NOW THE MAIL BANS WHITE PEOPLE

No-one likes to work on a weekend, so for newspapers it's always a good time to just take loads of material from a book, reprint it verbatim and fuck off back to the Cotswolds to see your secret children. The Mail has done something similar with Fads of the chattering classes: Are you a walking, talking middle-class cliché?, which reprints chunks of an amusing book which will presumably be next to many a toilet this coming Boxing Day. Here's an example:

Plain and simple, middle- class people don't just like Apple, they love and need Apple.
On the surface, you might ask yourself how middle-class people could love a multi-billion-pound company with manufacturing plants in China which contribute to global pollution.

The simple answer: owning an Apple product tells the world you are creative and unique. Its exclusive product lines are used only by every single college student, designer, writer, English teacher and hipster on the planet.

Middle-class people need iPods, iPhones, Apple TV, AirPort Express stations and anything else that Apple produces, because they need to express their uniqueness by purchasing everything that a publicly traded company produces.

If that seems oddly familiar and yet somehow not quite right, congratulations! You've successfully recognised popular internet website Stuff White People Like! So it turns out that the guy from Stuff White People Like has written a book about stuff white people like called 'Stuff White People Like', and this article helpfully promotes that, as it explains at the bottom.

But wait! Is it me or has the Mail done a 'Find and Replace', changing all mentions of 'white people' to 'middle-class people'? You know, I think it appears it has! Apparently you're not even allowed to say 'white people' any more! It's political correctness gone mad!!! Except you're probably not allowed to say 'mad' any more!!!

It's really a strange decision though, I'm not quite sure I understand the rationale behind it. Why do an advertorial for a book if you have some kind of problem with the title? The site and book repeatedly mention white people (the Apple entry on the site, for example, contains ten instances of the word 'white'), whereas the Mail's ethnically-cleansed article mentions it zero times in the main body of text, with the exception of the footnote which grudgingly gives readers the correct title of the book in case they want to buy it. But why bother going to this trouble? Numerous commenters are already pointing out this absurdity and demanding to know why it was done. Let's assume Mail readers aren't going to like the phrase 'white people'; why, then, do an article aimed at selling them a book where it's almost certainly the most-repeated phrase? It's a bit like telling people to watch The Thick Of It by showing them a trailer where all the swear words are redubbed with 'flipping' and 'chuffing' and 'willy'.

Perhaps they got cold feet at the last minute, concerned that if they ran the excerpts with 'white people' intact there'd just be several hundred comments from along the lines of;
"If you wrote something like this about black people or the Muslims they'd put you in jail faster than you can say 'blackboard'!"
"I find this offensive! It seems that anti-white racism is the last acceptable prejudice in this politically-correct nanny state. At least soon we'll be in the minority and we can start claiming persecution and have everything our own way. You wouldn't print something like this about the Muslims!"
"I didn't find this offensive, I thought it was hilarious! That's because I can take a joke, not like the Asians! You wouldn't print something like this about black people!".

So at least they largely avoided that minefield. Unfortunately this just leaves them with a load of comments from people smugly pointing out how different they are from the 'middle-class' people in the article, in the most middle-class way possible. And slightly confused people like this;

What a load of old cobblers. I could just as easily pick 100 other cliches about the middle classes and make them real by writing amusingly about them.

You probably should have done, you might have got a book published.

Pre-publishing edit: I hadn't actually read all the comments before I started this entry, which is good because I just found a genuine comment under the article that backs up the 'you wouldn't say that about the ethnic minorities' stuff perfectly:

Can you imagine a similar article mocking the working classes, or an ethnic minority? There'd be outrage. The middle class is the last scapegoat, the only group that it's acceptable to bash without fear of reprimand.
- Susie, Shanghai, China, 31/10/2009 5:55

I'd like to think that says something about my piercing insight and razor-sharp satirical mind, but in reality it just demonstrates that Mail comments are nothing if not tediously predictable.

Mail now accusing others of racism? FIGHT!

I'm not a big fan of Nick Griffin, to be honest, but if there is one good thing to come out of his upcoming Question Time appearance, it's that there's a certain joy to be had in watching right-wing commentators squirm as they try to distance themselves from Griffin and his party, who they understand aren't very well-liked. This can be a little tricky when your own writing and that of your newspaper is to a large extent based on stoking up the kind of fears Griffin's BNP are feeding off, as Enemies Of Reason recently noted.

Last week, the Mail rain an article entitled Is political correctness to blame for lack of coverage over horrific black-on-white killings in America's Deep South?, which helpfully reproduced, in full, a white supremacist group's propaganda pamphlet. The police in the story suggest that there was no racial motive for the horrific crime in question, but the Mail doesn't really believe that cop-out, and attributes to 'campaigners' a flyer produced by 'govnn.com'. If you go there (and I'd advise you not to, especially at work), you'll get taken to the Vanguard News Network, an absolutely notorious white supremacist site, run by this charming fellow. The most recent stories on VNN concern 'Deciphering Jewish Intellectual Movements', revising the Auschwitz death totals, and celebrating the recent and shocking decision of a Lousiaina judge to refuse a marriage licence to an interracial couple. VNN helpfully divide their news articles with tags like 'nigger crime', 'nigger mentality', 'niggers', 'jewish lies', and, rather more simply, 'jews'. I'm not saying the Mail endorses these cunts, but it does get kind of troublesome for them when their areas of interest overlap with those of the more balls-out racists.

Today, Richard Littlejohn explains why he didn't want to go on Question Time alongside Griffin...

Best case, you monster him and come across as a bully. Worst case, he challenges you to disagree with some of his views, perhaps on something as straightforward as demanding a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty, and you're immediately tarred as guilty by association.

Once you've said he's a racist, where else is there to go?

And there you have it. A Mail writer simply accusing someone of racism instead of engaging them in the debate? Isn't that the sort of thing Mail writers constantly accuse everyone else of doing with them? Imagine if Griffin challenged you to disagree with his views! Here's Littlejohn from back in January praising Trevor Phillips;

Those of us who argued at the time that it was ludicrous to accuse the entire police force of racism [he's referring to the Macpherson report], over what was a bungled murder inquiry, were ourselves slandered as 'racists'.

The phrase was seized upon by those Trevor identifies as ' guilt-tripping white folks' as a potent stick to batter every public institution in the country.

They have used the catch-all cliche; of 'racism' to advance their own agenda, silence dissent and bully the paying public into submission.

The distinction, it soon becomes clear, is that Nick Griffin is an ACTUAL racist, even though, like Littlejohn, he constantly claims he's just sticking up for British identity, whereas Littlejohn is just someone who agrees with the BNP about a lot of things but wouldn't vote for them because they're racist thugs, unlike him.

Melanie Phillips wrote a similar 'Fuck the BNP!' piece this week:

But that is not the reason for [Griffin's] appeal. Those who support him do not in the main do so because they are racially prejudiced. It is because he also opposes mass immigration, Islamisation and the loss of sovereignty to the EU.

The message, then, is that if only the two main parties started opposing immigration and 'Islamisation' and started getting out of the EU, the BNP would go away. If we just adopt the BNP's policies, they won't be needed after all! Huzzah! Phillips continues;

The BNP really is racist.

