RIP Subtlety

The strange death of subtlety.  Forgive my unsubtle wordplay, but two recent laments at the strange-but-true obsolescence of *subtlety* appeared in the press recently. 

Forget subtlety, nuance or shades of grey. Your opinions must be black, white, or squeezed into 140 character soundbites. You. will. take. sides.

Douglas Murray’s Spectator article  was titled: “Kevin Myers’ eager critics should feel ashamed of themselves.” 

I have to ask myself, was I an eager critic? I suppose I was in a way. But then again, I wasn’t. 

I agree with 99% of Douglas’s argument.  Kevin Myers shouldn’t have been ‘written off’, either as an antisemite or a ‘Holocaust denier’ for all the reasons that are set out in the piece.  Sacking him was unfair, considering the bile that so many others with far fewer redeeming qualities have been able to get away with recently. I mean much more ill-intended stuff. But in the current climate NOT sacking him would have looked almost as bad. What can you do? 

Maybe being socially ostracised is just collateral damage; the fall-out from recent events. He may merely have been a scapegoat, an example, a warning to others; beware.

However, where Myers has been given a little too much of the benefit of the doubt by Douglas is in his generous reading of those crass innuendos about Claudia Winkleman and Vanessa Feltz as “a joke along the lines of ‘They’re no fools, these Jews’. 

“The point I imagine Myers was trying to make would appear, if anything, to have been somewhat philo-Semitic.” 

That is stretching it a bit. I mean, as if! 

Anything can be made to sound straightforward or deeply sarky, according to delivery and context. But in print - nah. Risky and show-offy, as Douglas himself willingly admits. It was an ill-judged throwaway, and if not antisemitic in itself, it pandered to antisemites. And in his subtle and nuanced defence of Myers, so, in some ways, does Douglas. Some of the below-the-line comments testify to that.

Subtlety, RIP.

The other article is a more straightforward lament about the demise of subtlety. It’s by Caitlin Moran,  who concludes that “there’s little to be gained in making a nuanced point in what is basically a medieval marketplace.”

While making the broader point that civilisation is functioning a-okay, despite the conspiracy theories that have been ushered in by social media in what she sees as “The Golden Age of Paranoia”, Ms. Moran also addresses the fallout from the revelations about BBC salaries.  With less subtlety than the thrust of her article would intimate, she expresses her contempt for critics of the BBC.

“But what surprised me, […]was the sheer number of people, from the left and the right, who were convinced the BBC was a wholly corrupt news organisation, devoted to perverting the truth and screwing the public.”

Oh noes! How can that be??

Is it not deeply ironic that the author of this Tweet concerns herself about the strange death of subtlety?

The BBC likes their 'bad boys’. Perhaps we’ll soon be watching Kevin Myers reviewing the newspapers and being controversial on the panel of Question Time or on the Daily Politics.

Anyway, I like subtlety. It will be back.

Migrants, charities, virtue signalling and mandatory emoting

Caitlin Moran, author, columnist and celebrity watcher is a punchy writer who specialises in human interest stories and light-hearted selfie-centric  observations. She also talks extraordinarily quickly.

The Times has had a hand in elevating her upwards and onwards, beyond journalism, to celebrity-hood in her own right.  It’s that Emma Thompson-Cumberbatch Benedict syndrome. 

I suppose if you’re revered by thousands, why not take advantage? Why not email a few friends (a term that can be interpreted in a way of your choice) and get them to collaborate with you to raise money for “the refugees”. Everyone’s a winner. 

Fair enough. Apparently the money raised is to go the Save the Children. What they intend to do with it I know not.

Just as long as the charities that benefit from all the fundraising confine themselves to helping orphaned children, who may willingly assimilate and absorb their host countries’ culture, which whole families or unaccompanied young men are unlikely to do.

In an interview with Anita McVeigh on BBC News 24, (thanks for the publicity?) Moran, with those annoying arched eyebrows, speed-talked her project up with all the ‘mandatory emoting‘ one would expect. 

In the interview, she stated confidently that little Aylan Kurdi’s family fled from persecution, and he ended up dead. 

It is widely believed that the father’s account is flawed, but even so, the child undoubtedly died, and the politicians of the big wide world must urgently come up with some kind of rescue plan for dealing with the exodus of families displaced by wars.As Douglas Murray says “Where is the ‘Ummah’ now?” 

But that’s not the point. It’s that failure to fully inform the viewer again. I don’t know if Moran and Cumberbatch are Corbynistas, but there are too many people amongst those pleading for more and more Syrians to be given sanctuary in the UK and Europe who seem unaware of the effect that an influx of thousands of Muslims will have on the western world.   

At least let them know.

Melanie Phillips had a full page opinion piece in yesterday’s Times. (£)

I have yet to see this view being explored  - sympathetically at least - on the BBC. I don’t claim to watch the BBC as much as I used to. Please let me know if I’m mistaken. 

Accepting these migrants is a huge mistake

Britain can’t be expected to take in a flood of displaced people that will alter the cultural balance of the country for ever.In Germany, posters saying “Refugees welcome” and “Nobody is illegal” have been appearing at bus stops and demonstrations. At a rally in Oxford last weekend, demonstrators held up home-made placards saying “We welcome refugees (given the chance)” and “We are all human”.These people are merely telling us about themselves. Public expressions of compassion signify that a person is good. Their absence demonstrates heartlessness. This has been called “virtue signalling”, or mandatory emoting, and it has now reached its crazy apotheosis in the great migration crisis.”

Soeren Kern, Gatestone Institute:

“Based on Pew projections, the Muslim population of Germany reached an estimated 5,068,000 by the end of 2014. The 640,000 Muslim migrants arriving in Germany in 2015, combined with the 77,000 natural increase, indicates that the Muslim population of Germany will jump by 717,000, to reach an estimated 5,785,000 by the end of 2015. This would leave Germany with the highest Muslim population in Western Europe.
By way of comparison, the surge in Germany's Muslim population would be equivalent to the Muslim population of the United States increasing by 3 million in just one year.Critics say that German officials, under pressure to solve Europe's migration crisis, are ignoring the long-term consequences of taking in so many migrants from the Middle East and North Africa.”

“Islamic Sharia law is advancing rapidly throughout Germany, with Sharia courts now operating in all of Germany's big cities. This "parallel justice system" is undermining the rule of law in Germany, experts warn, but government officials are "powerless" to do anything about it. At the same time, German judges are increasingly referring and deferring to Sharia law in German law courts.”

I’ve no idea what Caitlin Moran would have to say about any of that. We don’t know because it’s something she hasn’t written about. It’s something she might not even know about. Or care. 

The tidal wave of compassion for migrants is accompanied by a troubling absence of appreciation for the achievements and sacrifices of previous generations, fought on our behalf at enormous cost. The cavalier willingness of the politically illiterate and those raised on celebrity culture to throw it all away is what is really shocking.