The Right Dishonourable – Page 97 – As truthful as resources permit

What you should know about Westminster’s Vote Leave, the rival to Leave.EU

Posted on 9 October, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

For the past few months there have been agitations from the “anti-establishment” eurosceptics about the emergence of a Westminster alternative to the Leave.EU coalition.

And on Thursday night Vote Leave officially launched with a slickly cut campaign video and the backing of MPs from Ukip, Labour and the Conservatives (the Lib Dem members being europhiles):

https://youtu.be/0tItgGcWVHw

That list of MPs includes Steve Baker (Conservative), Douglas Carswell (Ukip), Kate Hoey (Labour). Kelvin Hopkins (Labour), Bernard Jenkin (C), Owen Paterson (C), and Graham Stringer (Labour).

Prominent donors backing the campaign include the likes of Tory donor Peter Cruddas, Labour donor John Mills, and Ukip donor Stuart Wheeler, who has gifted the fringe party some £700,000 over the last five years.

All of this is the work of Matthew Elliott, founder of pressure group the TaxPayers’ Alliance and the man behind the No2AV campaign that thoroughly trounced attempts to reform Britain’s voting system in 2011.

His other group, Business for Britain, was recently hedging its bets on the European question, claiming that it was waiting for prime minister David Cameron’s negotiations to finish before it made a decision to setup Vote Leave.

Indeed in an interview with BBC Radio 4’s Today show, Jon Moynihan of Vote Leave said of the changes his group wanted:

“We’ve now reluctantly come to the conclusion that those changes are not going to take place…what we want to achieve is a common market, not a political union.”

Neither group has chosen to include Ukip leader Nigel Farage as their champion, many fearing that he is too divisive a figure and that he might scare off potential leavers in the debate.

Ultimately only one side will be chosen as the main campaign group for leaving the EU, giving it access to greater funding.

An ICM poll cited in Vote Leave’s press release has 44 percent opting to leave compared to 39 percent opting to stay, the “leave” side having only gained the upper hand in recent months.

Image Credit – Vote Leave screenshot, October 2015

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Danny Boyle and Aaron Sorkin explain casting Fassbender, historical inaccuracies and three act structure in Steve Jobs biopic

Posted on 9 October, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

Tying in with Friday’s US release of the biopic Steve Jobs, the folks at the Verge have put out an interview with its director Danny Boyle and writer Aaron Sorkin, talking about the decision to focus on three product launches in Jobs’ life, casting the non-lookalike Michael Fassbender, and historical inaccuracies in the film.

Many of the family and friends of Steve Jobs have criticised and even reportedly attempted to scupper the film because of Jobs’ record as a bit of an arsehole – so from the filmmakers’ perspective this acts as a time to explain their approach to capturing the technologist’s life.

Image Credit – Danny Boyle, Toronto International Film Festival, September 2008 by Gordon Correll

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If the Steve Jobs film portrays him as an arsehole, that’s because he was

Posted on 8 October, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

When biographers probe the life of a celebrated figure the family will always wonder just how much of the bad stuff is going to hit the presses.

As such Steve Jobs, a biopic of one half of Apple’s founding team, was always going to cause trouble given the well-chronicled nastiness of one of the pioneers of consumer electronics.

Even before the film started shooting Laurene Powell Jobs, a critic of Walter Isaacson’s biography which forms the basis of the film, was reportedly lobbying film companies and movie stars such as Leonardo DiCaprio and Christian Bale not to back or appear in it.

Then as its release approached Apple’s current chief executive Tim Cook dismissed Steve Jobs and the documentary Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine as “opportunistic”, though he hasn’t seen either of the films.

https://youtu.be/7Yap6WKKin8

And more recently Jony Ive, designer of many of Apple’s greatest hits, saw fit to divulge his opinions on the matter despite not seeing Steve Jobs, branding the movie “ridiculous” and complaining it ignored the “context” in which Jobs was operating.

“There are sons and daughters and widows and very close friends who are completely bemused and completely upset,” he added. “I’m sorry to sound a bit grumpy about it but I find it ever so sad.”

The trouble with these comments, aside from the fact they come from people who haven’t even seen the film in question, is that they ignore that Jobs was a man who denied he fathered a child with his childhood sweetheart Chrisann Brennan, forcing her to raise their daughter Lisa with only limited financial support from him for several years.

They also skirt over the fact he was often abusive and unreasonable to colleagues, and rude to hotel and restaurant staff, the kind of people who were obliged to be pleasant to him despite his misbehaviour.

Some of this is shown in the biopic, and indeed Ive himself once explained these flashes of temper to the biographer Isaacson:

“I once asked him [Jobs] why he gets so mad about stuff. He said: ‘But I don’t stay mad.’ He has this very childish ability to get really worked up about something, and it doesn’t stay with him at all. But, there are other times, I think honestly, when he’s very frustrated, and his way to achieve catharsis is to hurt somebody.

“And I think he feels he has a liberty and license to do that. The normal rules of social engagement, he feels, don’t apply to him. Because of how very sensitive he is, he knows exactly how to efficiently and effectively hurt someone. And he does do that.”

