If you’re visiting this page after following the link from this post and in search of the Chris Lightfoot Memorial Melanie Phillips Naziometer, it’s on the sidebar about two thirds of the way down the page.
It’s currently reading “zero”, though a manual check reveals that there’s also one “Goebbels”, one “Munich”, one “Hitler” and three “Auschwitz”es.
Melanie Phillips recently sought to outwit the Naziometer, first by moving her blogpage over here, and, second, by not mentioning Nazis for a week or two, and thereby keeping us in suspense as to whether our technology was able to cope with the transition. But it is, and it’s now recording a healthy “four” thanks to this post.
The Chris Lightfoot Memorial Naziometer (see sidebar) was recording pretty low values over the Summer. It was zero for quite a while, and although things have been improving recently, I’ve only been noticing scores hovering around the three / four mark. So I’m thrilled to report that it’s hit sixteen!, which may very well be an all-time high, thanks entirely to this fine post.
I am, however, confident that when Our Melanie starts blogging about the what’s going on, or, rather, not going on, at Leeds University, we’ll see it rising again, with the word “dhimmi” or “dhimmitude” possibly making a reappearance in her blogpages, too.
UPDATE [7pm]: Bingo! Though only one “Nazis” and no “dhimmitude”, alas. But I think she may be warming up for a more detailed treatment of the topic later. And it looks as if we in Britain’s universities “have already given up the battle for civilisation against barbarism”, I’m afraid.
Chris Lightfoot did many valuable things in his life, but one that was particularly treasured here at the Virtual Stoa was the Melanie Phillips Naziometer. It was a bit of code that reported on the number of times the word “Nazi”, “Nazis” or “Nazism” appeared on the front page of Melanie Phillips’ blog, so we wouldn’t have to do a manual count ourselves every day. (It rarely recorded a score of zero, though it did from time to time.)
When Chris died, the Naziometer stopped working, as it was on the server that he had running at home. Unlike my grandfather’s clock, however, I’m glad to report that the Naziometer has started going again, having been revived by Chris’s friends over at Mythic Beasts. It lives over here, and it’s also now been reinstalled on this page on the blog’s sidebar as a permanent tribute, now redesignated the Chris Lightfoot Memorial Naziometer (a label which will help to distinguish it from all the other Naziometers that there might be out there).
It’s currently reporting a somewhat low score of Three, though we might note that a manual check reveals three uses of “genocide” — one of which is particularly tasteful — and two of the verb “islamise” — but only one reference to Britain “ever more eagerly stretching out its neck for the cultural knife”, which I particularly like.
More post-election analysis from Mel P, over here.
You could tell that Melanie Phillips needed a holiday: the Naziometer, which records the number of times the word appears on the front page of her blog had fallen to zero a couple of weeks ago. Batteries recharged, she’s returned to the fray, and the N-o-M is registering a reasonably healthy seven. (See the big number that appears on the sidebar for the most up-to-date readings.) I don’t think we should worry too much that all seven appearances are in quoted text from somebody else: it’s a good thing to take it easy for a bit when you get back from a trip, and I’m sure we’re heading for regular double-digit readings quite soon.
(There’s also four “Hitlers”, one “fascist”, one “fascism”, and, I’m very pleased to see, one “morally degenerate”.)
There’s a very useful new page on the interwebnet here, from Chris Lightfoot, which tells you how many times the word “nazi” appears on the front page of Mel P’s blog, to save you having to count at any given moment in time [via, in comments].
Anthony Browne has just published a pamphlet, “The Retreat of Reason” with the think tank Civitas, which can be downloaded here. It’s already prompted quite a bit of blog-discussion, partly, I think, because Browne (Anthony) and Brown (Yasmin Alibhai-) were tearing strips off one another at 8.20 or so yesterday morning on the Today programme (you can still, I think, listen to them here), and people like to blog about what they hear on the Today programme.
The pamphlet is dreadful, of course. (But then I would say that, wouldn’t I, as a leading PC guardian of strict orthodoxy and general thought-policeman? So the Browne-boosters needn’t worry about me. Anyway, I thought that Civitas was supposed to be the non-barking centre-right alternative to the loons at the Adam Smith Institute and so on: was I wrong?)