Do you see?

But because legitimate feelings about national identity are also deemed to be racist, Griffin has been able to present the entire political mainstream as a conspiracy against the interests of ordinary people.

By cleverly sanitising the BNP message over recent years, he has thus been able to pose as a victim of political correctness.

I can't help feeling that I'm witnessing the truly absurd here. Mail commentators essentially saying 'Guys, come on, don't listen to him, he's racist!'. There's just something inherently amusing about Melanie freakin' Phillips decrying others for 'pos[ing] as a victim of political correctness'. It's the basis for your entire fucking career! You would have thought the Mail would take care not to toss around accusations of racism when their whole shtick is complaining that others are unfairly accusing them of it, but hey, here we are. The irony of Melanie Phillips talking about 'legitimate feelings' is brilliant. Could you imagine if a left-wing columnist had been chastising her by implying her feelings were illegitimate? She'd fly into a fury.

Let me make myself clear; the BNP are much worse than Phillips and Littlejohn, and I'm not trying to suggest their views are identical. But when Mail columnists like them constantly bang on about political correctness stifling debate, and depict accusations of racism as underhand tricks to create 'thought crimes', when you repeatedly say, as Phillips does, that "The hallmark of a liberal society is the toleration of offensive views", can they then realistically simply dismiss the BNP as racists? As Five Chinese Crackers wrote, these extremist groups seem to be at least partly fuelled by the relentlessly negative stories about Muslims and immigration and overbearing political correctness that the Mail churns out. I can't help but feel that when Mail writers lash out at the BNP, maybe somewhere in there should be a little twinge of guilt. There won't be, of course, they simply blame it on the left.

In which I join a mischievous and heavily orchestrated internet campaign

Yeah, so pretty much everyone has joined in giving Jan Moir's spectactularly offensive Mail column, "Why there was nothing 'natural' about Stephen Gately's death..." (now pathetically retitled "A strange, lonely and troubling death..." as if a more thoughtful headline somehow mitigates the swill within) a good kicking. Normally I try and avoid the subjects everyone else is doing, but in this case it's hard not to want to join the kickers.

It's hard to know where to start. Moir begins with a bit of pointless padding about other celebrity deaths (Heath Ledger and Jacko), and then starts talking about how the recently-deceased Gately couldn't really even sing. Now, I don't give a fuck about Boyzone; I've got a bunch of Six Organs Of Admittance and Chris Corsano records, and I listen to genres stoner doom metal entirely without irony (or drugs even). Heck, I've even got a surprising amount of Jandek albums which I had to grow a beard that I could stroke along to. I've made 26 records of my own which had a combined listenership that could safely fit on a single-decker bus, so to see these lucky chaps performing bland ballads and inexplicably getting showered with money and awards and the wet knickers of teenage girls has always been a bit depressing. All of that is irrelevant to Gately's death though, so to set the scene a supposedly serious column by joking that "he could barely carry a tune in a Louis Vuitton trunk", as Moir does, seems a bit crass somehow.

Still, that probably would have made for a better column than the one she launches into, which defiantly casts scorn on the coroner's verdict:

But, hang on a minute. Something is terribly wrong with the way this incident has been shaped and spun into nothing more than an unfortunate mishap on a holiday weekend, like a broken teacup in the rented cottage.

Actually, no-one called it a mishap. The official cause of death was pulmonary oedema, which is a dangerous accumulation of fluid in the lungs.

The sugar coating on this fatality is so saccharine-thick that it obscures whatever bitter truth lies beneath. Healthy and fit 33-year-old men do not just climb into their pyjamas and go to sleep on the sofa, never to wake up again.

As many people have pointed out, 'healthy' and fit men DO die in their sleep, for a variety of reasons. Although in this case it's a disingenuous argument; if he had a fluid build-up in his lungs then he didn't just die for no reason, and having a serious medical condition requires a particularly loose definition of the word 'healthy'. What's troubling about this is that Moir is just nudging and winking at the readers; the coroner and the family may believe one thing, but WE all know different, right, folks? We know what people like Gately get up to! This would be staggeringly heartless so soon after his death even if there were solid grounds for casting aspersions, but with an official explanation in place and nothing but assumptions in the opposing corner it's just pure vindictiveness.

After a night of clubbing, Cowles and Gately took a young Bulgarian man back to their apartment. It is not disrespectful to assume that a game of canasta with 25-year-old Georgi Dochev was not what was on the cards.

What was, Jan? And how did it relate to his death? Any evidence? Some kind of theory? ANYTHING?

Gately's family have always maintained that drugs were not involved in the singer's death, but it has just been revealed that he at least smoked cannabis on the night he died.

Nevertheless, his mother is still insisting that her son died from a previously undetected heart condition that has plagued the family.

Yes, because a hereditary heart condition known to be present in his family is absolutely ludicrous, whereas cannabis = death is just pure, solid science you can take the bank. Where the column gets most outrageous is towards the end, where this tragic death is somehow co-opted into a rant about civil partnerships:

Another real sadness about Gately's death is that it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships.

Gay activists are always calling for tolerance and understanding about same-sex relationships, arguing that they are just the same as heterosexual marriages. Not everyone, they say, is like George Michael.

Of course, in many cases this may be true. Yet the recent death of Kevin McGee, the former husband of Little Britain star Matt Lucas, and now the dubious events of Gately's last night raise troubling questions about what happened.

Kevin McGee hanged himself. He wasn't in a civil partnership at the time. He had been battling drug addiction. There's genuinely no similarity between the two deaths other than that they were both gay, and that they'd been in the papers. This kind of dog-whistling, "see what happens when the gays try to get married" garbage is just so utterly foul that it's hard to imagine a paid newspaper columnist actually going through with writing it. But here, sadly, we are.

The reaction has been strong enough that Moir has put out a damage-limitation press release to try and make herself look vaguely human. It's not an apology, which I suppose is fair enough since she doesn't feel sorry and clearly meant every word she said. "Some people, particularly in the gay community, have been upset by my article about the sad death of Boyzone member Stephen Gately", she points out. I'm not in the gay community, and I'm certainly not in the Boyzone fan community; I'm just one of those crazy human beings who thinks that viciously raking over the largely imagined details of a tragic death, in public, before a man's even been buried, insulting his family and casting doubts on the integrity of the coroner, is kind of not really cricket. You may not be sure about the wisdom of civil partnerships, Jan Moir, but this is really not the angle to be criticising them from if you want to get any sympathy, even from people who thinkthat equality is somehow a bad idea. The response goes on, hilariously suggesting that her critics probably haven't read the massively widely-available online piece that got Tweeted around the globe, before compounding it with another torrent of burning stupid:

However, it seems unlikely to me that what took place in the hours immediately preceding Gately’s death - out all evening at a nightclub, taking illegal substances, bringing a stranger back to the flat, getting intimate with that stranger - did not have a bearing on his death.

It doesn't matter what it seems like to you, Jan. The facts don't care what you think. That's why we have coroners and inquests and police. There's a reason we don't write on death certificates "Fucked if I know...looks a bit dodgy though, he was one of them weed-smoking gay fellas...just put that down". It seemed 'unlikely' to me that a professional writer would think this column was a good idea, but hey, I'm revising my opinions in the light of new evidence! So, what was that you were saying about civil partnerships?

