The Virtual Stoa

Pollard writes today in the Sunday Telegraph (as recorded on his blog) that “There is only one story which really gets some commentators’ wickers up and that is that the Blairs have chosen to holiday in homes belonging to Sir Cliff Richard, Prince Girolamo Strozzi and Silvio Berlusconi.”

The claim of substance that he makes in the sentence is obviously false, as so often in Pollard’s writing, but that’s not what bothers me here. Rather it’s the word “wickers”. There’s a phrase “to get on [someone's] wick” [see OED, "wick", 2.a.], and this could be a clumsy attempt to render that thought. And I read also that “wicker” as a verb can be used instead of “whicker”, which means to whinny, or “To utter a half-suppressed laugh; to snigger, titter”, which might work in a slightly different context, but not really here, as he’s not really writing about journalists who mock the Blairs.

And Google doesn’t really help either: the main uses of the words “wicker up” seem to be found in furniture catalogues, but again, I don’t think that that’s the metaphor that Pollard’s using.

So is this some horse-racing jargon that Pollard has in his vocabulary to which I’m happily not privy, or is he a master of linguistic invention to whom I should defer?

Or is he illiterate, or am I?

… is an Ignorant Git: We’re used by now to pieces of Pollardiana in which he spouts nonsense on subjects about which he appears to know nothing whatsoever. His lunatic sneerings about Glastonbury are probably the most celebrated recent example.

Now he turns his attention to Lance Armstrong’s victory in the Tour de France and comments that part of the reason competitive cycling is so boring is “because the team element is missing.”

That’s pretty much the equivalent of saying that football is boring because the ball isn’t spherical.

(Are the only people more stupid and ignorant than Pollard the editors who pay him for his dross?)

Given the amount of criticism swimming around directed at Donald Rumsfeld, don’t you think it’s time we had a rousing defence of his recent conduct from his unofficial cheerleader-in-chief Stephen Pollard?A search of his blog reveals that he’s been unusually reticent on the subject in the last couple of months.

Perhaps he’s feeling like an idiot.

But who knows what, if anything, really goes on inside the Pollard brain?

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.

I wander over to right-wing hack Stephen Pollard’s blog, and there I find a badly-written post called “The EU kills one person every 13 seconds“.

It’s advertising a think-tank report which he’s co-written against EU trade rules, and in his post he restates the claim and makes it slightly more precise: “EU protectionism kills one person in the third world every thirteen seconds”.

Curious as to how these figures were calculated, I follow the link to the press release put out by an outfit Pollard works for called the Centre for the New Europe, and there, in a summary of “Key Findings”, I read that “6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour”, and then, with a bullet point all of its own, that, “In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world – mainly in Africa – because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks.”

Still curious, I download and skim-read the report, and about two thirds of the way through a pop presentation of the case for free trade attached to some rude remarks about the EU I find this:

The Human Cost of Protectionism

24,000 people die every day from starvation, or from causes directly related to malnutrition. Let us make a reasonable assumption – erring on the side of caution – that 20,000 of these people do not die from the purely local causes of civil war and crop failure.

In a world of potential abundance that could be made actual by more open trading rules, the European Union accounts for a third of trade protection. Thus – given the earlier assumption – 6,600 people die every day in the world because of the trading rules of the EU. That is 275 people every hour of the day.

In other words, one person dies every 13 seconds somewhere in the world – mainly in Africa – because the European Union does not act on trade as it talks. (p.10)

And, er, that’s it. That’s the sum total of the pathbreaking reasoning and demographic analysis employed to produce this conclusion. It seems to be slightly more respectably generated that the figures about global child abuse which Michael Jackson tosses around whenever he’s given the chance, but not much.”These are questionable, if not unreasonable figures…”, the writers recognise in the sentence that follows on from the chunk quoted above, but they don’t go on to question them. And, regrettably for the credibility of the report, this flash of self-awareness fails to percolate through to the trumpeting of “key findings” in the press release, nor to one of the co-authors’ own breathless blogging of his own achievements.

EU agricultural subsidies produce grim results. There’s no disagreement there between people like me and people like Pollard. (Lots of others, though).

But there’s a part of me which likes to think that so-called think tanks are supposed to raise the level of public debate, sponsor interesting research papers and produce real “findings”, rather than churning out tabloid-esque shock headlines which turn out to be underpinned by little more than tabloid-esque arguments.

Another part of me wonders whether the entire output of the Centre for the New Europe is as silly as this, or whether it’s just this report, or just the stuff that Pollard works on; but having spent the time reading one of their efforts this morning, I’m not sure I can be bothered to invest the energy to find out.

It’s very exciting to see that right-wing hack Stephen Pollard’s blog has been replaced by a “default erotihost page” for some “adult web hosting”. How long can it last?

3pm update: Sadly, it’s back to Pollardland already, boo hiss.