Prisonner Cell Block H
Sigh. Back on call again. It's the weekend so there's nothing really to do.
Just sit.
And stare at the clock.
While the hours slowly slip by.
I devoured the paper too hastily this morning. I should have paced myself so that it lasted me the day but, in my eagerness to read about the dethroning of Red Ken, I accidently gobbled the whole thing up with my eyes like a greedy child. It seems a terrible tragedy that the Newt could be so unceremoniously deposed by three humourless functionnaries. So he got unlucky when he picked a Jew to hold up in comparison to a Nazi concentration camp guard, but you can see what Livingston was getting at: that disregard for people justified by a claim 'only to be doing one's job'. I think Mr Fieldgold's overly-precious indignation at the comparison is slightly non-sensical and, in reality, probably journalistically expedient. How can it be considered anti-semitic to hold the Nazis up as an example of immoral inhumanity? Unless I miss the point and it has now become a crime to say anything nasty to a Jew full stop? Once the victim, always the victim, perhaps?
Anyway, I still have no computer after becoming the victim of some technophilic theif two weeks ago. I've been looking for a new one today and I think I might go for the Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo A1167G. I miss downloading random music too much to go without one again. Anybody know anything about laptops that might want to give me some advice?
posted by The Venial Sinner at 2:48 pm
8 Comments:
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All me, those deleted posts. Sorry for wrecking your comments but I'm not expressing myself very well today.
I have been waiting for someone to go down the "Jews think it's one rule for them and another rule for everyone else" line, and dreading it. There have been a few times in my life when people have been genuinely antisemitic towards me and when I've pointed it out to them each of the three people involved said something along the lines of, "Oh, your lot are always complaining. I suppose you're going to go on about the Holocaust now." It isn't like that. I don't know why the original complaint was made because neither I nor any of the other Jews I know think that what Ken said was antisemitic. There is a lot of antisemitic literature widely circulated both here and abroad and most of the time it's ignored by the Jews and by everyone else. It is a shame that when a complaint was finally made it was about something that wasn't antisemitic at all. It gives people who want one another stick to beat the Jews with.
Well you got there in the end, eh?
I have never really understood antisemitism as an idea, I must admit, so perhaps I underestimate its prevalence.
I suppose I have heard the cry of antisemitism too many times in relation to the Palestine question and perhaps that is why I was a little irked to find the same accusation being made against Red Ken when, as you quite rightly pointed out, there was nothing antisemitic said.
I remember being accosted for money in a chip shop by two young black guys. When I refused, they made the claim it was because they were black (this was prior to Ali G and hence not comically intended) and became a little threatening. Rarely minority can used as a convenient defence or a way of legitimising otherwise unacceptable behaviour. It reality it is just childish table-turning.
I will take your advice on the Toshiba. Thanks.
"Can you imagine him telling a black journalist that he was acting like a slave?" - I think the problem with this statement is that Ken did not deliberately choose the Nazi comparison because the journalist was a Jew; he didn't know that until he was told so by Mr Fieldman AFTER he had made the comment. If there was no intent to insult then there is no need to apologise, though I must admit he would have been better off politically had he done so in the first place. Then again, I suppose from his point of view an apology is akin to an admission of antisemitism, a crime of which he, and I, do not feel he is guilty.
I thought that Ken was in fact done for bringing the office of mayor into disrepute. He was rude and aggressive in the first place and more rude and aggressive when called to task. There ain't much excuse for behaving that way.
What I really logged on to say is, you need a Mac (say an iBook). I switched to Mac from Windows about 6 months ago not from choice but due to a series of constraints with which I won't bore you - and I am now getting to be a Mac bore. It's not that the hardware is better (though it's prefectly good) it's that the software works so much better. I have crashed my iBook G4 once since I've had it, and I am a heavy user. Your security problem goes away too. You can buy Word for Mac if you need to share word-processing files - the student one is much cheaper.
I'm afraid I am still holding out against the fashionable whiteness of the Mac. I ended up buying the Amilo anyway.
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