Nick Cohen's brains have turned to slush, II posted by Richard Seymour

If your favourite stop at the funfair as a child was hurling wet sponges at a clown in stockades, Nick Cohen's column this morning is for you. It's a hoot, it's a giggle, it's more fun than you ever deserved to have at someone else's expense. In an attempt to defend himself against charges of apostasy, he decides to highlight some contradictions of the Left:

I'm sure that any halfway competent political philosopher could rip the assumptions of modern middle-class left-wingery apart. Why is it right to support a free market in sexual relationships but oppose free-market economics, for instance?

Go ahead and check the link: I'm not making it up, and I haven't taken it out of context. Nick Cohen cannot tell the difference between the state telling you what must never happen in your bed, and the state regulating industry. Anyway, to support for imperialism, an increasingly uncritical attitude to New Labour, and support for grammar schools, we can now add addled arguments for the free market to the list of items characterising Cohen's rightward lurch.

The rest of the article consists of the usual accusations of crimes and complicities on the Left, the ritual denunciation of "postmodernism", and the compulsive and caricaturistic understanding of "Islamism" as a "fascistic cult of murder and self-murder". Every word of it - every single word - has been taken apart so many times that it would be a dreadful bore and a waste of time to go through it all again. It is time to simply diagnose the illness and move on: Cohen is becoming Colonel Blimp. Cheeks empurpled, spit launching in all directions, eyes afire with outraged vanity, the Colonel will have none of your treachery. Gad, sir, he won't.


Colonel Blimp and pet.