"In writing that ‘it strikes another blow to the happy-ever-after myth of civil partnerships’ I was suggesting that civil partnerships - the introduction of which I am on the record in supporting - have proved just to be as problematic as marriages."

What happy-ever-after myth? Find me one person, one single living person in human history, who claimed, nay, even suggested, that civil partnerships would in all cases be a lifelong recipe for happiness. Just one. Were you asleep when we debated civil partnerships, Jan? Because I'd always assumed that the reason we did it was that homosexuals are just people, as complex and uncategorisable and multi-faceted as any others, imperfect just like you and me (well, perhapss not quite as imperfect as you). There was no expectation of a 100% success rate for gay marriages, just a simple recognition that some sort of basic fucking equality in the eyes of the law might be quite nice, an acknowledgement of the fact that gay people are not freaks to be marginalised and stereotyped and looked upon as a threat. Get with the fucking nineties, Jan!

"In what is clearly a heavily orchestrated internet campaign I think it is mischievous in the extreme to suggest that my article has homophobic and bigoted undertones."

Yeah, you're right. All these people who read your article, they don't really think it was nasty. They're all quite right-wing and intolerant usually, but on a Friday they like to let their hair down and pretend to be politically correct liberals for the lulz. It's how the kids roll these days! We don't feel anything! It's definitely not that journalists have been cossetted for years by the cosy world of printed media, reaching a largely sympathetic audience who can't really reply. It's definitely not that journalists like you are only now suddenly coming face-to-face with what reactions their columns genuinely provoke in real people in an age of instant communication. Just keep believing the problem is everyone else's and nothing to do with the bilious drivel you wrote, it'll all be fine!

The art of headlines

I'm always intrigued by the way headlines juxtapose with their stories in the tabloid press. I understand that headlines are supposed to be attention-grabbing, but when they misrepresent the story it makes reading the comparatively lacklustre material within a bit of a let-down. For example, when you look at the sports pages and you see that someone has 'blasted' someone or is in a 'fury', and then when you read the story they're just making fairly mundane comments expressing minor amounts of disappointment, because they've all been media-trained within an inch of their lives to spout tedious platitudes. See today's Telegraph for Shay Given blasts Fifa over decision to seed World Cup play-offs, where the blast in question is less like a giant star exploding and more like someone trying to discreetly let out a fart in an overrunning meeting. Or the other day in the Mail when Frank Lampard blasted former chief Adam Crozier for 'golden generation' tag, wherein Lampard tapped into unexpected levels of molten rage to furiously spit that it was "quite frustrating". It's not known yet if Crozier needed to be taken to hospital after being caught in the epicentre of that terrifying blast.

That sort of thing is easy enough to let slide, I guess; the sports pages unfortunately don't go away when it's a barren international week, and it's hard enough to make footballers' comments sound interesting at the best of times. In the realm of Proper News though, those kind of exaggerated headlines feel a bit more dangerous. The Mail has a few examples today, the most irresponsible of which is Normal flu jabs 'double the risk of catching swine bug'. The worst thing about this is that you can tell that the writer is fully aware that it's a non-story; much of the actual piece is given over to sheepishly admitting that this is a single study which hasn't even been published in a medical journal, and as such hardly overturns the huge amounts of properly peer-reviewed research that backs the safety of the vaccine. Dutifully, the reporter gets appropriate quotes from the JCVI, the WHO, Sir Liam Donaldson, and the Department Of Health telling them not to be fucking idiots about the whole thing. My favourite bit of the article though is this line:

Health chiefs are concerned that conflicting evidence about protection offered by flu jabs could deter those at risk of serious illness or dying from getting vaccinated.

Which might as well have read "Health chiefs are concerned about tabloid reporters writing articles with scaremongering headlines like this one".

Over in the science section, we get Whatever happened to global warming? How freezing temperatures are starting to shatter climate change theory, its headline eerily similar to a recent BBC effort which made global warming 'sceptics' and their nutjob ringleaders shit their pants with glee last week. The headline suggests the article is about to finally explode the idea of climate change, but the article itself is a bit of a damp squib; some cherry-picked tales about how it's really quite nippy in the not-normally-tropical state of Montana, a repeat of the incredible stat that the earth isn't quite as warm now as it was in the hottest year in recorded history, and then a fair bit of backtracking in the middle where they say the evidence is 'inconclusive', before topping it off with some quotes from some scientists who tell them their headline is pretty much bollocks. Many of the commenters didn't seem to get that far, of course, with Vanessa in London dribbling:

At last an article with the truth. I am sick and tired of reading about this idiotic dream of 'global warming' or climate change...

...suggesting this is the first time she has seen the Mail. Pete in Essex knows where to go to dig for the REAL scientific evidence:

Read the book State of Fear by Michael Crichton. Blows the whole climate change scare stories out of the water.

Indeed. And why be worrying about climate change anyway, when we've got these fucking big-ass cloned dinosaurs on the rampage?

Moving on, we come to Boy, 6, faces 45 days in reform centre for bringing own cutlery to school, wherein 'cutlery' is apparently a quaint euphemism for a Swiss Army knife. This story is from the US and concerns a kid who took a camping knife to school, apparently to eat his lunch. The school had adopted one of those crazy 'don't bring knives to school' policies, and got suspended pending a decision. Thus we get to witness the slightly disorientating sight of seeing the Mail, once so outraged about knife crime, apparently demanding that a child not be punished for taking a knife to school. To be clear, it does sound like the school may have been a bit inflexible with their zero tolerance policy (although that is kind of the point of zero tolerance policies), but I'm kind of baffled that this became news over here, especially with a needlessly misleading headline.

Still, I suppose the alternative to misleading headlines for a paper like the Mail would be ridiculously straightforward headlines that lay bare the crashing tedium within. Headlines like Curvy Danielle Lloyd gets back into bikini for romantic Dubai holiday with Jamie O'Hara, in which curvy Danielle Lloyd gets back into a bikini for a romantic Dubai holiday with Jamie O'Hara. Or Rebecca Loos is back in a bikini eight weeks after giving birth having lost her baby weight AND an extra 5lb, in which, over several gripping paragraphs, we learn the incredible truth about how Rebecca Loos is back in a bikini eight weeks after giving birth, having lost her baby weight AND an extra 5lb. Or Naomi Campbell shows off her timeless figure in an orange bikini as she reunites with Russian lover in Miami, which takes the reader on an extraordinary roller-coaster ride of emotion as, through an intense mesh of florid prose and startling illustration, we gradually build up a picture of what it might be like to look at Naomi Campbell showing off her timeless figure in an orange bikini as she reunites with her Russian lover in Miami. Still, I guess these particular stories are aimed at people who don't necessarily have time to decode more nuanced headlines in the five minutes before their wife gets out of the shower.

James Delingpole is a twat

Probably not one of my cleverest blog titles, if I'm being honest, but he really is a massive twat. He's the sort of twat that would probably love finding out that people like me think he's twat, as he sits there oozing twattery from his twatty face.

