Sunny,

Don’t be such a plonker. Rod Liddle might not be PC or dare to have opinions of his own; but that is not a crime is it?

You have your website, articles in the Guardian and appearances on platforms with some people who say unpleasant things that would make Liddle blush, so spare us the lecture thank you very much.

PS: A Facebook campaign with only 1400 members is hardly sometimg to boast about as it only shows how few people read the Independent and how important they think they are.

Lebedev may well be looking to turn the Indy into a freesheet. If so, there’s not a lot of point in staying in the quality market, and – from his point of view – a lot more fun to be had in attacking the Dirty Digger head on. How many Sun readers would pay for their paper if there was a free one doing the same tits’n'gossip?

Still, while we’re on the subject, can anyone tell me why the Indy is so popular with gay men?

So, a grand total of 16-18 lesbians then?

They’re just rumours. Like the one that Matt d’Ancona will be the next editor of the Independent. Or the Mail. Take your pic.

I think perhaps you should be more worried about the identity of the owner of the newspaper than the editor. Can you remember the name of the editor of the Express? Who bears more responsibility for the decline of the Telegraph, Will Lewis or the Barclay brothers?

Well you could shoot him (*joke*)

Or else offer him an editorial post on this esteemed website?

Presuming Lebedev actually knows what he’s doing, this is surely a sign that the paper would be repositioning itself to the right and possibly downmarket. So any revolt from the current readership and staff would be rather beside the point.

The resulting exodus might help the Guardian’s precarious financial situation somewhat, mind you.

“might not be PC or dare to have opinions of his own”

Good grief, that is one of the lamest collections of words put together on this website for some time, minus points for mentioning PC, double minus points for dragging out terrible irony use and a final nail in your coffin is confusing a man being a bigot with the fictional concept of ‘PC’.

*sigh*

@ Mike Killingworth.

Still, while we’re on the subject, can anyone tell me why the Indy is so popular with gay men?

P.Hensher and J. Hari are the most prominent regular columnists in any of the broadsheets who are out. That might be a reason.

Maybe the best way for the left to stop Liddle is for them to collectively do the one thing they always seem reluctant to do when faced with a “Stop X” type campaign.

Stop bleating, get their wallets out and just buy the newspaper.

Then they can impose their own editor and run it the way they want to.

You’ve made my day — I’ve neber ever before knowingly bought the Independent, but with Liddle at its helm I may well reconsider ))))))

I suppose it’s not surprising trolls would love to see one of their own installed as editor of a national newspaper.

This is much more than a rumour.

My belief is that Roy Greenslade’s MediaGuardian report that Simon Kelner (editor-in-chief) has recommended and supports a Liddle appointment post the takeover is accurate and solid. Certainly, that is very much the view among senior journalists within the paper, as Greenslade sets out in his post, which reports it as a “decision” rather than an option being considered. That suggests it is very much odds-on to happen, unless the controversy were to change Kelner or Lebedev’s mind. It may well reinforce Kelner’s sense that the paper would get talked about, as Sunny suggests in his post.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/jan/11/theindependent-simon-kelner

Daniel Hoffmann-Gill,

Let us consider Rod Liddle’s comments about Harriet Harman. Would you?
Let us consider Rod Liddle’s comments about the numbers of young black kids committing metropolitan street crime. Are they untrue?
Let us consider Rod Liddle’s comment that average fewer women commit themselves totally to work than men do. Is this not true?
So, I do not know if you just dislike him or feel that what he says is only the tip of the iceberg of ‘unacceptable’ views. Either way he hardly worth of the the scorn people here are showing.

As far as The Independent goes it is my view that it lost it’s way after Peter Jenkins died.

Still, while we’re on the subject, can anyone tell me why the Indy is so popular with gay men?

Not with this one. Though I did win an item in their Christmas Charity Auction a couple of years ago.

And it is just possible that an experienced journalist like Liddle realises that he can’t just fill the paper with his own views. He did edit the Today prog you know.

er, isn’t the independent already edited by a sexist right-winger, ie roger alton?

rumpypumpy:

I don’t accept the premise of the question so I’ll not validate it by answering it, so the daft sexist statement about Harman, the idiotically simplistic way of categorising crime by colour of skin and the non-evidnce based, generalised, sexist trite about gender of workers are not acceptable premises to even begin a debate on.

Worth plenty of scorn if you ask me.

I suppose it’s not surprising trolls would love to see one of their own installed as editor of a national newspaper

hah! Excellent line

Dunno why you’ve picked out these two.

