86 people died today after a string of bombings of Shia neighbourhoods, which brought the death toll of the last week soaring over 200. Sunni jihadists have been perpetrating bigoted attacks all year, with a particular brutal focus on pilgrims and places of worship. This is not a one-sided conflict, though, and Sunni areas of Baghdad were the targets of bombings that killed 76 people last Friday. I was moved by the bewildered sadness of a taxi driver reflecting on the devastation of a roadside cafe. “We used to meet every Friday to smoke shisha,” he said, “And we thought we would have a good time today, but things turned into explosions and victims.”

Tensions have been more stoked than soothed by the Prime Minister and his government. Its failure to work with the Awakenings Councils, which were groups of tribal Sheikhs who played a major role in opposing jihadists and restoring a measure of peace to the country in 2007, prompted many of them to renew the oppositional stance that they had held previously. Economic underdevelopment and the brutal anti-terrorism policies of the state have ensured that there are many aggrieved young men receptive to insurgent and sectarian propaganda.

The potential for war has been grimly illustrated by the involvement of both Sunni and Shia fighters in the Syrian conflict. Al Qaeda in Iraq has been storming over the border to support the grimly disjointed revolution. The BBC reports, meanwhile, on claims that Shia militiamen have rushed to the defence of Bashar al-Assad. As the Awakenings Councils and their Sunni allies maintain their uneasy standoff with Prime Minister Maliki, this storm of sectarian violence could hardly be positioned at a worse time and place for Iraq. If agreements are not forged, the country risks descending back into bloodshed.

Imagine growing up with no memories of a time when you did not have to accept that any moment could bring chaos, agony and death. Adults have only life under Saddam’s heel to think of before that. It might be enough to drive a man to drink, except that in Iraq the sale of alcohol is liable to bring gunmen charging through one’s door.

Why might this be? Marlowe is, after all, a miserable loner with an evident dependence upon alcohol; a habit of witnessing grotesque crime scenes and a tendency to commit acts of private violence against bedsheets. What makes him attractive? It is not, unlike his trashy counterpart James Bond, his sexual adventurism. Marlowe is apt to refuse sex even when it’s offered to him. It doubtless helps that he is attractive to women but this alone is a mediocre explanation. Carmen Sternwood seems to be attracted to everyone except the butler and Vivian Regan’s apparent fancy for him is compromised by the knowledge that she lies through her teeth.

I think that Marlowe’s appeal can be found in the respect that he is able to command. Whatever the beauty of the face that stands before him, or the size of their wallet or pistol, he has an insolent remark and incisive revelation that forces his interlocutor to admire him as an ally or fear him as an opponent. He might have no money and a mild alcohol addiction but he appears to have pride and this can seem enough to compensate for all the lonely nights in dingy apartments.

Chandler was too good a writer to compose escapism, of course, and Marlowe is not the cold fish that he presents himself as being: brooding on missed chances for romance; fretting about death and purging his frustrations at the expense of his own furniture. What is interesting is that he craves respect and is keenly aware of its absence. Here is a nice bit from Farewell, My Lovely (Rembrandt is on a calender)…

My foot itched, but my bank account was still trying to crawl under a duck. I put honey into my voice and said: “Many thanks for calling me, Mr Marriott. I’ll be there.

He hung up and that was that. I thought Mr Rembrandt had a faint sneer on his face. I got the office bottle out of the deep drawer of the desk and took a short drink. That took the sneer out of Mr Rembrandt in a hurry.

It seems to me that men have evolved to value respect: the dignity of individual ownership and achievement. There has been a great deal of chatter regarding the nature of masculinity in the twenty-first century. There is no one problem faced by the British male: some of them are struggling to cope with an indefinite role within their families; some of them just need a bloody job; some of them are too fond of drugs and some of them are, well, fine, thank you very much.

I suspect that an absence of esteem and, thus, pride is a detrimental force in our society, though. Working lives are often spent in awkward, artificial submission before clients, customers, managers, committees and public officials. Love and esteem, meanwhile, is directed not towards people who embody virtues they are expected to represent but a bunch of preening dullards on the television. Life, then, can mean obscure indignity – escaped from via a television on which fathers tend to be portrayed as ineffectual dimwits.