Melanie Phillips, on the other hand, thinks it’s marvellous. She writes: “Browne is one of the few who very clearly understands that �political correctness� is not some ludicrous absurdity that can be laughed away, as it is so often depicted. It is instead a terrifying, totalitarian and in Britain wholly successful putsch against truth itself, the weapon of subversion of a moral, political and social order.” So opinions differ.
Browne’s pamphlet ends with a rather engaging ten-point “Guide to Purging the Political Correctness Within” for all citizens to follow, and I thought it would be fun to see how Browne’s text performs in light of his concluding recommendations. Read onward, or upwards, as the case may be.
Someone has just visited the VS after searching for “melanie phillips stoicism”…
… In other Stoic-related news, I’ve just started reading philosophy professor and occasional blog commenter Tad Brennan’s new book The Stoic Life, and I think it’s going to be really very good indeed.
(I’ll hold off deciding whether it’s splendid until I’ve made it through to the end.)
P.S. Google gives 425 records for “melanie phillips stoicism”, but an impressive 29,700 for “melanie phillips barking”. But then the proof of how misleading these things can be comes with the further stat that “melanie phillips sensible” garners a whopping 55,700.
I’m delighted to report that a certain close relative has become the subject of the most recent piece of frothiness from the incomparable Melanie Phillips: Dhimmi Judges or Just Dim? Read it, and enjoy.
Mel P rises to the occasion (as ever) with praise for IDS and his insightful views about blogs [see below].
For IDS, apparently, “has understood that the web has the power finally to topple not just individual journalists caught with their hands in the ethical till, but the whole wretched hegemony of insidious and civilisation-threatening views that has driven Britsh society off the rails…”
UPDATE [3pm]: Tim Lambert has been thinking about Mel P’s thinking on science and global warming:
Next, we have Melanie Philips, who is sure that global warming is a scam because (quoting McIntyre and McKitrick):
[Mann et al�s method], when tested on persistent red noise, nearly always produces a hockey stick shaped first principal component (PC1) and overstates the first eigenvalue.
According to her biography Philips is a journalist with a degree in English. Back when I was an undergraduate learning about stuff like eigenvalues and mathematical physics, my friends studying English didn�t learn about eigenvalues. Maybe it was different for Philips, or maybe she�s done some postgrad course in advanced statistical analysis, so I emailed her, asking her if she knew what red noise, principal components, or eigenvalues were. No reply. My guess is that she doesn�t know what any of them are. (Oh, and M&M�s �always produces a hockey stick� argument is a red herring.)
More over here, at the ever-excellent Deltoid blog.
Find a copy of this week’s New Statesman to read my friend Daphna Baram’s sensible observations about Melanie Phillips.
Excerpts below:
At the Royal Geographical Society in London on 27 January, Melanie Phillips fought like a lioness against the motion tabled by Profesor Avi Shlaim of St Antony’s College, Oxford University, stating “Zionism today is the real enemy of the Jews”…Phillips wasn’t prepared to leave it there [after her side lost the vote]. She decided to have another go at the opposition - “the three Jewish persecutors of Israel” as she called them - in her personal internet blog, using language that was extreme even by her standards.
“I came away from that debate,” she wrote, “feeling the kind of emotion one feels - in a totally different context - when forced to listen to or even watch the details of paedophile assaults on children. It is a physical numbness, a feeling of the very darkest despair; a feeling that a very great evil has been unleashed which reveals the depths of pathological malice to which human beings can descend - to turn on their own at a time when they are already under murderous attack. It seems like a repudiation not just of their Jewishness but their humanity.” …
Phillips doesn’t accuse her enemies, the dead or the living, of being “self-hating Jews”. She gets straight down to business and charges them with treason. But who are the real “instigators” of “diabolical calumnies” against their fellow Jews? Those who initiate an open debate about the nature of the leading ideological movement among Jews today, or those who accuse dissident Jewish thinkers of evil and “pathological malice”? As an Israeli and a Jew, I know whom I would prefer not to meet in a dark alley.
Not sure whether it’s available online or not. The Statesman has one of those rather annoying websites where it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Anyway, it’s on sale at your local newsagent.