“On average, fewer women wish to commit themselves totally to work than do men”

This is true. Even a skimming of the economics literature on the labour market would show this. For example, we know that womens’ (on average, of course) decisions to work or not are more sensitive to tax rates than those of men (source, Chris Dillow). Yes, this does show that there is a lesser commitment to market work than with men.

Why is an entirely different question (easily answered as well: “caring committments” or if you prefer, the disgusting patriarchy which assumes that caring is womens’ work) but the fact is still there.

“The reason is that the country uses lots of fossil fuels and the resultant black carbon and sulphur smog prevents a whole bunch of sunlight reaching the ground. In other words the stuff that causes global warming can also, in a rather crude manner, prevent it.””

This is also true. Straight from the IPCC….don’t any of you at least try to keep up with climate science? Aerosols do cool. That’s the general explanation for the cooling trend 1940-1970. Then we did things like the Clean Air Act (bit earlier for us, 1950s) and there were fewer aerosols and so the effects of CO2 could be felt again.

That’s also why some nutters are thinking about cooling the Earth by firing sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere from 18 mile long tubes. We probably wouldn’t like the side effects but it would indeed work in cooling.

His offence was actually saying it.

I guess the fact it was called out as a pile of bullshit by a bunch of anti-PC right-wing libertarians is irrelevant then?

With ref to the protestations of Tim W, who seems to be intentionally missing the point, it is the context and use of the statements that is the problem, the only way I can give an example of this is when Hitler spoke about Jews dominating business and money in Germany; it was true but the use of it was loaded with meaning.

To be clear, I am not comparing Liddle to Hitler, just using the only example I have to hand of the problem with much of what he is saying.

Rod Liddle’s been a consistent man-made global warming denier for years, writing articles on the subject for the Times and Spectator. It’ll be a bit odd for the Indy to turn denier all of a sudden.

Still, who cares – does anyone read newspapers any more?

“With ref to the protestations of Tim W, who seems to be intentionally missing the point, it is the context and use of the statements that is the problem, the only way I can give an example of this is when Hitler spoke about Jews dominating business and money in Germany; it was true but the use of it was loaded with meaning.”

Well, no, the Jews “dominating business and money in Germany” was not true. Entirely a fabrication to get the ethnic Germans all riled up about them.

And as to Liddle, sorry, but other than the white lies of this life (Does my bum look big in this? No darling….) I’m not all that sure that there’s a context or use where it is impermissible to state the truth.

Wow. I somehow hadn’t heard of Liddle and didn’t know what all the fuss was about. Thanks for this.

On the whole I disagree with Rod Liddle about climate change, but I think he’s right about the countering effect of sulphur pollution in India. Read this quote from James Lovelock (hardly a climate change sceptic) –

“Industrial civilisation has released into the atmosphere, in addition to greenhouse gases, a huge quantity of aerosol particles, and these tiny floating motes reflect incoming sunlight back to space and cause global cooling. On large areas of the Earth’s surface the aerosol haze reflects sunlight back to space sufficiently to offset global warming. By themselves they cause a global cooling of 2 to 3°C. Back in the 1960s, when we knew much less about the Earth and its atmosphere, a few scientists even speculated that continued economic growth would increase the density of the aerosol and lead to global cooling and even precipitate the next glaciation. The present extent of aerosol cooling is real and seriously worrying. It may have allowed us to continue our business as usual, not noticing how much we had changed the Earth nor realising that we would have to pay back the borrowed time. Aerosol particles stay only a brief time in the atmosphere: within weeks they settle to the ground. This means that any large economic downturn, or a planned reduction in fossil-fuel usage, or unwise legislation to stop sulphur emissions, as the Europeans are now enacting to stop acid rain, will allow the immediate expression of greenhouse warming.”

Daniel Hoffmann-Gill,

Why is it that you won’t answer my questions when they are only the examples raised by Sunny in the article? If they are not worthy of your validation (answering – in laymans English) and cannot be deemed to be non-evidence based, then was Sunny correct in citing them in the first place?

Here is my response in lieu of your failure to reply to the questions I put:
Harrier Harman – no I wouldn’t, too old, too serious and she was prize bitch to the teaching staff when my ex had the misfortune to be a student teacher of one of her primary aged children.
Black kids and street crime. It sadens me to see how black kids are disproportionately active in this. It shouldn’t be left to the black community to discuss this openly – as they do readily.
Neither should we ignor the time it takes to bring up children and expect that this would not impact upon the commitment this allows women to dedicate to paid employment. It goes with the territory women give birth and men die younger (generally).

