Saturday 6 April 2013

Trolling the aspiration nation

There was no point in getting offended by the Daily Mail's biggest troll of the week, or with George Osborne, for living down to everybody's low expectations by parroting the Mail's hogwash. Like the man said, never wrestle with a pig - you get dirty, and besides, the pig enjoys it.

In radioland, professional troll A N Wilson crawled out from under his bridge to goad fellow interviewee, Labour MP Pamela Nash, by pontificating in a plummy drawl about how the Philpott case showed that the welfare state was way too generous and puts the morals of the undeserving poor in mortal danger. Sadly, instead of butting him into the river, Nash fell into the trap of being offended. 'No, no, no', I thought, 'the pig's enjoying it. Don't do it like that.' This is the way to do it:
The Daily Mail has apologised for failing to notice that people from wealthy backgrounds who are likely to inherit significant sums of money, might also be murderers.
Stephen Seddon, 46, was convicted of killing his parents for a quarter of a million pound inheritance in a story the Daily Mail failed to cover with the headline, “Vile product of affluent UK”.

Editor Paul Dacre apologised for the oversight, telling reporters, “We at the Daily Mail pride ourselves in drawing vociferous conclusions based on highly questionable evidence linked by wildly tenuous correlations – as yesterday’s front page about Mick Philpott showed.”

“Clearly we can link welfare payments and benefits to killing your children in a house fire, so how we missed this story about people with money killing people is anyone’s guess.”

“I would like to apologise to all of our readers for not telling them that Stephen Seddon is a product of UK’s truly awful culture of wealth accumulation and nepotism.” 
News Thump, skewers the whole manufactured "debate" like a shit kebab. If these sort of extreme, isolated cases had any relevance to anything (except for smearing the scapegoat du jour), the personal finance pages would be full of dire warnings that people were saving way too much for their retirement, without realising that the nest egg they'd been putting aside to keep them in Saga cruises or Werther's Originals was putting them at serious risk of being bumped off by their own greedy kids.

When even the right-wing Speccy concedes that this whole thing is nonsense, it's time to calm down and quit pig-wrangling.


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