You can pretty much pick any entry from his Telegraph blog to back this up, but let's start with the most recent one. After the headline How pathetically useless of Cambridge Union to ban Michael Savage, Delingpole runs his mouth off about Cambridge Union apparently cancelling an invitation for Savage (an even bigger twat than Delingpole) to speak in one of their debates at the last minute. After a swift kick at Islam and a suggestion that the Union wimped out, Delingpole is forced to add a sheepish update at the end, after he gets an email from the Union explaining that they actually just couldn't afford to meet Savage's technical demands. While it's nice to see Delingpole admit he was wrong, the headline does still call them 'pathetically useless'.

Skipping past a few entries, including a nauseating one where he taunts his wife about how much he wants to fuck Carla Bruni, we come to the following bizarre entry from Sunday: A little light Islamist propaganda to liven up your Sunday. I'll quote it in its entirety:

I’ve just been supervising my nine-year old daughter’s home work for the week. She attends a Church of England Primary School. Here is the text she was set:

“Abdul left his friend’s house. He had had a fun afternoon. He took the route home. He was whistling softly. He scuffed his feet in the dry leaves. He pretended to dribble a football up the pitch. He passed a derelict church.”

Is it just me or is there something seriously wrong with the subliminal messages being sent out here?

Because, as we all know, C of E schools are the first place I go to for my Islamic propaganda. As far as I can make out, Delingpole makes the case that this is a sneaky leftist conspiracy to foist Allah on us all merely by noting that this fictional kid is named Abdul. That's basically it, plus the 'derelict church' bit, which inflamed a few of his commenters (although one could just as easily argue that the image of a Muslim walking past a derelict C of E church was subtly anti-Islamic, you could certainly imagine it as a shocking vignette in a BNP party political broadcast). So I Googled the first line and found this PDF link to what would appear to be that piece of homework. In that link, the text is exactly the same, but it says 'old church' instead of 'derelict'. It could be that this is a standard piece of homework that Delingpole's kid's school changed for some reason, or it could be that Delingpole got a bit creative there, I don't know. In any case, it goes on:

He heard a sound. He stopped. He listened. He heard someone crying. He pushed the gate open. He was scared. It creaked. He shivered. He looked around. He wondered whether there was anyone behind him. He went through the gate.

...so it's not really about Abdul or the church, it's a starting point for kids to write a story. Even if it were, is naming the character in your fictional story 'Abdul' likely to cause of wave of little Church Of England school kids to start strapping bombs to their chests and joining the jihad? Not least since the other questions on that page involve kids named Charlie and Gavin and fucking Joshua.

My recent personal favourite is where he claims, without irony, that liberals can't do comedy. No, really: 'Liberal satire' is an oxymoron. Adopting the moral high ground, as he often does, by calling liberals 'libtards', Delingpole takes aim at comedians like Al Franken and Jon Stewart (seemingly because Chris Hitchens already picked on them and he's merely cribbing off a Hitchens piece), asserting that they're not funny because they don't make jokes about Islam (except when, as some commenters point out, they do). Unable to think of any actual funny right-wingers (seriously, who is there? Fucking Clarkson?), Delingpole desperately tries to claim the Daily Mash as right-leaning satire (sample headline from this week; "TORIES TO RAISE MILDLY RACIST, CARAVAN-OWNING BASTARD AGE"), which will come as something of a surprise to many of us.

He does little to explain why right-wing comedy is funny and left-wing stuff isn't, but that's not really Delingpole's style; merely asserting that something is true is usually enough for him. He contrasts the Daily Mash with another, supposedly shit, liberal satire site which I haven't read. Strangely though, he neglects to contrast Stewart's wildy successful Daily Show, or the similarly popular Colbert Report, with the unbelievable failure of its conservative equivalent, Fox's quickly-aborted 1/2 Hour News Hour, which was thoroughly derided during its brief 17-episode lifespan and featured the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter struggling to make joking about the poor and minorities into something funny. (The show was swiftly cancelled and had a rating of 12 out of 100 on MetaCritic).

I could go on, but some of his other entries are making me lose the will to live. You've got Isn't Black History Month a bit racist?, which fails to add any particular insight beyond its depressingly familiar title, and things like How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie, one of his many pieces where he takes the word of a 'global warming sceptic' at face value and runs around smugly touting his triumph over the libtards. In this particular one he can be found repeating criticisms that have spread like wildfire throughout the right-wing blogosphere, in an article so shit it got a special mention in RealClimate's weary rebuttal.

Delingpole loves to pour scorn on the idea of anthropogenic climate change; most weeks you can find him hiding behind Ian Plimer, tossing insults at George Monbiot for following the scientific orthodoxy on climate change, because Delingpole read Plimer's largely discredited book and found it well impressive. His understanding of science is pretty laughable; in one hilariously bad piece of playground name-calling, he responds to Monbiot's perfectly reasonable suggestion that a debate between himself and Plimer take place in written form to allow readers to check out the sources rather than in a live public slanging match, by calling him a 'chicken' and characterising his response as

...the squirmy, weaselly get-out of a no-good, snivelling, yellow-bellied, milquetoast loser quite terrified of having the massive holes in his puny argument mercilessly exposed in public by a proper scientist who actually knows his subject inside out?

And that, my friends, is the sort of thing that justifies my admittedly childish title. I thought about taking the high road, but he's really just a big silly fartypants.

Quite possibly the laziest Richard Littlejohn column ever

I've been a bit quiet recently, since I haven't really been in the mood to depress myself with a trawl through the papers, and the stories I have followed, like the abortive attempt by several papers to whip up an HPV vaccine scare only to be cruelly thwarted by the actual evidence, (although many of them did gamely try to cling on to the 'well, we should still be concerned' angle even after their initial reactions proved unfounded), have been pretty well covered elsewhere.

So I figured I'd ease myself back in with another lazy run through Dicky Littlejohn's latest knockabout romp. Today's, though, is quite bizarre. In it, Littlejohn complains that his council are too damn reasonable about recycling and helpful with the bins. He ponders aloud how he's supposed to run off one of his ironically recycled rants about the Bin Nazis, displayed a hitherto undiscovered sense of self-awareness. You can see that he's suddenly struggling with his conscience; there's just a glimmer of a hint of a thought there that maybe, just maybe, the world isn't entirely run by morons without a shred of 'common sense', that maybe all these little pathetic one-off anecdotes he repeats about some unreasonable council official aren't actually a fair representation of the world. That in some cases these stories aren't even true, or that they're exaggerated, or that even when they're true they're only newsworthy because they're isolated incidents which you can't extrapolate from. As I read it, I almost started rooting for him. "He's about to get it! He's finally fucking getting it! Go on Richard my son!".

Of course, he hasn't learned a fucking thing, or if he has, he's clearly about to repress it, as the final piece of his column today demonstrates. Still, before that, he has time for a couple of other segments, like a whole section which is designed to justify yet another pointless, smirking reference to Peter Mandelson's (gay!!!!) partner. It's actually quite a neat little bit of baiting; the section is headed "Thank God it was Sarah and not Reinaldo", and after a perfunctory complaint about Sarah Brown introducing Gordon Brown at the Labour conference (© all newspapers this week), he drifts into one of his merry little daydreams:

Still, at least we were spared Reinaldo's version of how Mandy makes a mess in the bathroom when he's dyeing his hair. Or Jack Dromey on how Harriet went mental when she discovered he had a Page 3 calendar up in his office.

