Really tired of this now!

He's only saying what we are all thinking anyway !

zzzzzzzz...so bored

I've read the post(s) and stories behind Morrissey's comments, including the NME issue. It really pissed me off that this Conor guy would take things this far simply to sell a couple more issues...(which by the way, newstands were selling out completely!). I've been a Morrissey/Smiths fan for over 16 years now and nowhere in lyrics do I detect a hint of racism! I cannot speak for other fans, but I will support Morrissey no matter what! It really saddens me how carried away this issue has gotten and we forget why we are fans in the first place.

Viva Morrissey Always!
 

I am not familiar with British law, but I can't imagine it is illegal to "omit critical parts" of an interview.

I just heard a rumor that I suspect that it is true coming from a reliable source at NME that Morrissey has agreed to be on Oprah because she offered him to come on and he said yes. I know he will do it because he loves her because she is black.

Even if Morrissey did say what the NME attributes to him, only someone wearing a thick pair of PC blinders could construe his comments as 'racist'. Any halfway intelligent person knows that immigrants and foreign language-speakers aren't a race.

What Morrissey's comments highlight is the transformation of the historical (monocultural) England of polite bobbies, bowler hats, and red phone booths into a multicultural polyglot, replete with Orwellian 'hate speech' laws. The historical England Morrissey grew up in has been thrown away by her elites for an inferior substitute. Anyone with a love of home would find this greatly lamentable.

I just cannot believe what the NME/IPC have done and that they have continued to publish such total rubbish - worldwide - following all of the discussions and developments prior to publication. This whole debacle - or charade - beggars belief.

But it is clear that Russells here in the UK have a very clear argument to win a case against the NME/IPC. Plus they have another one against the editor for making such hideous and ridiculous allegations.

How on earth do NME/IPC they think that they could get away with printing such lies and rubbish ? That the NME/IPC could - and then DID - continue to print such an article, is unbelievable and deeply disturbing.

I can tell you now, that the NME will be finished by this unless IPC are able to settle out of court. Having just signed a new recording contract, Morrissey's career and character is being slighted by what appears to have been acts of deliberate malice.

The assumption that the NME/IPC are somewhat clear of any legal action due to the fact that they cannot locate one of there interviewers, who subsequently retracted his authorship of said article, beggars belief.

Bravo to Morrissey and Merck for having the guts, strength and determination to see this through. These people deserve to be in court for the sake of the free and the just throughout the world, who battle their own struggles to stand up to racism and to bullying behaviour.

I read the Black Information piece and I feel sympathy for those immigrants who are vulnerable, whether because of fleeing from intolerant or abusive regimes, or working for a meagre salary to profit their employers, and more sensitive to perceived slights about their presence. Given that understandably peevish tone in the article, it remains reasonably balanced.

Morrissey speaks like he writes lyrics, which is to say that he articulates images and emotions gestating in ambiguity that leaves them open to interpretation. He describes subjectively his impression that he cannot identify as easily with his homeland when he is surrounded by strangers speaking in foreign tongues. He expects this experience when he is in other countries but not in the nation of his birth. If I’m not mistaken, taking the interview alone and not the peripheral incidents involving the NME editor, this point, plus the comments about the floodgates, giving England away, and the panic at the rapid change in the country, are what the magazine chose to zoom in on and distort. Even though the interviewer does confide therein to Morrisey that, “There is obviously a need for debate around taboo issues like immigration”.

I live in Dublin. Ireland’s history is one of emigration up to about 10 years ago, when the pattern began to reverse rapidly. I, like others, find it disconcerting to walk down the main street of the city and hear European languages, Russian, Chinese etc being spoken and rarely an Irish voice. I have no problem enjoying communications on an individual or small group level with these immigrants, but when the community in the public spaces which you took for granted transforms so rapidly frome one of fellow-countrymen to a host of nations, then the instinct is to feel somewhat uncomfortable at even a biological level, as if becoming cut off from the tribe. It may be irrational but it’s an interesting encounter with inner promptings about one’s measure of security, broadly, in respect of identity and belonging.

