Wednesday, December 24, 2008 

Christmas Eve miscellany.

Just a few words and links today. Here's what I left on the Grauniad article regarding Zavvi's entering administration:

Can I be so bold as to put in a defence of Zavvi? Perhaps it's just my local store, but the prices in there, at least on the new releases are usually competitive or better than HMV's, the staff are far friendlier and helpful, and you actually felt like they cared about you. It's all well and good saying support your local independent, but the sad fact is that they hardly exist any more: it's either Zavvi and HMV or the utter hell of a supermarket. Music is no longer an art to these people; it's become a commodity. If Zavvi and eventually HMV goes then we'll have genuinely lost something for good.

David Semple writes of the best Marxist analysis of the financial crisis he's come across so far.

Aaron puts in a superb rant on the bailiffs issue, and my post was also cross-posted over on Lib Con, sans the description of Green as "fat and greasy", should you feel the need to read a load more comments.

Anton Vowl rips into the Sun and its fetish over "Our Boys", while the paper itself complains about the MoD refusing to pay for gifts from the public to be sent over to them, which is quite obviously what public money should be spent on rather than anything else.

Finally, if you want to read something cracked from err, someone cracked, these thoughts on Pope Benedict's speech from our old friend Johanna Kaschke are rather unique.

Anyway, have a good Christmas, and I'll be back in a couple of days with some tedious best and worst of 2008 lists that we all love so much.

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Friday, December 05, 2008 

Solidarity, brothers!

One of the great untruths about the internet when it comes to libel is that more or less anything goes, and that it's fairly easy to get away with saying the most outrageous things about absolutely anyone. This is only the case when you get a great lumbering bulk of an individual or company weigh in, disgusting enough people that a Spartacus-like uprising manages to take place. It happened with Usmanov, when this blog amongst others was threatened by Schillings, resulting in the material which Usmanov had wanted to be squashed being spread like wildfire.

It'd be nice if something similar now occurred in defence of Dave Osler, Alex Hilton and John Gray, all of whom are being targeted by Johanna Kaschke, who is, to put it mildly, a fascinating character. The trouble began when allegations arose of Kaschke's links to the Baader-Meinhof group, links which she vehemently denies. Far more interesting though is Kaschke's political nymphomania. Prior to April 2007, Kaschke was a member of the Labour party, and on the shortlist to be the party's candidate at the next election for the seat of Bethnal Green and Bow, currently held by George Galloway. Whether it was, as the East London Advertiser reports, their highlighting of Labour attempting to change the law to defeat a campaigner in the High Court over public housing, or that she only received one vote, as Dave Osler suggests is unclear. What is known is that Kaschke didn't stay long in Gorgeous George's organisation: she quickly shifted to one of the various Communist Party sects. Unsatisfied by her shift to the far left, she then forgave Labour and got back together with the party, before finally seeing the light and shifting to the right, settling on becoming a Conservative activist, seen earlier in the year with none other than Boris Johnson. Kaschke appears to have undergone a changing of political colours which sometimes takes place over a lifetime within the space of under a year.

Kaschke also seems to be rather precious about her own blogging output being so much as quoted by others, so instead we'll have to make do with just linking to it and quoting what she has said on other people's blogs. On her MySpace blog, for instance, she criticises George Galloway for being litigious, without any apparent trace of irony. Over on John Gray's original post on Ms Kaschke, she manages to contradict herself within a sentence:

I do not want you write anything about me anymore, I shall not comment about the ridiculous content of your shit blog, so just take it off. Its really ridiculous that you slate a fellow union member. you are an arshole.

She goes on:

He cheapskate, it may have escaped your non existing attention that Dave Osler has removed his blog connecting me with Baader-Meinhof, because he pays attention to his legal obligations, which is something I cannot say about you. I am asking you to remove the Baader-Meihof logo and name in connection with my name for the last time now before legal action may commence against you.

Her own internal contradictions don't however seem to bother her too much. Back in April last year she moaned to the ELA about how Labour had been "hijacked by a bunch of ultra-conservatives". She now happily links to amongst others, such ultra-conservative organisations as the Taxpayers' Alliance and the Libertarian Alliance. Indeed, Kaschke's rather strange political shiftings and what they might mean led to one of her complaints, after she was described in Dave Osler's comments as "one cherry short of a Schwarzwalderkirschtorte", which is the German, I believe, for bat-shit crazy.

One can only hope for a happy outcome. In the meantime, I think we can all agree that Kaschke ought to examine the precedent set by Arkell vs Pressdram.

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