Coward:

Is that the best you’ve got? Use a name I give to you for hiding behind anon identities? Very sharp coward.

Nice to see you fall back to using personal attacks as well, speaks volumes about you.

As I’ve said but you don’t read, anyone who uses the colour of someones skin as the sole measure for relations to crime is an idiot. Anyone who takes such statements out of context is also an idiot, you are ticking all of the boxes so perhaps Idiot should be added to your moniker of coward?

“Why should it be that the African-Caribbean community produces such crime?”

In that one phrase, you have all the proof you need that you’re a racist idiot, the premise of your question is not acceptable, to make this very clear to you Coward: when did you last beat your wife?

And funny how you moan and whinge about name calling, when you started with the personal attacks. Can’t you take it?

And don’t talk t me about Nazi propaganda you idiot, my German Jewish relatives escaped the horrors of that regime and have educated me well on what did and didn’t occur from first-hand testimony.

Tim W:

Sorry Tim, it was true considering my great grandparents and my grand parents were part of that level of Jewish domination in the finance sectors and small to medium enterprise, esp. in Berlin were my family were based. You see there was a kernel of truth in Hitler’s statements, that is what makes them partially believable and thus dangerous so that people act on their prejudice, just as the coward is doing in this thread; we all know that BME people are mis-represented in crime figures but it is what we then do with that knowledge that makes us either a racist idiot or a reasoned thinker.

And I think you’re being disingenuous, you know very well the point I am making but one thing I have noticed with you, you hate to cede any ground whatsoever; which makes you pretty close minded.

rumpypumpy:

What do you not understand about me not accepting the entire premise of your question and that answering it would only validate the daft principles it contains?

You seem to have this simple idea confused in your mind.

Of course when Liddle said “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community” it was true, and demonstrably so.

Please demonstrate it.

Giles the farmer,

I claim Liddle was wrong when he said ““The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”

I provide some justification here :
http://www.fivechinesecrackers.com/2009/12/rod-liddle-more-racist-than-bnp.html

and there is more in this comment here:
http://liberalconspiracy.org/2009/12/08/what-to-do-about-boggle-eyed-spectator-bores/#comment-89632

based on this document:
http://www.justice.gov.uk/publications/docs/stats-race-criminal-justice-system-07-08-revised.pdf

Since you say it is demonstrable that Liddle was right, can you demonstrate it please? N.B. showing how black people are disproportionately represented is not the same as showing that they commit the overwhelming majority of hose crimes.

Cheers.

‘And as to Liddle, sorry, but other than the white lies of this life (Does my bum look big in this? No darling….) I’m not all that sure that there’s a context or use where it is impermissible to state the truth.’

Or what you genuinely THINK is the truth. The question is whether Liddle believes he is telling the truth or if he’s simply giving his audience what he thinks they want.

If it’s the latter then he’s not likely to change much at the Indy. Different audience, different message.

Whups – ‘those crimes’, obviously. Hose crimes are different. Usually involving fire stations..

As TimW points out, Liddle is correct about the effect of aerosol emissions. The problem is that he uses it to justify an argument for inaction on climate change.

I too don’t see the point of the climate change quote – it is, IIRC, near enough to correct.

On the few occaisions when I have bought the independent it did seem to be looking for a market, and a little surprised that it couldn’t find one.

@ 28

I claim Liddle was wrong when he said “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”

You are 100% correct.

Had he said instead

A vastly disproportionate level of the street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”

Nevertheless you would have to say that journalists are paid to use words to express and explain factual information and that such a schoolboy error does not say much for Liddel’s journalistic standards.

clodhopper,

5cc & ukliberty

I did see someone do just that one this site the other day, and very interesting it was too.

Till the thread was nailed closed!

I’m not willfully blind, I have never seen it demonstrated, and I’ve tried looking into it myself. Which thread was it?

But I can’t help but notice that you are reduced to semantic technicalities matey, apparently conceding that “black people are disproportionately represented” in crime but not overwhelmingly committing these crimes. Still a bit of a problem anyhow, luvver.

I don’t know what semantic technicalities you’re referring to; aside from this comment, I haven’t posted anything to the thread but for an excerpt of one of your comments (“… it is demonstrably so”) and my response, “Please demonstrate it.”

My issue with this: “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community. Of course, in return, we have rap music, goat curry and a far more vibrant and diverse understanding of cultures which were once alien to us. For which, many thanks.”

