links for 2009-09-18
September 18, 2009-
The real mystery about the Lib Dems is not why they aren’t performing better, but why they aren’t doing much worse.
Consider the Himalayan obstacles they face. It is only a slight exaggeration to say that, most of the time, almost nobody listens to a word they say. As one of Mr Clegg’s predecessors put it, where the prime minister wakes up thinking about what he has to do, and the Tory leader ponders what to say, the Lib Dem chieftain wonders how to make anybody pay him the slightest attention. The proliferation of news outlets might, in theory, have helped the Lib Dems increase their exposure. It hasn’t: round-the-clock news channels and blogs have been as captured and captivated by the car-crash spectacle of Gordon Brown’s demise and by David Cameron’s rise as have the traditional media.
-
I’ve never understood the argument that we should ignore Rush Limbaugh because he’s simply an entertainer who says outrageous things that millions of people are merely entertained by. I didn’t read the complete works of Silas Weir Mitchell because they were good—they are almost uniformly awful—I read them because they were popular. I was interested not in the content of his thought—it is almost uniformly mediocre—but in why his contemporaries found it so wildly appealing. If you want to learn which ideas and ideologies literate Americans in 1900 found comforting, you do not consult Henry James: you turn to the inartistic novels that parroted their prejudices back to them in a language they already understood. So when people say that we should dismiss Limbaugh on the grounds that he only says outrageous things to sell his product, I’m never quite sure why they’re more concerned with Limbaugh’s motivations than the fact that millions of Americans are buying what he’s selling.
-
A selection of images taken from the Guinness World Records 2010 book
