Politics

Inanity?

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Sonic backgrounds: Obloquy to the message.

I thought I would say something really important. After listening to yet another performance of Götterdämmerung, and I hasten to add lest already I have given the wrong impression, that it was a very good performance apart from the ‘Bravo’ hurled out at the end. The voice, by the way, which penetrated the air was very similar to that which resounded at a different, and much reduced, performance in the promenade concerts many years ago. It seemed that the utterer of that earlier bravo may have listened to the rebukes of his peers at the quite untimeliness of the oral intrusion of his voice on the earlier occasion, ah, but me! I have been distracted and consequently left unfinished, an error which my better grammaticastic friends will not let me forget, a sentence which now lacks both a subject and a verb. Let me start again with what I really intended to say. Just for the sake of distraction: Did you notice the importance of the second comma in this paragraph?

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Offences

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Offences, which do not like a joke – an open letter

Have you heard the one about the Yorkshireman, the Cornishman and the man of Kent? It doesn’t quite have the ring about it as an opening line as ‘Have you heard the one about the Irishman, the Scotsman and the Englishman?’ But if Coco used the latter, Coco would get away with the rest of it in an English public house, providing none of the English liberal elite were present, and might regret the long, but deserved, stay in hospital if Coco tried it in Clonmel. What the reaction would be in Aberdeen is as clear as whether Schrödinger’s cat is alive or dead.

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Farming targets

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How to use a cane

A tautologous repetition of conceptual ideas will not produce the making of a taxonomic classification of factual data items however well clothed with an investment in a garb of reasonable logic, but it may provide a cane with which to rod those with whom your tolerance will have nothing to do.

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Committees

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If Coco said that the opinion that ‘A is safe’ is supported by 100 years of medical experience, and the opinion that ‘A is not safe’ is only supported by sixty such years, which opinion are you more likely to trust?

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Conspiracies

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It has been said if a lie is to believed it must be a big one

Now certain reports have suggested to Coco that not many of you are likely to read this post through as it is too long, nevertheless it shall be long. Sometimes a short rebuke is both necessary and effective, but in reasoning and critique a longer reply may be required. Another reason for you not wanting to read it through might be that it is far too convoluted, perhaps, some would say, dense or even turgid, but whatever your reason might be Coco hopes that you will be able to overcome any such propensity and continue to plough a furrow through it such as shall not be erased at least not before the late rains have come.

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Twelve years

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A man is ‘called out’ for posting a workout referencing a film ’12 years a slave’ . What are we supposed to do? What is wrong with using such simile? ‘I’m working like a slave’ is not an uncommon phrase. Are we to be banned from using it anymore? Surely it both celebrates the capacity of a slave to work hard and at the same time recognises that a man should not have either to work as a slave or be a slave. What are we to say instead? I’m running like a winger? I’m spinning like a jet engine? Or ballet dancer? They don’t have quite the same impact, do they? And the impact that I’m working like a slave has is derived from the very thing that slavery is.

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Slave traders

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At last an acknowledgement on the BBC that the Atlantic slave trade was not solely the responsibility of Europeans, but that Africans themselves provisioned it, that the slave trade itself was already in existence when we arrived and that it survived until the second world war despite our attempts to suppress it. You may notice however that the article reads more like the speech of Mark Anthony than an apology for any part played in the trade.

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