Respect is not one’s birthright, of course, and must be earned – I have no wish for us to heed demands of thugs who often abuse peaceful citizens for paying insufficiently obsequious homage to their existence. There must be the hope for respect, though: as a good father; a good husband; a good citizen. If virtue does not seem valuable, some men are going to think it pointless to achieve.

She suggested that I should mind my own business.So I minded my own business by utilizing my famously feline agility to deftly snatch the phone out of her hand and toss it across the room, where it would do no more damage. She slapped me and stormed away to seek managerial succor. Eventually, I was visited by a black-suited agent of order, who asked whether he might have a word.

Throwing the phone was petulant and disruptive in itself but the sympathy that Mr. Williamson has inspired is evidence of how widespread poor behaviour in theatres has become.

My amateur exploits on Britain’s smaller stages have exposed me to frequent choruses of ringtones and conversation. The former almost inevitably go off before punchlines or during emotional climaxes, and tend to be the loudest, shrillest and most repetitious ringtones imaginable. It has not been Clocks by Coldplay yet but I suspect that it is just a matter of time.

We are often conflicted as to how to respond. One can ignore it – plunging onwards as if ignorant of the existence of viewers. One can shame the troublemaker, as the late, lamented Richard Griffiths did in magnificent style. I am tempted to incorporate the annoyance into the production; to break off from the dialogue, for example, to comment on a passing circus troupe or the sound of rats in the skirting boards.

What makes this an interesting phenomenon is its unmasking of anti-social behaviour in the middle-class. (Not everyone who goes to the theatre is middle-class, of course, but the prices alone put them in a majority.) This is not to demonise disrupters. Most of them, having grasped that it is their mobile phone that has been burbling, scrabble for it as if it is a grenade that must be hurled before it goes off in their pocket. Their failure to respect a law that is followed by schoolchildren under the threat of severe punishments, however, is reflective of a broad indifference to the individual obligations that our sharing public spaces imposes upon us.

One can see this in more dramatic cases, such of those of people who speed or use their mobile phones while driving, or in apparently innocuous acts that nonetheless make our society more unpleasant, such as the ignoring of the homeless or the hectoring of public transport employees. Many people, across classes, are more sensitive to their rights than responsibilities; cognisant of what represents their business and nonchalant towards their effects upon other people. As long as they are not being actively malicious, then, they can feel that they are good citizens. All of us, I think, can be prey to this temptation and would do well o remember that it is an individualism that worsens our collective experiences.

I have defended nuts but what of olive oil? These men note that it offers little nutrition beyond its many calories. It has some Vitamin E, and its polyphenols are argued to be health-promoting, but its nutritive qualities are overstated. Even if it provides “empty calories”, though, as they claim, I do not see the problem. The context of empty calories matters. They are less than healthy when consumed in isolation or in making nutritionally worthless products richer yet olive oil tends to be used to dress or fry vegetables. One thus creates products that contain vitamins and minerals but that need not be rich. If you love eating vegetables in their natural state you may not want the oil but some of us find that it improves their palatability to such an extent that we’ll eat more plants.

These men tend to argue that olive oil is detrimental to one’s health, and with some dodgy claims. Michael Klaper MD notes that the official target for saturated fats in our diets is 7% but that 14% of olive oil is made up of them. “How does 14% help get you to 7%?” He asks. Who’s going to eat all or even half of their calories in olive oil? Jeff Novick references a study by one Robert Vogel, who found that olive oil reduces blood flow. Dr. Vogel used ten subjects and fed them fifty grams of olive oil. Never mind the sample size: who’s going to glug that much?

Some people fill the gaps of data in the case for very low-fat diets with what is either paranoia or fearmongering. John McDougall says “the fat you eat is the fat you wear”, which is both untrue and gruesomely similar to phrases like “a moment on the lips, a lifetime on the hips”. Klaper gripes that restaurants offer nothing more than “ethnic-flavoured salt, sugar and fat” and tells his audience to “order the vegetable soup and steamed greens, eat it and get the heck out of there”. Never invite this gentleman to a birthday dinner.

Given that people who are enduring or have endured eating disorders are liable to be attracted to vegetarian diets, I am keen to ensure that my own and other people’s ethical decisions regarding consumption are not engineered by their neuroses, so I have no wish for them to be mixed with health puritanism. Moreover, such puritanism gives vegans an image of ascetic joylessness. Food critic Jay Rayner gave veganism a shot and came away disheartened by its supposed paucity of fat. Perhaps he was unaware that he could eat olive oil, avocado, almonds, almond butter, walnuts, pecans, peanuts, cashews, coconut, coconut butter, coconut milk, pumpkin seeds, sesame seeds, sunflower seeds and acai. It ain’t just lentils n’ leeks.