… is that, aside from the fact that Liddle has never (to the best of my knowledge) ever provided any evidence for this claim, it just seems incredibly lazy and plays into the hands of people who are unwilling or too stupid to look into it, people prepared to write off a whole section of the community, to blame them for a host of problems.

There’s no discussion of any other factors; note, I make no claims here either way, because I don’t know, but are socio-economic factors completely irrelevant? We don’t know, because Liddle hasn’t looked into it. He’s much more interested, apparently, in making sarcastic comments about a whole group of people without providing any evidence, inspired by a Daily Mail article about two people – yes, just two people – who attempted to murder a young woman. Not very scientific is it?

are socio-economic factors completely irrelevant?

Or rather, are ethnicity or ‘community’ better predictors of involvement in crime than economic factors?

homesteader,

I told you in the last comment that this guy had removed the links to get the comment through and that I googled some that checked out.

So essentially what you want me to do is google for you?

… If you want anymore and you really are interested, google yourself.

All I ‘wanted’ was for you to provide evidence for Liddle’s claim that “The overwhelming majority of street crime, knife crime, gun crime, robbery and crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”. You did after all claim it is “demonstrably true”…

Giles the farmer/Homesteader:

That link really, really doesn’t cut it. We have a bunch of unsupported assertions, one involving figures from ten years ago, and the ones we do have don’t all address the issue. Here goes:

More recent figures reveal that in 92% of gang rape cases the offenders are from the BME, primarily Afro-Caribbean’s.

What figures? Where? Also, BME does not mean African Caribbean. And ‘Gang Rape’ is only one type of sexual violence.

The black newspaper The Voice reports:

“According to a report from the Metropolitan Police, black people in London are four times more likely to be murdered as whites and 12 times more likely to be suspects in homicide cases. Bailey [Black Community Activist] said: “We live in more violent times at the moment.”

That article misses out one vital detail, included in (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/crime/black-people-are-four-times-more-likely-to-be-murdered-475754.html):

“…Homicide suspects are 12 times more likely to be black than white, in proportion to London’s population.“

The Indy article goes on to say that “Of the 163 homicides in London in the year to April 2006, there were 50 black victims” so black people don’t make up the majority of victims, and “Of the 279 people accused of committing the killings 140 were black”, so black people were accused (not convicted) of one more than half the total. 50.17 percent doesn’t represent a vast majority. This is before we factor in how many of those were young men. For Liddle to be right, none of those homicides were committed by any women or men over the age of 25.

Next:

Leaked figures on knife crime revealed that 73% of those charged with knife crime were BME (whist the biggest victim group was whites.)

BME is not equal to young black men. Besides, what leaked figures? From where?

Next:

75% of London’s gun crime involves the victim and suspect both coming from the capital’s black communities”

Hurrah! You got one, maybe.

Next:

“Then there is the serious issue of organised Asian grooming”

Asian does not equal African Caribbean.

So, your demonstration that Rod Liddle’s claim was right only supports on of his assertions. Which means they don’t demonstrate he’s right at all.

And let’s not forget that Liddle made those claims to support the assertion that two young black men who tried to murder the mother of one young man’s child weren’t an anomoly. Sorry for the double post.

ukliberty,

I think, check it out, that a mod has been around here

There is no post by clodhopper any more.

What a fucking shame!

Can I just say that we appear to be having threads completely jiggered by trolls. An entire thread was closed because of a ‘yes you are a troll’, ‘no I’m not’ spiral into stupidity, including allegations of me using sock puppets and the like. Which, if it needs to be said, was untrue.

This comment column makes hardly any sense any more, because people are, entirely reasonably, arguing against posts that have been, equally rightly, deleted.

Perhaps this site needs to be policed better.

Would it be possible, perhaps to leave the posters name up and a message like:

“This post has been deleted by admin for infringing the comments policy”

Or something.

If our good host or anyone else is reading this, we appear to have entered an election period since the New Year.

It is, perhaps, that, that has instigated the Swift Boat Boomer Boys to come out in force. I would expect this to get a lot worse in the months to come.

I think you should not ignore this.

douglas clark:

It is happening on a more regular basis and I do agree that perhaps the site should look to get a handle on it somehow but then they do delete crap pretty quickly; the only down side is if threads have to be shut to comments I suppose.

I do feel bad because the main culprit (Curious Freedom/Sentinel/toni/troll in this thread/giles/whatever) is here because of me I think but you are right, certain threads attract a whole raft of trolling, perhaps it has always been that way here; I’ve not been here long enough to really say.

Homesteader,

See your statistics? See your criteria?

So fucking what?

