A year ago, Glossy News recently gave you The Absolute Truth on how tabloid journalism in the UK works.
That’s right: my recent article on how “right-wing moral panic journalism” is actually a Trojan horse for “far-left-radical-deep-cover-subversion.”
Still, I thought I should ask a couple of scholars, because as is well enough known:
Not a single idea in this world can have any claim to the remotest plausibility or validity or value whatsoever, unless it has the seal of approval from an appropriate authority!!!
First of all, I lectured, um, spoke with Professor John Gray of the London School of Economics.
Now, how many times do I have to tell you people that the whole left/right political spectrum nonsense is outdated and not relevant to the current political climate?
I mean, what if I were to tell you that Polly Toynbee’s writings on disability and abortion were those of a paid Vatican shill?
Or that David Aronovitch’s Iraq war journalistic creations were merely some epic pomo irony pastiches that were actually intended as a vicious wrecking project to cynically discredit Blair and ruin his vicious, unjustifiable imperialist escapades in the Middle East?
Of course, I’m not saying I would indeed actually tell you such a thing.
But maybe we’ll leave it there for now, and you can draw your own conclusions.
I mean, Andrew Marr says I am the closest thing to a “window-smashing French intellectual” the UK will ever have, so I don’t think I should be too clear or explicit about this one.
Somewhat confuddled, I made a sinisterly unannounced approach to Professor Richard Dawkins in an achingly non-Parisian, soberly Anglo-Saxon café he currently frequents.
He was not best pleased.
Oh, now dear God! You damned fool!
Now, don’t you encroach upon my little hermitage! This space is sacred to me!
Yes, it is my own personal paradise of intellectual meditation and communion with the greats who have gone before, and whose footsteps we must inevitably follow in fear and trembling, indeed in sacred awe!
Why, you scared the blessed life out of me! What the hell were you thinking of, you cheeky devil?
I was rather dismissive at this:
Richard, your insinuation that my behaviour is creepy is your interpretation, not mine. Think about what your poor brothers in the Chicago school of economics have to put up with, when they get their houses burned down by cocaine-ridden, beer-bottle- flinging London Trots, merely for discussing the social sciences in a purely value-free and neutral manner™.
At the sound of these most congenial modernist mantras and spiritual shibboleths, Professor Dawkins was overcome by a divine rhapsody, and re-immersed himself in his notebook. I took a brief glance over his shoulder.
Well, you heard it here first!
Apparently, his next monograph will be called:
How to Stop Whining, Backward Sophists and Bigoted, Reactionary Quibblers from
Value-Free Science, Value-Free Politics:
Getting in the Way of Progress,
With their Idiotic, Indefensible and Dangerous Superstitions,
And How to Comprehensively and Uncompromisingly Defend the Honour of The
Human Project and of the Unchallenged Supremacy of Reason,
By Any Means Necessary
Hm. It looks like Professor Gray was right not only about UK journalism, but about the UK academic sphere again. Once more: truly, neither left nor right!