This view is backed up by Steve Wozniak, the other more technically gifted half of Apple’s founding team and a consultant on the film. He was asked by the Beeb what he felt the film showed well in terms of Jobs’ personality:

“It deals with what we are all very familiar with – a lot of his negativism. This comes about less with him doing negative things to other people, and more him just sort of standing [there] and not caring as much about others as himself, and not being able to have feelings very much.”

He added that whilst the film did not portray what historically happened in the events it covers, “it really conveys what Steve Jobs was really like inside… and what it was like to be around him.”

If you wanted to be generous about all this you would point to Jobs’ difficult upbringing. And nobody is denying that the techie later reconciled things with his daughter Lisa, or that he did not have a nicer side to him.

But whilst the family will no doubt prefer to remember the more generous side of Jobs, history should not be so kind. It is important people remember that even the most celebrated men can be bastards, and Jobs was undoubtedly one of them.

Image Credit – Steve Jobs, at WWDC 2007, by Ben Stanfield

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Milo Yiannopoulos: Gamergate in 10 minutes

Posted on 8 October, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

Journalist and provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, recently banned from speaking at Manchester University because of fears he might incite hatred, has long been embroiled in the Gamergate controversy, and has now appeared in a brief breakdown of the scandal.

Whatever one’s view of the situation, Yiannopoulos draws some interesting parallels between the progressive attempt to censor video games on charges they make you sexist and the work of the American religious right in the 90s, who claimed that video games make you violent.

“People were doing this in the 90s and the games press did a great job of defending video games against those charges. They’ve done a much less good job – in fact they’ve done no job at all – of defending it against feminists who are just as whacky and just as crazy as the old religious right. And in fact the feminists say all the same things, they hate the same things, they hate nudity and violence – all the same stuff.”

In the video Yiannopoulos references to disgraced American attorney and Christian crank Jack Thompson, who attempted to censor violent video games and was later disbarred by the Florida Bar due to misconduct.

The Breitbart columnist also went on to discuss how the Internet has led to a realignment of the culture wars, pitting authoritarians against libertarians.

“The Internet has dumped politics. It’s very interesting. It’s turned every major culture war and every major discussion into a row between authoritarians, who want to control how other people live, and libertarians who either want to escape whatever is going on in their lives or classical liberals, like me, who believe in freedom of expression, freedom of thought, and liberty of ideas, and believe it is essential – for the good of our species if you like, if you want to get serious about it – that we can talk about everything openly and honestly and there are no no-go areas.”

His later comments about the rise of anti-establishment politics do not entirely wring true, partly because many of those backing populists like Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, the Democrats’ Bernie Sanders, the Republicans’ Donald Trump and Ukip’s Nigel Farage are themselves authoritarians.

But even so one should keep an eye on the trend of how the Internet is reshaping politics as we know it.

Image Credit – Super Blast Mario, July 2012 by JD Hancock

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Boris Johnson in 2001: ‘Bin Laden should die, but we must try him first’

Posted on 8 October, 2015 by Jimmy Nicholls

Grandstanding at the Tory conference on Wednesday, David Cameron took the opportunity to attack Jeremy Corbyn for his description of the death of terrorist Osama bin Laden as a “tragedy”.

As the Right Dishonourable has now pointed out twice, the video in which the Labour leader is quoted from makes it clear that for Corbo the escalation of violence and the snuffing out of the rule of law is the real “tragedy”:

“On this there was no attempt whatsoever that I can see to arrest him [bin Laden], to put him on trial, to go through that process. This was an assassination attempt and is yet another tragedy upon a tragedy, upon a tragedy. The World Trade Center attack was a tragedy, the war in Afghanistan was a tragedy, the war in Iraq was a tragedy.”

In return for this Cameron lambasted Corbyn for his “security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology”.

For a conservative it is strange to attack support for the rule of law as part of a “Britain-hating ideology”, especially since, as all good Tories know, it is partly Britain’s reputation for strong law that makes us such an attractive place to invest.

But stranger still is the implicit attack by Cameron on London mayor and Tory leadership hopeful Boris Johnson, even if his preferred successor is chancellor Gideon “George” Osborne.

Way back in December 2001, as the fumes from the destruction of the Twin Towers were still strong in the nostrils of New Yorkers, Johnson took to his column in the Torygraph to reject the notion that British squaddies should perform a summary execution if they came across bin Laden:

“Bin Laden should be put on trial; not in Britain, but in the place where he organised the biggest and most terrible of his massacres, New York.

“He should be put on trial, because a trial would be the profoundest and most eloquent statement of the difference between our values and his. He wanted to kill as many innocent people as he could. We want justice. It was a trial that concluded the tragic cycle of the Oresteia, and asserted the triumph of reason over madness and revenge.”

At the end of his piece Johnson does skirt over Britain’s commitment not to hand over crooks to the Yanks if there is a danger of them being executed (as was true in New York at the time), which does rather spoil things.

But even so, once this article is brought to Call Me Dave’s attention he will no doubt waste no time in denouncing Johnson for his “security-threatening, terrorist-sympathising, Britain-hating ideology”.

We await the prime minister’s response.

Image Credit – Boris Johnson, November 2011 by BackBoris2012 Campaign