Melanie Phillips is distressed at the Prime Minister’s failure to give the speech that Melanie Phillips would have given to the Labour Party conference earlier today. He has, therefore, “muffed it”, “bottled out”, and “made precisely the leap of logic which has given such impetus to the anti-war zealots”, and so on and so forth.
OK, moving along…
Then, she finds another part of the speech over which to become exercised…
And remember when to be in favour of gay rights was to be a loony leftie, race relations was political correctness, and Red Ken frightened people even as brave as your own leadership? Now the parties compete for the gay vote, unite against the BNP and Ken has led and won the debate on congestion charging and community policing. So many things that used to divide our country bitterly, now unite it in healthy consensus…
Think for a moment about what this passage indicates to you.Then follow this link and find out what it indicates to Melanie Phillips about Mr Blair.
Then goggle a bit, giggle a bit, and after that go and pour yourself a large drink.
Melanie Phillips (who else?), in a post understatedly titled “Western Civilisation RIP“:
Destroying the Christian roots of European culture will not usher in a secular utopia where everyone will worship at the shrine of Blairism. It will create a philosophical and intellectual vacuum, an undefended cultural space, ripe for colonisation in particular by Islam, which has its eye firmly on this very opportunity…
Yes, it’s true. Those who don’t think it’s such a good idea to have explicit reference to Christianity in the European constitutional treaty are trying to bring about the aforementioned “secular utopia where everyone will worship at the shrine of Blairism”, but it is clear that they are in fact “intent on destroying the particular cultural basis of British and European society” so that — if they get their wicked way — that culture “will be swept away”.Wheee!
Good use of the word “neo-Jacobinism” in the bit at the end, though.
“Here’s a nice piece from the lovely Melanie Phillips, basically saying that cannabis made someone do a frenzied murder. I have a friend who thinks the Melanie Phillips articles are a big joke by Chris ‘Brass Eye’ Morris…”
If only that were true…
VS-2d-favourite Melanie Phillips turns her attention to the history of modern political thought:
While non-Christian nations can indeed subscribe to human rights — and it is to be hoped that they do — fundamental human rights (as opposed to the politically correct doctrines being laid down by European institutions) are emphatically not secular. They are based on the precepts originally laid down by Judaism and embellished and developed by Protestantism — that individual behaviour must be constrained by moral laws, and that all human beings are equal in the image of God. Take this Judeo-Christian God away, and equality disappears too.The secular ‘human rights’ promulgated by eponymous lawyers and government ministers are actually nothing of the kind. They are instead an attempt to destroy this liberal and democratic heritage and replace it by a secular inquisition that takes self-governnment away from peoples and deprives them of the expression of their individual culture. It is deeply, profoundly, terrifyingly anti-democratic…
Next up (we can only hope), Melanie on Kant’s transcendental deduction of the categories…(Actually, that’s slightly unfair, but only slightly. There’s an interesting discussion to have about the relationship between Locke’s natural rights theory and theism, on which Jeremy Waldron’s God, Locke and Equality is quite superb. But this isn’t it, and most of the rest of what she’s written above is nonsense.)
Well, there are two today. And they’re from the usual suspects. First, Stephen Pollard explains why he’s not going to be soiling himself with the Guardian any more. Second, Melanie Phillips takes issue with Jonathan Freedland’s piece in today’s Guardian. This is a more complicated effort. I’ll just note that in her second sentence she mischaracterises Freedland’s use of the “McCarthyite” label, and that she never engages with his main claim about rightist views of the Spanish elections, which is their implication “that when terrorists strike political choice must end”. The rest of the post is the usual hyperbolical nonsense.Oh, except that Stephen Pollard has said that this is a “withering response” to Freedland.
So there must have been something in there that I missed.
Melanie Phillips has just sat through Mel Gibson’s almost-certainly-appalling new film about the crucifixion of Jesus of Nazareth:
Most of the reactions have focused on the astonishing sadism and violence. Very few have seen fit even to mention the way it portrays the Jews as the real killers of the son of God…
Yup. That’s probably why a google search on “Mel Gibson” and “anti-semitism” and “Passion” taken together generates, um, over twenty-two thousand hits…
