Small Beds and Large Bears

Anton Vowl discusses cryptoracists, and the preferred mode of transport of the people who oppress their common-sense opinions:

Which brings me to the other kind of racist, who is much more loathsome. This kind of racist doesn’t admit he’s racist. He thinks he’s not racist; he thinks he’s just trying to talk about matters in a [...]

In Vanity Fair, Thackeray continues to refer to the most morally upstanding member of his bizarre collection of characters as a hypocrite:
Conducted to the ladies, at the Ship Inn, Dobbin assumed a jovial and rattling manner, which proved that this young officer was becoming a more consummate hypocrite every day of his life. He [...]

Jonathan Jones refutes the charges against Heart of Darkness, but I’ve never really been convinced there’s a case to answer at all. In paragraph 38 of the original essay by Chinua Achebe lies the oft-quoted (by Jones too) complaint of:
the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the [...]

David Cameron and George Michael were at the Carbury festival:
‘That’s what we want, isn’t it? Government approved rock n’ roll? Don’t you want to be at a concert one night, look to your right and see Dan fucking Quayle right next to you, man? You know you’re partying then, you know you’re on the edge! [...]

An illiterate buffoon with pretensions on the blogosphere writes:
Forgive this trivial rant, but I really hate the use of the word “forums” as the plural of forum. I mean, come on folks, “fora” is a great word! Yet you get weird looks for using it, as though celebrating the richness, beauty and plain weirdness of [...]

Trust networks never really work. These are semi-formal systems on the web where people nominate other people that they consider to have a particular relationship with: say, they trust them to look after their puppy. Then these new puppy-trustees each nominate even more people, based on what they think are similar criteria, that they would [...]

Over on Spineless Reviews, five great books from the site’s 2006 output. Go scour your local charity shops for your relatives’ presents now.

Once again, the LRB comes up trumps with its understated sarcasm: this time, the target is Christopher Hitchens and his new lite-lit book on Thomas Paine, and the marksman is John Barrell. Strictly speaking it seems to be a biography of Paine’s Rights of Man. It’s a trendy thing to do: document the work rather [...]

When something smacks at first glance of out-and-out snobbery, I tend to want to believe there’s something in it. So often genuinely useful suggestions—when did singling out the élite suddenly become a liability, for example?—are dismissed as the opinions of some sort of snobocrat, supporting a self-serving hegemony, because once someone’s made themselves sound snooty [...]

No man is an island, and few want to be: much of our everyday life consists of “only connecting” with others as peers, relatives, acquaintances or friends. It was a joy, therefore, to find out that there are other (possibly atheist) intellectuals that have Dawkins’ ignorant, bile-filled number. Eagleton has written in this fortnight’s LRB [...]