The Dromey/Harman bit has the feel of something tacked on just in case someone makes a joke about his continuing obsession with Mandelson's gay relationship, so it wouldn't surprise me to see him making that defence of himself next week.

The next two sections aren't really worth talking about, just a strained dig at Gordon Brown and then a bit of fluff about how we're being turned into a federal superstate. Yawn.

Still, you know it wouldn't be a proper Littlejohn column without one of his trademark misleading anecdotes about politcal correctness gone mad, and today's comes in the form of this closing belch:

When the North Wales Traffic Taliban decided to muzzle all their police dogs and train them how to headbutt suspects instead of biting them, I thought I'd heard it all.

As usual, I should have known better. The increasingly absurd Devon and Cornwall force has started replacing their German shepherds with springer spaniels, which are said to be 'less frightening'.

Isn't frightening the whole point of police dogs?

Perhaps they should go still further and start recruiting labradors. Our old lab, Ossie, would have enjoyed being a police dog.

Trouble is, he wouldn't have been able to decide between licking suspects into submission or humping them to the ground.

Hmm, that seems odd. Attack dogs reduced in size to avoid hurting the nasty rapists and armed robbers? Must be human rights gone mad! So, donning my Sherlock Holmes hat, off I bravely go to Google to put in "springer spaniels" along with "Devon" and "Cornwall" to see if I can't get my massive detective brain around it and try to get to the bottom of it. It's amazing I go to this level of trouble unpaid, but what can I say, when duty calls I guess you gotta pick up that phone. And so, after upwards of 26 seconds of reading the BBC's less rabid account, I finally get a glimpse of the truth...

They're rescue dogs. No, genuinely, it's literally as straightforward and almost insultingly simple as that. They've trained them to be rescue dogs, for rescuing people. People who probably haven't done anything wrong and need rescuing. Devon and Cornwall police force have trained three (3!) springer spaniels and a Brittany to rescue people. So when Littlejohn asks "Isn't frightening the whole point of police dogs?", he means "Isn't frightening the whole point of police rescue dogs?". To which the answer, I would think most reasonable people would agree, is "no".

The force dog inspector said: "Our existing general purpose dogs are fantastic at what they do but vulnerable people are often scared when confronted by a German shepherd dog.

"These lost person search dogs have no other skills and are pure specialists in finding people who are lost."

So, these dogs will literally only be used to rescue people and find people who have gone missing, like for example lost children, with the old big dogs used for everything else. Meaning that they're not being 'replaced' either. This BBC story, which completely renders Littlejohn's argument massively wrong IN THE VERY FIRST SENTENCE, has been up since Tuesday. If you Google News search for "springer spaniels", you get it as the second result, with the Telegraph's Springer spaniels recruited as rescue dogs by police the main result. Indeed, do any kind of search for any news story about this, and it becomes painfully clearly that Richard Littlejohn is possibly the only person in the world who thinks these dogs are supposed to be hunting down criminals and giving them a playful lick on the face because political correctness gone mad says we can't frighten the bastards. I don't want to accuse him of being deliberately misleading, but I genuinely cannot conceive of a way he could have found out about this story without being told that these dogs are purely for rescuing people, unless he just half-heard it on the telly while he was doing something else and didn't bother his arse to do even the most basic Google-powered research of the kind a tiny child would be able to do.

Can I write this blog entry without touching the keyboard?

There's a well-known rule that when a tabloid headline poses a question, the answer is almost always 'no'. I don't think I'm going out on a particularly dangerous limb when I propose that this rule holds for the Mail's Can this man cure cancer with his bare hands?

This one's a really classic example of journalists reporting credulously on pseudoscience, complete with the time-honoured opening which presents our hack as a skeptic who's seen it all and definitely don't believe none o' this garbage, not no way.

The BBC's Watchdog says he's a menace. But when one of our most cynical writers met Britain's most controversial healer, her scepticism began to waver.

The writer, Rebecca Hardy, may well be one of Britain's most hard-nosed, scientifically literate skeptics for all I know, but it seems she's had precious little time to rigorously test paranormal phenomena before at the Mail, where she's been mostly employed to bring us the stories that really matter; stories like how Anne Robinson is looking for a man, how Jerry Hall would like to have sex with a man, how Cherie Lunghi can't find a man, how Mariella Frostrup didn't have sex with one particular man, how Andy Murray found a woman, how people have reacted to Paul Beshinivsky finding a woman, and how some old rich guy would like to impregnate a woman.

In the article, Hardy meets Adrian Pengelly, the "world renowned Visionary Healer, Energy Worker, Teacher and Psychic" (according to his own website), who works with both people and animals, both with his magic hands and also apparently at a distance anywhere in the world. It seems Pengelly recently got criticised by the BBC's consumer affairs show Watchdog for doing things like, y'know, claiming he can cure cancer with his fucking 'energy'. Like all good cranks, Pengelly has a finely-tuned sense of which people are stupid enough to believe him naturally in tune with his energy.

'Your energy's moving OK,' he says, which is, I guess, a good thing. Not like poor Matt Allwright from BBC1's Watchdog. 'When he came in his energy was so unpleasant - aggressive,' says Adrian.

Having not seen the episode of Watchdog in question, I won't address Hardy's characterisation of what the show claimed and how unfair it was on Pengelly, who is, we're told "a rather gentle man", with a list of anecdotes to support his claims and who says "I don't care about scientific evidence". Pengelly later seemingly contradicts this claim by talking about the incredible science behind his skills:

'I was just happy to help people. Some said I had a gift from God. But I just wanted to understand the science.

'I thought: "What is there? There's only energy - electricity in different forms - and it floats." I can feel energy come with one hand and draw it with another.

'Somehow the energy I was generating was stimulating the body's immune system.

I dunno about you guys, but that's got me in the mood for some hard-ass science, so let's move on to the test and watch how ruthlessly Hardy analyses Pengelly's abilities as he gets his hands on her and starts feeling her energy...

I've left my bag on the floor with a packet of cigarettes sticking out. Surely, if this man is a fraud, he's going to hone in on my lungs.

'There's no sign in your energy system of you smoking,' he says. 'If you were a heavy smoker, I'd be able to feel that. How many do you smoke a day?' A packet.

This is a strange one, because I would class a pack a day as a heavy smoker. Apparently she doesn't consider herself one though, and credits Pengelly for a hit here. Perhaps he tuned into her psychic energy, perhaps he just noticed that she wasn't constantly coughing up phlegm, who can say?

Now he's feeling my liver. 'People often accumulate emotional and psychological stress here,' he says. 'I can feel lumps of stress.'

Quelle surprise - I have a deadline to meet.

I'm not sure there's anyone anywhere who doesn't think they have some stress in their lives, a fact that Pengelly does at least acknowledge before honing in his diagnosis to something that's still massively vague but allows Hardy to provide all the information for him;

'One lump is now becoming bigger than the others. It's either a partner or a child it's related to. Is it related to a child and a partner at the same time? Does that make sense?

