what musician in any given year on label X etc etc. The filing cabinets that held it took up more room than the records themselves. I asked him if ever actually listened to the records and he looked confused, upset, and gave me a quizzical glance. Listen to them? I obviously didn’t get it, so he started telling me all over again. I sat back and dreamt of the morgue.

When I saw Ian again not long ago he informed me that he was still living at his mum’s and that he was in the process of transferring his index system onto his new computer. It was a PC. He had just started to explain which programme he was using, and how much extra RAM it required, when I affected an escape; I understand that Ian was out of the Intensive Care Unit and taking solids foods shortly after, but I also understand that the suicide rate amongst the staff in the ICU rose sharply in that time. Ian remains, to this day, the world’s most boring man. Ian owns a PC.

Mac users never preach to anyone that did not express an interest, yet PC users are worse than Christians. They evangelize about a subject that they insist is fact but is, in essence, based on faith; ‘Better pray this works’ say the nerds before booting up, again, and Mac users are constantly having their languid Chardonnay and sex-fuelled Sundays interrupted by a knock on the door from two cyber-losers in burger-stained neckties asking if said Mac user had heard the good news about Vista, donks who are greeted with the Zen Buddhist calm typical of our people and wished well with their spiritual journey, after which the Mac users return peacefully to their tantrical pursuits.

Charlie Booker is correct on one count – the Mac ads are devastatingly accurate, and the fact that he so cheerfully identifies with such a pack of drab saps indicates a mental illness for more worrying than any suffered by the clear-eyed and level headed Macsters. Indeed, apart from either the narcissism or a pathological self-hatred, and penis envy, denial, reaction formation and projection previously mentioned, Charlie is quite obviously suffering from an anti-social personality disorder that sees him regard negative personality traits as positives, the Millwall FC ‘No one likes us – we don’t care!’ approach to computing, but his victimhood is a grossly misplaced – IBM and Microsoft are not exactly what one might describe as vulnerable to exploitation or abuse from larger entities.

Much as Charlie Booker may like to flatter himself, PC users are not idiosyncratic; just like people who say ‘I’m so zany!’ and ‘I’m bonkers, me!’ are invariably found to be completely sane and utterly dull, PC users are not eccentric or quirky mavericks but common or garden drones of the most dismal hue. He denies that people define themselves by the technology they choose because that would mean he defines himself as a bland, dreary, faceless member of the great unwashed, but in pretending to revel in being unreliable and unfair he has done just that – defined himself by the technology he chooses and demonstrated an unhealthy external locus of control by taking on the characteristics of a computer that is notoriously unreliable and run on software declared by the courts to be manifestly unfair.

Mac users, on the other hand, exhibit an internal locus of control by defining the ‘personality’ of their chosen technologies – Macs are designed by the people that use them, they are machines created for baby-boom hippies by baby-boom hippies, reliable, fair and true iconoclasts who live nice lives in the hippest digs with great food and greater drink, beautiful lovers and A grade recreational pharmaceuticals. They are independently wealthy, well read, well respected, fulfilled, creative, prolific and spiritually at one with the universe, and if that makes them wankers it’s a small price to pay. Now, excuse me while I move the bed to opposite the windows and adjust some bamboo flutes to maximise the flow of chi.

A Frank And Thorough Exchange Of Views.

Yeah, Elroy knows, but he's been busy. If you tuned in for Just Say No!, the latest from your one and only favorite interwebs wundkind, Elroy is sad to relate that it had to be recalled urgently due to some fatal flaws and errors in logic and reasoning. The mistake was made in production and the appropriate minion has been duly sacrificed, but not before offering an abject and groveling apology to all and sundry, and Elroy hopes you can accept with the same good grace that he sadly failed to muster.

Meanwhile he has been locking horns with The Arctic Fox, so take a peek at the goings-on here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here and, of course, here, and report back with your scores or join the fray!