Demonising foods on health grounds is always strange as there is no food the average person could not eat regularly with minimal effects. A plant food diet with the odd portion of fish or liver would be as or more healthy than veganism. This is not to say that veganism cannot improve one’s health, still less that it should be avoided, but that if one embraces it it makes sense to use considerations of the heart rather than of the gut.

Pascoe’s argument is that Dan Brown is reviled by liberals, “for whom a novel lacks merit unless it involves a forensic account of two pre-op transexuals in sexual congress”, because he is a “white, middle-aged American of comfortable means…whose stories have a moral foundation in a Protestant world view”. One wonders which critics this applies to, as Mr. Pascoe references nobody. One wonders if it applies to Alexander Rose of The National Review, Rod Dreher of The American Conservative and Amy Welborn of The American Spectator – all of whom are white, middle-aged and middle-class American Conservatives who thought Brown’s novels stank worse than the bathrooms of a seafood restaurant. One wonders where Pascoe gets off  miring a literary argument in the turbid battlefields of the culture war. It is not only liberals who needlessly politicise.

Pascoe then attempts to defend Brown’s novels on their own merits. They are “gripping”, he suggests, which is perhaps true, in the same sense that a pub bore who seizes one’s arm as he gasps banalities into one’s ear is gripping. They are, Pascoe continues, “thought-provoking”. Why? Well, he “gather[s] his new work discusses overpopulation”. The subject matter of a book is not a measure of its insight. Ben Elton’s novels “discuss” the environment and religion but they remain far less thought-provoking than Jane Austen’s books about rich girls marrying off.

“Finally,” Pascoe writes, “There is the question of Mr Brown’s prose”. It is not a question. It is a short, blunt answer in the negative. Regardless, Pascoe sniffs that he “do[es] not see that it is particularly offensive”, and adds it is “easy to understand and admits no ambiguity”. Is this another way of saying that it is prolix, laboured and inelegant? If Mr. Pascoe had the courage of his convictions he would defend the use of the words “renowned”, “seventy-six-year-old” and “man” in the first three sentences of The Da Vinci Code. That would be contrarian.

Pascoe ends with a middle-finger to Brown’s critics, saying that if they “possessed his ability and application, they would be in his position”. “They don’t,” he sneers, “And their envy is unbecoming”. Envy? I thought they hated the bloke because of his race. Decide upon which groundless smear you are committing yourself to, Mr. Pascoe! As for the idea that a critic has no right to judge practitioners: it is akin to saying, to rework a phrase of Tynan’s, that if one cannot drive one has no right to comment on directions.

I am not especially passionate in my dislike for Brown. His novels are dreadful but I doubt that most of their admirers would have turned to superior books if he had turned to plumbing rather than prose. Rather, it was Pascoe’s article that yanked my chain. He is trying to differ from conventional opinions but not with incisive criticism or fresh insight but aggressive grandstanding. He intends to provoke, but it is not reflection or enlightenment that he tries to inspire but defensive outrage. He stirs up conflict between ideologies but not in defence of an institution or a value but of a trashy novel. He is the inevitable offspring of belligerent dilettantes from O’Neill to Young, and the aggressive insincerity that he embodies will be applied to far more significant debates in the future. In the modern press, it seems to me, click-baiting and cat-fighting are the highest virtues.

If I were a Truther, my strategy would be (a) to focus on some one very, very specific claim — for example, the claim that WTC7 couldn’t have come down the way the ‘official story’ says it did, and then (b) to defend this and only this claim without appealing to premises that presuppose the existence of a Truther-style conspiracy….And finally, (c) don’t say ‘I don’t know’ when asked what exactly did happen if the ‘official story’ is wrong…

One Ryan Ashton replied…

(c) is an unnecessarily demanding stipulation. In fact, on the face of it, (c) appears to conflict with (a): whereas (a) promotes “one very, very specific claim,” (c) promotes a very broad claim…But, more fundamentally, (c) seems to suggest that one can only know a proposition to be false if and only if one also knows which alternative proposition is true.