'The energy is twisted together. It's an emotional trauma, a shock, an energy you've held on to.'

Now I'm slightly freaked out. Almost two years ago my son's father died'

Of course, anyone who knows anything about cold reading can see what's going on here. Pengelly dangles a suggestion out there which his subject then stretches to fit her life. In this case it's her son's father dying, but Pengelly left his suggestion open enough to cover miscarriages, illnesses in both children and partners, relationship break-ups, custody battles and all manner of other potential traumas. The good thing about feeling energies through your hands rather than, for example, claiming to talk to the dead, is that it sort of makes sense that you would get vague signals back which your subject has to interpret themselves. With seances you always wonder if these spirits are mumbling and why they appear to only know the first letter of a dead relative's name, but the nebulous psychic energy racket has got a bit more leeway.

But just in case you think Pengelly is a crank, Hardy reassures us that he was once, like her, skeptical. I mean, he was "a policeman's son", for fuck's sake, and we all know about the well-documented link between having a copper for a dad and not believing in psychic healing. Pengelly became convinced when he went to a psychic fair and a man told him "where the scars were on [his] body from cycle racing", which I'm sure we can all agree would be almost impossible to guess. He tried out his own psychic ability by putting his hands on a friend's head and watching in astonishment as her migraine vanished. A scientist or doctor might suggest that headaches are self-limiting and subjective conditions which go away by themselves over time and are thus ripe for the old correlation/causation fallacy, but in this case our scientifically-minded journalist is just so darn impressed that she probably forgot.

The article finishes with Hardy talking about how she feels sort of better since Pengelly touched her up, saying "Meanwhile, I, as a professional cynic, am far less sceptical about Adrian than I expected". Maybe her stress disappeared, as she acknowledges, because she'd met her deadline. Perhaps it disappeared because instead of doing a real job she sat on a chair in a field getting gently massaged by a nice man. I certainly couldn't say. But isn't it so refreshing to see a serious journalist like Hardy really applying her critical thinking to a topic? So let's all petition the Mail to move Rebecca Hardy to a new position dealing with science and health claims, because truly her analytical talents are wasted on stories like Sinitta's continuing love for Simon Cowell, Dermot O'Leary's family plans and the trials and tribulations of someone who was engaged to someone who danced with a newsreader on a TV show about dancing.

Now PC prude bans phrase 'political correctness'

If ever you needed proof that 'political correctness' long ago ceased to be an actual code of language, if it ever was, today's papers are jizzing themselves silly about how you can't even say 'spotted dick' any more in case you offend dicks, or people with dicks, or people with no dicks, or people who once saw a dick but wish they hadn't. The Daily Express have gone with the rather straightforward NOW PC PRUDEES [sic] BAN SPOTTED DICK, presumably because you can't even say 'prudes' any more without offending the prudes.

The story runs like this; some people think that the name of the pudding 'spotted dick' is inherently hilarious, presumably the kind of people that really relish ordering cocktails called things like 'Sex On The Beach' or 'Interracial Anal Fisting' (not sure if the second one is a real cocktail). Canteen staff in one particular canteen have got bored of sniggering comments about spotted dick, and decided to rename it 'spotted Richard' on the menu (perhaps in homage to pudding-esque Mail columnist Richard Littlejohn, who knows?). This isn't really news in the sense that most of us would understand the term, but nevertheless the story made the Express, The Mail, The Telegraph, The Sun, The Star, the BBC, Sky News, and quite possibly a number of distant solar systems with no discernable traces of life. (If you're feeling a sense of deja vu, it could be because this sort of thing has happened before).

The Express, quick as a flash, sends a man racing up to the top of Express Towers to project the emergency PC Gone Mad symbol into the sky (I believe it's in the shape of a rainbow sheep), and, sure enough, their call for a hero is answered in the form of the tireless Philip Davies MP, a man who may very well actually shit reactionary quotes when he goes to the toilet:

Tory MP Philip Davies, Parliamentary spokesman for the Campaign Against ­Political Correctness said: “They are likely to get more people sniggering ­because they are calling it spotted Richard rather than spotted dick. It also speaks ­volumes that one group can be so childish and the other so sensitive.”

It seems they didn't need Davies to actually say 'political correctness gone mad', because he was beaten to it by someone who heard something about it from someone which he reckons is probably what happened:

Last night council member Klaus Armstrong-Braun said: “I find this unbelievable. I have been told it happened because it was felt the name was offensive. That is ludicrous. This dish has been around for 150 years and its name has never been a problem.

“It is part of British culture and heritage and to change it because of the childish ­behaviour of a few is absolutely ridiculous.

“It will even cost money because the name labels have to be changed. It is political ­correctness gone mad.”

That creaking sound you can hear is the national economy straining on the edge of total collapse with the news that Flintshire County Council's canteen is about to waste funds running into perhaps tens of pennies on their menus which almost certainly get reprinted on a regular basis anyway.

So what is political correctness these days? I'm a liberal person who tries to be careful with my choice of words because I understand that words are extremely powerful tools, weighted and shaped by decades of changing meaning and history such that they carry with them connotations which I think it behooves us all to acknowledge, out of a mixture of basic respect to people and the need to be understood. What I'm not is someone who thinks the name 'spotted dick' should be banned. The word 'dick' is not really a PC concern, is it? Political correctness isn't about banning swear words, that's just censorship at most.

It seems that 'political correctness' has now come to mean 'any type of censorship, change or compromise made which we in the press don't agree with'. Therefore, I propose that people just stop saying it. Just stop. You've ruined it now. It once sort-of meant something, but you messed around with it like excited children, tried to use it for something other than its intended purpose, and now it's broken. Maybe you can come up with another term which more accurately represents the weirdly simplistic narrative you're trying to spin, or, and here's a wild idea, maybe you can just try and criticise things on their own relative merits instead of screaming 'PC! PC GONE MAD!' like some kind of yelping chorus of gits. Does it make you feel good to constantly rail against a poorly-constructed left-liberal strawman using quirky, isolated examples which you know full well have nothing to do with any kind of political movement? Why the obsession with concocting a strange fantasy world wherein a dark cabal of socialist oppressors are stealing all your good old British words? It's so bollock-achingly fucking boring now that I'm actually tempted to start a campaign to genuinely get spotted dick banned (not even renamed, the actual pudding banned from shops, forever) just to piss you morons off.

So yeah, you can quote me on the 'let's stop saying the phrase "political correctness"' stuff and pretend I've banned it, if it helps give your world that frisson of excitement. Next time you're at a social gathering, why not end one of your spluttering right-wing rants with the phrase "...but of course, you can't say 'political correctness' any more, apparently the politically correct get offended by it!". Perhaps I'll be there when you say it, at which point I'll drag you off into a darkened room and violently stuff your every orifice with a popular currant-filled suet pudding while screaming "YEAAAAAAAH HOW YOU LIKE MY SPOTTED RICHARD NOW, BITCH?! TASTE MY RICHARD!", until your body explodes and your wretched existence finally draws to an undeservedly spectacular end.

O, Moonenbaum...

