Recommendation:
There should be a provision of state funding for media which are essential for pluralism (including geographical, linguistic, cultural and political pluralism), but are not commercially viable.
The state should intervene whenever there is a market failure leading to the under‐provision of pluralism, which should be considered as a key public good
Translation:
Tax payers will be obliged to fund dreary publications such as pro-EU propaganda, union self-congratulatory bumf, anything vaguely leftist such as the extinct Spare Rib magazine, and perhaps a whinge-sheet by groups such as Hacked Off.
It is obviously a market failure that people don't rush out and spend their own money on this, so we'll have to have it delivered to their houses anyway, in defiance of the EU rules about not creating waste. It's not waste when we do it.
Pluralism does not mean funding the UKIP newspaper or anything which puts forward the view that the state has a primary over-riding duty towards its own citizens.
This is all to show how democratic the EU is, even though it isn't.
10 comments:
The very WORDS 'State-sponsored art' fill me with despair...
Agree. I wonder if their aim is to have all critics voluntarily throw themselves off the top of a hi-rise carpark? It is impossible to avoid a Godwin infraction when reading it.
Ben Hammersely should the chucked out of the Front Line Club for being a signatory and defiling the memory of real journalists such as Frank Falla.
I'm surprised you're surprised. Ever since this UKIP miasma clouded the smogways the Masons have gone public - the Custard Club in vernacular (awesome!) and I kinda think - fuck 'em! Cammo's Common Purpose apparently and well. frankly, that's not on.
Liberty is costed these days love, we're a minority. I'm doing UKIP things for kicks but they're probably worse. The inexorable progress to 2nd rate status - and why not? Fuck me and my Oirish Republican and Yorkshire Tory ways - I'll kill your dad! Not anymore - robot.
Blair fixed Ireland and I reckon it's cost about £100 billion - fairy snuff. As long as they're not killing each other - nation shall speak shite unto nation!
Whitby Goth Fest last weekend? Good stuff. Best to you and yours
Hello DtP
Alas I missed WGW this year due to attending a workshop on book origination. I'm taking my Goth seriously in my own fashion and noting how it has spawned a global industry and yet still remains disreputable. Anyone who thinks UKIP is a minority interest needs to have a look at other minority interests to see how very well they are doing.
Actually, I am surprised at Hammersley precisely because I thought he was the real deal. Another of my famous mistakes.
As regards UKIP, the candidates can be very variable. However, I'm very impressed with the individuals locally. With luck, the Kernow may finally go off the dogshooters and change their choice of non-conformist politician.
If UKIP can avoid offering a) sex offenders b) financial fraudsters then I'm generally OK with the odd strange statement which is quoted out of context by the BBC anyway.
For the record, should you be asked, I was annoyed at the beasting of Bloom. It seems obvious from the recording that he made a Graham Norton-type comment which would have been winked at if it had come from a BBC pet luvie. The people he was talking to laughed and nobody complained because they understood the intended irony.
What does annoy me is people (and by this I mean blokes from the BBC who would piss in my drink in real life to stop me competing with them) telling me that I've got to be offended because they say so. No I haven't. I'll be offended if and when it suits me, and even then it might not matter depending on the context. David Dimbleby annoys and offends me but do they do anything about it? Fat chance.
He's like Clarkson, Farage; it isn't so much their own stagey vileness that matters, it is the de-facto, media-delivered permission they gives to otherwise - rightly - constrained bullies, wimmen-haters, every kind of fascist you could nightmare-up.
If you don't believe me just look at Redneck Central - the comment pages of the Mail and the Filth-o-Graph - every rancid, racist arsehole in the country feels that Nige the Fag has legitimised their every seething, resentful, bilious misanthropy. 'Thirties Weimar stuff.
You are correct about Bloom or whatever his name was, just an old man doing harmless dribbling, no doubt you are correct, also, about local candidates but Farage,for all his drollery, like Clarkson, needs a swift rubdown with a housebrick. And deportation.
Goth, is it? And I had you down a sa sedate, home counties bluestocking, gone a bit rogue.
A numbers game, innit? It depends if you believe that Clarkson and Farage typify only a small, ultimately irrelevant minority. Here you will have to choose which you believe. If their constituency is small then a tubby philanderer and a jumped-up bookie are not worth getting upset over.
However, if you think they articulate the frustrations of a much bigger number of people, then they have to be taken seriously.
I am not a bluestocking (alas, I never got the levels) but a simple technique of theirs is to go in to Tesco and measure - with a tape - the subjects on their bookshelves, subtract a marketing fiddle-factor for people trying to push various subjects, then categorize what remains.
The answer is "1950". Cath Kidson, anything about midwives, and at a pinch, the 1960s. This is not just the people who were there; da yout is buying a sanitized version of those days when antibiotics were the New Thing. Crucially, it is a time before 1972 and the oil shock, when English law shaped the cultural landscape.
From this I conclude that Farage is on to something and I can't just bat him away. Nor would I since I believe that it is European law which prevents English law perfecting itself. We already don't give a fuck about innocence but I know we used to even when we got it wrong.
As to the Gothery; I have a top hat and as I'm approximately the height (and width) of a bar table, I do not loiter outside quayside pubs lest someone rest their beer on my head.
The numbers game IS interesting; b how do we know what the numbers are when the commentariat, cyber or otherwise, is self-selecting and speaking for and generally to itself? Only a tiny proportion of Filth-O-graph readers comment about anything, yet if you read the comments you would believe that there is an overwhelming, unstoppable wave of Farageism.
If he's that popular why didn't his party take HuhneSeat, wherever it was? As I said to our mutual friend, mr dtp, very, very few people go to the 'pub, at all, never mind daily and even fewer people smoke. Most people would consider Farage a fucking idiot simply for his choice of vices, and those most people have better things to do than join the redfaced angry masturbators at the Filth-O-Graph.
And then when you add-in the fact that he's too busy getting pissed or jackassing on Question Time to even effectively superintend a small party conference, you have to ask, well, what are your political competences, BigBoy?
The magnifying lens of MediaMinster makes all these arseholes hugely important so it's hard to tell waht's really what but I would guess that Nige the Fag is as much a leader as Paul Staines is a political scientist.
There's always been rabble-rousers but they only ascend when more people are shut out of the system than are in it; we are not there, yet. And when we are, political consciousness will have risen way above Farage's grimy tidemark.
We have imported Europe - all of Europe - Ruskies, Scandanavians and Bjork too! I'm more afraid of the lawyers than the pikeys.
Not sure about Gothy disreputability - do tell?
Gothery has always upset the modernist sensibilities because of its backward-looking re-working of medieval themes. It likes frilly architecture, even baroque, has an irrational streak and and likes discussing moral philosophy but often from an immoral point of view.
One of the best jokes - although it is not all that funny - in the whole of literature is that it is the new arch-rationalist scientist Dr Frankenstein who finds himself tortured by having played god and obliged to involve himself in discussions of moral philosophy with his own creature - who is not at all happy with his dad.
God, mrs woar, God.
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