I agree with Mr. Ashton. The falsification of one theory does not demand the creation of another, and the explanation of one event in a sequence need not compel one to devise an overarching theory. If one discredits evidence against a murder suspect one is not obliged to charge somebody else with the crime, and if one finds somebody’s prints at the scene of the killing one need not substantiate a case for the prosecution before offering it as evidence to be accounted for. If it has extraordinary implications it had better be damn good evidence, but if it is, that’s good enough.

The facts of events must be firmly established before one constructs theories atop it. If one’s theory is built upon fissures of omission and bogs of mistruth it deserves to collapse, in part or as a whole, and must be reconstructed or rebuilt upon more solid epistemological grounds. Much as I regret the ignorance with which I used to debate theorists, and for all that I agree that the official narratives have obscured the apparent roles of conspirators and enablers of various origins, I find the idea that the government engineered the atrocities hard to believe, for the usual reasons – the enormity of the supposed operation; the silence of its many accomplices and the mystery of the motive. Such a priori objections should not lead one to dismiss the fact claims of such theories, though. I have, for example, seen many smart people, both in and outside of truth movements, criticise the official explanation of the fall of World Trade Center 7 and I endorse the accessibility of the relevant data and its analysis by scholars. Science can always be challenged on no bases but its own.

The Times

It is an uneven essay. The sections devoted to jihadism are sloppier than they should be. Which speakers have been influenced by Abu Hamza or Abu Qatada? I have not encountered them. Idly mentioning that the suspected Boston bomber had admired Hamza Tzortsis, meanwhile, seems unfair for similar reasons that mentioning everyone that Breivik had admired did. More fundamentally, it should have been acknowledged that many of these speakers have opposed terrorism, and that the link between theocratic opinions and jihadist acts can be weak to non-existent.

I use the word “can” advisedly. Jihadist themes are shot throughout the Islamist milieu of British campuses, and it should disturb us. The ISOC of London South Bank University, for example, promoted videos featuring Anwar Al-Awlaki nine times over the space of three months. The ISOC of London Metropolitan University has “shared” materials from two different groups in recent weeks on its sinister Facebook page, both of which were bedecked with quotes from Abdullah Azzam and Osama bin Laden. If right wing students were promoting arguments of David Copeland or George Rockwell there would be uproar, and rightly as these are ideas designed to provoke violence.

This debate should not pull the spotlight from fact that men preach in British universities who openly endorse the hatred of non-Muslims, and of Muslims who understand Islam differently to them; the establishment of Sharia law; the persection of non-believers, heretics and deviants and the oppression of women. This is influential, as we saw in City University, where the leadership of the ISOC were charged with lauding the virtues of slaying apostates; keeping women in the home and stoning homosexuals. The Federation of Student Islamic Societies, which is quoted in the Times, has taken no action against this behaviour, and this should be unsurprising. It has worked with some of the most brutal theocrats, and members of its officialdom openly admire them.

These phenomena are encouraging the growth of a more passionate, dogmatic and aggressive generation, and I am glad that more attention has been drawn towards them.

The rude old person has become a feature of the cultural landscape. Agnes Brown, the matriarch of Mrs. Brown’s Boys, curses her way through episodes of Britain’s most-watched sitcom. The Catherine Tate Show featured an old woman who did nothing except swear. Little Britain offered a sketch devoted to a young man having a sexual relationship with a grandmother. It was a recurring sketch. Did Father Jack start this? I hope not. I liked Father Jack. But perhaps he was a bad influence.

I have no wish to tell old people to conform to special standards of propriety. If they are going to warble on about pecking posteriors I am not going to bully them. Yet it would be great if younger people stopped cackling like idiots at such behaviour.

The septuagenarian singer was described as an “inspiration” by the botox businessman. Some might claim that this was for having the guts to perform, except that he had looked disgusted as she walked onstage; perhaps fearing that she was going to have the shameless audacity to try and show musical talent. Some might hold that it was because of her energy and spirit, but if singing R&B was enough to defy his preconceptions of the powers of the aged he cannot be acquainted with many old people. The reason he and the audience loved her was because she was being coarse, and, thus, defying those staid old values we associate with age. Reserve, politesse and prudence are disdained by our exhibitionistic culture, and old people are only welcome in the public eye if they are members of the royal family or behaving like young people. It is our world now and they are only welcome if they are trying to match our standards.