It was with a weary sigh that I opened up the Guardian's CiF section to note that they'd lazily republished a two-week old LA Times editorial about how frightfully nasty The New Atheists are. You might think that Andrew Brown's tireless moans about Richard Dawkins and the huge CiF Belief section would be enough, but apparently you'd be wrong. Science and religion need a truce was written by Chris Mooney and Sheril Kirshenbaum, a pair of 'accomodationists' who promote the idea that religion and science should try harder to get along by writing books and articles as one voice. Anyway, they're the young, hip science advocates who seem to have found that telling Dawkins he's a bad man is a good way to get noticed, a notion sadly proved correct by the fact I'm writing about them.

Their basic premise is one you'll have heard plenty of times; Dawkins, PZ Myers and chums are all a bit too confrontational, and maybe if we were a bit nicer to fundamentalists we'd be able to go back to the halcyon days where everyone believed in evolution, before 'The God Delusion' ruined everything. This particular article starts off badly by bizarrely criticising Dawkins for writing a book about science:

This fall, evolutionary biologist and bestselling author Richard Dawkins – most recently famous for his public exhortation to atheism, The God Delusion – returns to writing about science. Dawkins's new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, will inform and regale us with the stunning "evidence for evolution", as the subtitle says. It will surely be an impressive display, as Dawkins excels at making the case for evolution. But it's also fair to ask: Who in the United States will read Dawkins's new book (or ones like it) and have any sort of epiphany, or change his or her mind?

Surely not those who need it most: America's anti-evolutionists.

This is a bit of a straw man; I don't think even Dawkins believes he can convert fundamentalist Christians who believe the Bible is literally true and that the world is less than 10,000 years old. The strange part is though, that having been roundly criticised for writing about atheism, Dawkins is continuing to take heat for going back to writing books about evolution. Of course, Mooney and Kirshenbaum haven't read the book, but then that isn't really the point. The upcoming release of this book is just a hook on which to hang another reheated complaint about 'the New Atheists'.

These religious adherents often view science itself as an assault on their faith and doggedly refuse to accept evolution because they fear it so utterly denies God that it will lead them, and their children, straight into a world of moral depravity and meaninglessness. An in-your-face atheist touting evolution, like Dawkins, is probably the last messenger they'll heed.

I'm struggling to understand what Moonenbaum's point is here. If, as they say, the religious 'view science itself as an assault on their faith', what good is it going to do to start being nice to them? How is accomodationism going to get through to them? For the extremists, I don't think it really matters whether you offer them a cup of tea and a hug or leave a flaming bag of shit on their doorstep; if they're not interested in science then being a bit mealy-mouthed and cuddly about it doesn't seem like it's going to help. Let's not forget that pre-'New Atheism' everyone was telling religion how nice its hair was, and the acceptance of evolution wasn't any greater than it is now. I mean;

More moderate scientists, however – let us call them the accommodationists – still dominate the hallowed institutions of American science.

Yeah, and has it led to an America which overwhelmingly accepts the theory of evolution? It seems not. The weird thing about Moonenbaum (I mean beyond being a weird two-headed writing entity, one of whom appears to be Seth MacFarlane) is that while they're nominally all about respecting everyone's beliefs, they seem to really, really wish Dawkins and Myers and Jerry Coyne would all shut the fuck up and quit interrupting the big group hug they're trying to initiate. They seem to advocate the 'concerned friend' approach to empathising with creationists, but then criticise evolutionists for not being on-message with them. For example, they write this about Jerry Coyne:

Long under fire from the religious right, the NCSE now must protect its other flank from the New Atheist wing of science. The atheist biologist Jerry Coyne of the University of Chicago, for instance, has drawn much attention by assaulting the centre's Faith Project, which seeks to spread awareness that between creationism on the one hand and the new atheism on the other lie many more moderate positions.

Now, Coyne is no enemy of the NCSE (National Center for Science Education). His criticism of the NCSE's faith project is exactly the kind of friendly intervention they ought to endorse, but because it disagrees with their position they describe it as an 'assault'. A terrifying assault which begins;

Let me first affirm that I enormously admire the work of the NCSE and of its director, Eugenie Scott and its president, Kevin Padian. They have worked tirelessly to keep evolution in the schools and creationism out, most visibly in the Dover trial. But they’re also active at school-board hearings and other venues throughout the country, as well as providing extensive resources for the rest of us in the battle for Darwin. They are the good guys.

Coyne merely disagrees with the NCSE's policy in this particular area, arguing that the teaching of evolution doesn't really need to cosy up to religion to make its point; the science stands perfectly well on its own without having to get a big Jesus-shaped endorsement on it.

The article ends by suggesting that, hey, Charles Darwin wasn't nasty about religion, so there. But, as PZ Myers pointed out in his rebuttal, the whole point of science is that it's not about slavish obedience to Darwin; we don't have to agree with Darwin about everything because he was a brilliant scientist, just as we don't have agree with the NCSE's every policy just because Eugenie Scott is awesome. The most important thing in any debate is honesty, and what Mooney and Kirshenbaum, Andrew Brown, Michael Ruse and others seem to preach is a kind of weirdly dishonest approach where atheist scientists should keep quiet about religion even if they believe that unempirical faith-based thinking sits awkwardly alongside science, because God help us if we upset the odd Christian along the way. It's perfectly valid for Dawkins to put his cards on the table about what he believes; if you don't like it, criticise his arguments on their own merits. Don't start suggesting that he shouldn't make them in the first place.

(Predictably, Andrew Brown arrives in the comments, demanding that Jerry Coyne supply evidence that religion is hampering the teaching of evolution but failing to demand that Mooney and Kirshenbaum supply any evidence that Dawkins, Myers and Coyne's method isn't working).

The reality is that we're not seeking to win over the hardcore fundamentalists, it's about reaching the people in the middle ground. Some of them might object to any criticism of religion alongside their evolution, and for them there's Ken Miller, Mooney/Kirshenbaum and Francis Collins. Some of them might, though, appreciate the honesty of scientists who aren't afraid to say that there's no convincing evidence for God. The religious are attacking evolution and atheism all the time, why shouldn't some evolutionists fight back? We all have our own ways of debating, so let's all put our ideas out there and see whose wins, with less of this tedious nonsense about 'framing' the debate in the right way. And fuck, I'm willing to suggest that Dawkins' many science books have done more for the popular underestanding of evolution than a million boring op-eds which amount to little more than attempts to referee the debate.

Liz Jones' Tuscan villa nightmares, and other frightening tales

There are Mail columnists I dislike (well, pretty much all of them), but usually I know what the point of them is. Peter Hitchens may use some disingenuous arguments, but I understand why he thinks what he thinks, and I can see why he appeals to people who fetishise the past and fancy themselves as conservative intellectuals. Littlejohn is depressingly easy to understand; his columns are all pitched with exactly the same tone, making the same points over and over, and he appeals to the kind of people who think being 'no-nonsense' is a virtue, even if it means simplifying issues to the point where it pretty much is nonsense. Melanie Phillips...actually, let's not talk about her.

