Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

I'll defend any nation full of shadayim tov :naughty:

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

What's wrong with Lancaster? :confused: :p:

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

About 250 miles too far north. Seriously, I'm trying to count up the number of times she's been appreciably north of London since we've been together and it's difficult to reach the fingers of both hands (about the same number of times she's been to the States). She has an old friend who now lives near Darlington which is about the only time she ever goes north. Her sister now lives in Liverpool though, so she'll be going there, possibly for the first time ever, sometime this year.

Like I said, London isn't England, it's almost a separate country now. Lot bigger and richer than Scotland too, eh? Not to mention a lot closer to Europe. So how about moving the English capital to Brum and we can hoist the flag (newts crossed on a bottle of whisky rampant) and sail off into the sunset.

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

That will not help. If certain members cannot call you a racist they will hint at you being a member of a party that are racist. Which i find myself having to repeat i am not and never have been, Or ever will be.

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

Something I found amusing in Richard Littlejohn's column, todays Daily Mail.

LINKAGE

:D

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

Except of course it wasn't banned, but when was Littlejohn known for letting accuracy get in the way of rabble-rousing polemic?

See he managed to mention fatwa, though......

update - if you look on the Becta site, it says this
"The "Three Little Cowboy Builders" (a DVD resource produced by Shoo Fly Publishing, based on the "Three Little Pigs" story) is readily available on the market for those who wish to use it. It has not been banned by Becta or any of the other BETT Awards partner organisations.
However, it failed to be shortlisted for the BETT Awards which are run annually in partnership with BESA, EMAP Education, and Becta. There was a very high standard of entries this year and four high-quality products were shortlisted in this category ahead of "Three Little Cowboy Builders".

The product was not shortlisted by the judging panel because it failed to meet the required standard across a range of pre-defined criteria, especially in the areas of curriculum and innovation."

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

Laughable. Not amusing. It's not amusing that he gets paid a million pounds a year for this drivel.

Private Eye this week serialises extracts from Nick Davies' forthcoming book on the press 'Flat Earth News' in which he interviews an ex-policeman and an ex-Mail journalist who told him that the Mail routinely hands over money to bent coppers and civil servants for information from the PNC and benefits databases. That's patriotic stuff, eh? Upholding British standards, and all that.

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

It's becoming more and more obvious that the book was simply not considered good enough for the awards and the company behind it forwarded it to someone with a axe to grind and both decided to use the 'muslims ban xxx' formula to get attention and stir up anti-muslim feeling, andthe papers and public are more than happy to help

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

The early reports suggested this book has already won some other awards, so I'm not sure you have any basis for saying the book was 'not good enough' ... unless you've read some commentary on it somewhere?

I think what has happened here is exactly what Littlejohn said happened, in his own unique way: a bunch of well-meaning idiots taking offence on someone else's behalf, without bothering to check whether said someone really would be offended.

It is genuinely unfair that the book was banned from being entered in the competition on that basis, just as it's now unfair that these well-meaning idiots, by the Law of Unintended Consequences, have simply handed more ammunition to those who despise the very people they set out to protect.

---------- Post added at 19:40 ---------- Previous post was at 19:39 ----------

What do you expect, when the Scots are running the place? :angel:

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

While I think the original intent from Merlin John and Shoo-fly was to use a headline-grabbing PC gone mad story, I don't think they were actively bigoted, merely cynical and opportunistic and seemingly couldn't care less about the consequences. Our charming press supplied the bigotry, as usual, from their ample stocks.

Merlin John's site changed the headline on the story yesterday, by the way, it's a lot less inflammatory now.

Hmm. Not sure I buy this, as we've seen they fire it off whether or not they have any ammunition at all. If you'd said 'if you wanted to promote racial harmony and community relations the first thing you should do is actively combat the veiled racism and unveiled bigotry in the tabloid press' then I'd wholeheartedly agree with you. The fact that the only people doing this are Private Eye, me and some other bloggers (Obsolete and Five Chinese Crackers in particular) is the true scandal, since obviously we have a lot less power and money. This is probably behind the shocking rise in people willing to admit they're racially biased in this week's British social attitudes survey - if homosexuality rather than immigrants and Muslims were the current target this would presumably be reversed.

Except it wasn't solely on that basis, what's unclear is what weight was attached to it. The comments picked out by Merlin John, presumably supplied by Shoo-fly from the feedback sent to them, were presumably part of comments from some 70 judges, we have no way of knowing without access to the feedback what proportion of them are idiots or what weight the panel applied to each criticism or even what praise they offered. The basis of this story is cherry picked by one of the protagonists, which is hardly a recipe for a balanced view.

[It also wasn't banned from the competition but excluded from the final shortlist, which is a lot less inflammatory. Other books were excluded from the list on technicalities - nothing's been 'banned']

One other point that's germane to this is where the idea that pigs offend Asians or anything offends anyone comes from, which is of course the tabloid press puffing fictitious 'PC gone mad' rubbish*. Hence the story that the only people who actually do try and change 'Baa Baa Black Sheep' or whatever (which the Telegraph pulled out again, despite being long debunked) were some nursery teachers who'd read it in the Mail.

* Think about it - where else would they get it from, since there's we've established that there's no PC brigade? Even the Muslim Council of Britain, who are only really representative of themselves and are fairly extreme don't think this is an issue.

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

One mans muck is anothers brass :p:
Maybe I dont look deep enough that why I find many, many things amusing :D

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

My mate collects them, he has loads. :)

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

I thought it was not banned from the contest but just not entered into the short list? Although you are right in that every incident like his simply furthers the causes of anti-islamic groups

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

More muck from Littlejohn, this time about the Bus Goth incident referred to earlier in this thread, oddly enough:

Nice choice of mates there, Richard. Let us all be aware of this - the kind of people who will use the BECTA shortlist row as an excuse for bigotry and racism will similar use *anything* that deviates from their narrow norm to push their agenda, which could be you, your neighbours, your sexuality, your family, your religion, anything. This is not only anti-British (in the sense that harmless deviance and weirdness is a national tradition), it's sowing the seeds of Fascism.

However, I'm confident that we'll carry on getting 'PC brigade' rubbish on here as we always have. If anyone knows a better way of stopping it than reasoned argument, feel free to try. I might borrow Black Mike's stick and see if that's any better.

Re: 3 little......BANNED animals
 

This extract is far more shocking, well, shocking if you didnt expect it from the Mail :dozey:

http://www.newstatesman.com/200801240030