Of course, in many ways I think it would be great for us to encourage old people to regain their youthfulness. Few could match Elizabeth Jane Howard, writing novels at 90, or Robert Marchand, breaking cycling records after he has broken triple figures, but when the aged make use of the knowledge and resources available to us they can often retain and regain mental and physical abilities that allow them to live more pleasant and productive lives. What they need inspiration to do, though, apparently, is to say “ass” and mention oral sex. We don’t have enough references to the backside nowadays.

Reski has been covering the Mafia for years, and her book gives an impression of her as being tired and disgusted. The first time she visited Sicily, she admits, she had illusions that it of finding the glamour evoked by Coppola’s films. Reski likes glamour. She spends much of the book writing of her tours with Letizia and Shobha Battaglia, mother and daughter photographers and activists, and they spend a lot of time taking snaps of each other smoking moody cigarettes. It is this, perhaps, that inspires her loathing not just of the cruelty of mafiosos but their grubbiness: their furtive, guileful amorality and the timid and pompous clichés of those who enable them with denial and apologetics. It is the latter who inspire the most powerful moments of an uneven book: the priest, for example, who murmurs platitudes about service and absolution as he does the bidding of murderers.

Saviano digs deeper into the underworld. He lived in Naples: witnessing drug deals and murders and chatting to associates who had joined the Mafia and their young employees. His life since the publication of his bestselling tome has been one of police escorts and constant movement after threats daunted Salman Rushdie, but it’s amazed that he managed to observe them for so long, at such a distance and with so unprotected. It is akin to watching Attenborough peer down a crocodile’s neck.

The Camorra, like Reski’s subject, the ‘Ndrangheta, has outstripped Cosa Nostra: dealing in billions; infecting their political milieu and branching out with international trades and investments. In their home base, they flood the streets with drugs; extort the local businesses and engineer killings with scant compunction. (An example that I thought revealing came in December, when hitmen shot a rival gangster in a nursery playground. Their fleeing target may have thought they would not shoot when four-year-olds were playing nearby. This was rather naive.) Saviano is adept at conveying the tragic consequences for individual victims, as well as the fetid state in which they keep society mired.

Thought his book makes for more gruesome reading – it opens with an account of crates being hoisted up into the air above a Naples port, only to have their doors swing open and release frozen corpses of Chinese migrant workers onto the ground below – it leaves me with more optimism. That he went to such lengths, and that he has reached such an audience, leads me to think there is a will to take on the gangs. They have weathered injuries before; relaxing within the cowed, cynical and naive passivity of the citizens whom they operate among. From the grassroots activism of groups like Addiopizzo to the lofty disapproval of the Catholic Church, more public opinion has been mobilised against the mobsters than ever before.

For this to continue, though, the public needs help. Activism needs support; witnesses require safety and corruption has to be exposed. Here, of course, we find that the gangs are ahead of us. It is up to Italians to mark the passing of Giulio Andreotti by campaigning against state enablement of organised crime.

Still, I was amused by the response of the Society’s head, Alan Mendoza. He disputes Hoare’s claim that he was a “senior member” of the think tank…

He subsequently claims that he was somehow ‘senior’ because he was at one stage a “Section Director” of a section of our website. This is a fancy way of saying he was once a freelancer – which is what all such posts at HJS were in the days before HJS was a professional and fully-staffed think-tank.

It is nice to know that one’s suspicion that most think-tanks are group blogs for the pretentious are correct. Mendoza goes on…

Hoare was paid, in common with a number of other freelancers, £50 per month…Interestingly, and unlike several other more senior members – myself included – who provided contributions to HJS free of charge in the early days, Hoare never failed to collect his small fee for services rendered.

Actually, I have read more interesting things on the backs of pot noodles. What is interesting is Mendoza’s mention of it. What are we supposed to conclude? That Hoare is somehow disreputable? Why? Because he expects to be paid to work? Demanding pay for one’s labour is a good thing. It is the willingness of people to write for free that encourages the exploitation of young writers today.

I have a mild interest in political rhetoric, and this tactic has amused me before: the comment that levels no specific accusation against a person or their argument but serves to imply that one should think less of the former, and, thus, given the prejudicial nature of our minds, of the latter as well. I dub it the ad hmminem: an insinuation of dishonourableness that is attached to no substantive grievance. It might be promoted as being telling, revealing or interesting but it tells and reveals nothing and is duller than muzak in the lift of an office building in Slough.