Liz Jones, though, leaves me completely baffled. I don't what her appeal is supposed to be, who her columns are aimed at. I sometimes get the feeling they're aimed at the little voice in her head that tells her to keep going. And no-one else. On Saturday she tackled the sensitive issue of 800m runner Caster Semenya's gender test with a dreadful set of observations about the differences between men and women. In this, Jones suggests that rather than using science we could just do a test based on a load of hackneyed stereotypes about men and women. When the Semenya story first broke forums across the internet were filled with budding comedians making 'THEY COULD JUST ASK HER TO PARALLEL PARK HAHAHA' jokes with all the subtlety for which the internet is famed, but Jones turned this into an entire column.

Of course, those of you who know Liz Jones know that she has a somewhat unique view of the world, which it perhaps wouldn't be that unfair to describe as 'spoilt'. So, instead of even attempting to put herself in the shoes of Caster Semenya, a teenager from a rural South African village which didn't have electricity when she was growing up and still doesn't have running water, Jones gigglingly suggests that we'll know she's a woman if she uses "a BlackBerry timetable" for her weekly shopping, checks in efficiently online when she goes on her holidays and dutifully sorts out the recycling because Lord knows the feckless menfolk won't. Reading Liz Jones' examples of what a woman is like, it's impossible to reconcile this with real female humans I have met. I'm used to people using 'men' and 'women' when they really mean 'my husband' or 'my wife', but I do wonder what planet Jones is on if she thinks that the mark of a woman is the ability to schedule her shopping trips on a Blackberry.

Liz Jones is most notable for writing a series of columns about her similarly objectionable ex-husband Nirpal Dhaliwhal, who seemed to be competing in public to see who could make themselves look the biggest twat post-divorce. Since then, Jones has become notorious for being unfathomably self-absorbed and yet not remotely self-aware, writing endless columns mixing gushing enthusiasm about her wonderful fashion sense and her brilliant taste in designer house fittings with horrendous whinges about trivial shit that real people deal with without any fuss, to the point that even the most pretentious pseudo-middle-class Mail readers started to view her as a bit of a joke. (I mean, she writes sentences like "Michael was fast asleep on his back in the sitting room on the Jasper Morrison"; you know when people start referring to their furniture by the name of its designer that we're not dealing with someone all of us might get along with).

Now she's been given a column which reads like a parody of a vacuous, solipsistic moron; the only thing stopping me from believing it's a satire is that Jones has always been a bit like this. That new column is called, with no apparent irony, 'Liz Jones Moans', in which Jones takes feminism round the back, shoots it, set it on fire, shoots it some more, buries it in a locked safe, pumps a few extra rounds into the dirt for good measure and then commissions an award-winning landscape gardener to do something oh so terribly tasteful with the space above it.

If women were all like Liz Jones, you'd probably become a rampant chauvinist. Aside from her tedious gossip-mag bitching about the awful dresses other women are wearing, she has a very strange relationship with the idea of independence, switching constantly between sassy noughties go-getter and simpering, clueless little girl who expects everyone to do everything for her. Above, she was faintly praising herself for her smart Blackberry-organised shopping trips, but she also writes columns like last Thursday's Who wants to fill up their own car with petrol while wearing heels and cream Burberry?, in which she yearns for some kind of working class man to do the terrible things she can't bear to do herself.

In that piece, Jones complains bitterly about having to fill her car up all by herself, lest she dirty up her cream Burberry clothing and classy heels, before going on to complain about how terribly confusing the process of filling up at a petrol pump is:

When you finally stagger in to pay, they ask you which pump you were at.

How on earth would I know? Then you put your card in, key in about a million numbers, and they ask if you have a loyalty card.

No real person is that stupid, are they? The pumps are numbered. It's a fairly simple system, this 'numbering', and personally I think it's really going to catch on. I predict we're going to be using numbers for all kinds of things in the future, and trust me Liz, while I appreciate how difficult it can be to pull your head out of your arse long enough to remember a one digit number, if you keep persevering with it I reckon even you can crack the code.

Three days earlier, Jones scraped the self-parody barrel with a whinge about the horrors of going on holiday to her rented Tuscan villa and her hellish experiences in posh hotels. Here she complains about such hardships as overlong codes to unlock the hotel's broadband connection, insufficiently obvious light-switch positioning, and being given too much helpful information on her bedside table. Let's join Liz as she recounts the harrowing tale of the time her remote stopped working:

The remote control for the TV doesn’t work. You phone downstairs. ‘We will send an engineer up to your room.’

‘No, don’t do that. I don’t want a man in my room because I am tired and in my pyjamas.’

He arrives anyway.

It's not entirely clear what Liz expects the hotel to do without coming to her room, but I'm sure you'll agree it's all a terrible farce. She moves on to complaining about the expensive villas she's stayed in;

And don’t get me started on self-catering villas in Tuscany which, despite costing half your annual salary, don’t come with coffee beans or bottled water or a TV that works.

Why are people in Europe not as obsessed with TV and DVDs and up-to-date gadgets as we are?

I once rented a villa near Siena. I hired a car to get there, kept driving the wrong way round roundabouts, got hopelessly lost and then couldn’t find the key to the front door.

I kept having to go to a supermarket to buy food, which was all extremely tiring.

Imagine! Imagine having to drive to your villa all by yourself! What horror! Imagine having to buy your own food on a self-catering holiday! Oh, the humanity! At this point I might have made an exaggerated comparison to some actual real-life hardship for comedic effect, but Jones is perfectly capable of unintentionally satirising herself, as she does expertly in Modern hairdressers? They're as bad as Guantanamo Bay (no, really), in which she does actually declare that "the modern hairdressing salon is the female high-maintenance equivalent of being sent to Guantanamo Bay - torture".

The basins hurt your neck, the magazines are out of date and mind-numbing (salons never seem to stock newspapers) and don't even get me started when you try to book an appointment.

I do feel that in amongst all the talk about human rights abuses and indefinite detention without trial, people like Amnesty and Liberty have missed the real scandal of Guantanamo Bay - the out-of-date copies of Grazia which the shackled inmates are expected to read. Who knows what terribly outdated techniques they're now using to please their man? By the time they get out their fashion sense will be soooooooo 2002 that they'll probably wish they'd been beaten to death after all.

What kind of future are these detainees in for anyway? Next time they fly out for a holiday they'll have to deal with the nightmare that is using an airport. Now, a lot of people get a bit annoyed about using airports. They take a long time, procedures to get through, lots of waiting, boredom sets in, fair enough. Jones, though, manages to make her complaints about airport security so toe-curlingly irritating it makes you want to vomit up your soul;

I have booked a week in a villa in Ibiza with its own pool, mainly to avoid having to strip off in public on a beach.

Why, then, am I forced to practically get naked at the airport?

First, I am asked to remove my jacket, despite the fact that a) it is Yves Saint Laurent and doesn't do folded, or being squashed into a horrid plastic tray, and b) I only have on a Marc Jacobs camisole underneath, which is the equivalent of standing around in a bra.

A normal person might go on a flight wearing casual, comfortable clothes, but not dear old Liz here. Why can't airports just arrange their security operations around her for a change? Because, if Liz Jones has to fold up her Yves Saint Laurent jacket to reveal the horror that is her Marc Jacobs camisole, then the terrorists have truly won.

Although, to be honest, sometimes when I read Liz Jones' columns, I start thinking that maybe the terrorists have a point.