These people are people that live next door to you. You appear to be alive, although you sound like a fucking Turing machine.

So, on the basis you actually exist, what is your gripe?

Your lot, the English, were quite capable of murdering and killing citizens in England without a care in the world. You did it to yourselves, and it was not that long ago.

Great stories of multiple killers still seem to be exclusively white. The Peter Sutcliffes, the Wests, the blessed Shipman: Brady and Hyndley and Nilsen also come to mind. If you add up the death total of these bastards it would be there or there abouts for 7/7.

And so did everyone else. Every other ethnic group, Scots, Northern Irish and Welsh have their murders to bear.

What changed homesteader my old duck?

Perhaps you could work that out.

A lack of hysterics because we were being murdered by fellow ethnics. In, I suspect your use of the word ethnic, meaning indigenous, whatever that means….

Or is your hysteria because some general cross section of our population, including Muslims and Jews and Christians were just blown up. Rather than stalked and targetted, much as your average serial killer seems to manage?

It is you that differentiates evil. It is you that says that it is worse to kill indiscriminately rather than discriminately.

Personally, I think both are equally wrong.

The bomb or the bullet. You decide.

homesteader,

I think gang rape just might be the worst of them all but Im’s no expert on rapes I guess;

oh come on: Liddle claimed, “The overwhelming majority of … crimes of sexual violence in London is carried out by young men from the African-Caribbean community”, and you wrote that this is “demonstrably true”. Don’t move the goalposts.

As 5cc rightly says, gang rape is a subset of ‘sexual violence’. I don’t have figures for sexual violence (neither do you, apparently), but I do have them for ‘sexual offences’.

Percentage breakdown of those arrested for notifiable offences, by ethnic
appearance, offence group and police force area, 2007/08 (continued)
London, City of
white 61.5%
black 17.3%
Asian 21.2%
Other 0.0%
Unknown 0.0%
total 52
…
Metropolitan [that's London's Met police authority]
white 49.1%
black 31.4%
Asian 14.9%
Other 3.9%
Unknown 0.6%
total 5,362
…

Daniel Hoffman Gill,

I do feel bad because the main culprit (Curious Freedom/Sentinel/toni/troll in this thread/giles/whatever) is here because of me I think but you are right, certain threads attract a whole raft of trolling, perhaps it has always been that way here; I’ve not been here long enough to really say.

Perhaps they are. Did you give an especially rotten performance in Cheltenham or somewhere?

___________________________________________________

Just joking. You are perhaps the main victim of this nonsense, but you are not alone. If you check out what I had to say about my experiences, well…they are true.

And ukliberty, who is a commentator I have a lot of time for, is now also talking into a vacuum.

_________________________________________________

Anyway, I hope you stick around. Not ’cause we’ll agree all the time, but because we might not.

douglas,

If you add up the death total of these bastards it would be there or there abouts for 7/7.

Shipman alone accounted for 218 people, apparently, which is just 2 bodies shy of the death toll from 7/7. Something ought to be done about those Notts-born children of working class parents who grow up to be doctors.

Correction:

Shipman alone accounted for 218 people, apparently, which is just 2 bodies shy of four times the death toll from 7/7.

douglas,

And ukliberty, who is a commentator I have a lot of time for,

Why thanks, I very much appreciate that.

ukliberty,

Yes.

The point, I suppose, is about discriminate murder, perhaps against the elderly in Shipmans case, versus indiscriminate, perhaps Tube Passengers in the case of the 7/7 killers.

I’d have thought that the comparative lack of hysteria around Shipman, et al, was quite telling.

We appear to be able to accept individually motivated wrongs as “just one of these things” and group evil as “the end of the world as we know it.”

I do not agree with either idea – I like to think I am sane. But the advancement of one over the other leaves me cold.

Shipman and the 7/7 bombers are equally evil. Just in socially acceptable and socially unacceptable ways…..

For the absence of doubt, I think both were fucked up bastards…..

@45 – surely the Met arrested more than 5,362 people that year?!

Douglas Clark:

“Anyway, I hope you stick around. Not ’cause we’ll agree all the time, but because we might not.”

I like that phrase of yours a lot sir, it’s a shame that the troll doesn’t get that.

cjcjcjcjcjcjcjcjcjcjc:

With regards to comment 45, that is only sexual offences only, not any other crimes.

Cjcjc

@45 – surely the Met arrested more than 5,362 people that year?!

As Daniel rightly pointed out, those figures are for arrests for sexual offences only; there were over 200k arrests for notifiable offences in that year in the Metropolitan area and over 6k in the City of London.