I found New York to be multi-cultural, and successfully so, as if there was, mas o menos, space for all-comers. I imagine other parts of America maintain their cautious dividing lines. While travelling there over Halloween I started reading a book called “The Tipping Point” by Malcolm Gladwell, subtitled ‘How little things can make a big difference’, and I just picked it up again today, after finishing an exotic little volume about synchronicity, to entertain me on my work commute. In it I soon found myself absorbed in an overview of the phenomenon of social overload. Most people, surveyed by psychologists, come up with a list of, on average, 12 people they know whose death would leave them truly devastated – our so-called sympathy group. Being friends with people requires attention and time, and caring can be exhausting. At a point somewhere between 10 and 15 people, it is claimed, humans as constructed, overload due to the effort to distinguish between individuals.

“Most of human evolution took place before the advent of agriculture when men lived in small groups, on a face-to-face basis. As a result human biology has evolved as an adaptive mechanism to conditions that have largely ceased to exist. Man evolved to feel strongly about few people, short distances, and relatively brief intervals of time; and these are still the dimensions of life that are important to him” – S.L. Washburn, evolutionary biologist. -t.b.c.

http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/music/2007/11/jonze_nm e_morrissey.html [guardian.co.uk]

I will more or less cut n’ paste the rest which underscores the context as to why integration of newcomers cannot be assumed readily and that equilibrium in a population expanding from the outside is probably best maintained by carefully phasing their introduction into the group involving ideally consensual adaption by the existing residents/their representatives. I believe this has often been achieved, though sometimes not, and sometimes complications inevitably arise, as they would of one form or another anyway, with or without new members. In the past few hundred years, human culture, technologies, laws, norms etc have grown sophisticated enough to accommodate mass movement of people, if not perfectly or uniformly. The long quote starts on p. 177…

“Perhaps the most interesting natural limit, however, is what might be called our social channel capacity… most persuasively [argued] by the British anthropologist Robin Dunbar. Dunbar begins with a simple observation. Primates – monkeys, chimps, baboons, humans – have the biggest brains of all mammals. More important, a specific part of the brain of humans and other primates – the region know as the neocortex, which deals with complex thought and reasoning – is huge by mammal standards. For years, scientists have argued back and forth about why this is the case. One theory is that our brains evolved because our primate ancestors began to engage in more sophisticated food gathering; instead of just eating grasses and leaves they began eating fruit, which takes more thinking power. You travel much farther to find fruit than leaves, so you need to be able to create mental maps. You have to worry about ripeness. You have to peel parts away in order to eat the flesh of a fruit and so on. The problem with that theory is that if you try to match up brain size with eating patterns among primates, it doesn’t work. There are primate leaf-eaters with big brains and fruit-eaters with smaller brains, just as there are primates with small cortexes who travel great distances for their food and primates with big brains who stay at home to eat, so the food argument is a dead end.

So what does correlate with brain size? The answer, Dunbar argues, is group size. If you look at any species of primate – at every variety of monkey and ape – the larger their neocortex is, the larger the average size of the groups they live with.

Dunbar’s argument is that brains evolve, they get bigger, in order to handle the complexities of larger social groups. If you belong to a group of five people…you have to keep track of ten separate relationships: your relationships with the four others in your circle and the six other tow-way relationships between the others. That’s what it means to know everyone in the circle. You have to understand the personal dynamics of the group, juggle different personalities, keep people happy, manage the demands on your onw time and attention, and so on. If you belong to a group of twenty people, however, there are now 190 two-way relationships to keep track of: 19 involving yourself and 171 involving the rest of the group. That’s a fivefold increase in the size of the group, but a twentyfold increase in the amount of information processing need to “know” the other members of the group… [which] creates a significant additional social and intellectual burden.

Humans socialise in the largest groups of all primates because we are the only animals with brains large enough to handle the complexities of that social arrangement. [Dunbar concluded that] “the figure of 150 seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us”…Dunbar has combed through the anthropological literature and found that the number 150 pops up again and again.

For example, he looks at 21 different hunter-gatherer societies for which we have solid historical evidence, from the Walbiri of Australia to the Tauade of New Guinea to the Ammassal

Read the rest of this comment...

Was England/Britian/Manchester really better in the 1940s/1950s/1960s/1970s??
We can't go backwards we can only move forward to a better future can't we?

Many of you are missing the bright side in all of this. Such ridiculous sensationalism inspired by the likes of the N.M.E. will only do more to cause frustration about the disease of politcal correctness that has essentially become an estbalishment. This disease has plagued the world since the 90's.

Even the Libertarian minded members (you know, the no borders crowd) of Reason.com are rallying behind Morrissey, and most importantly, the issue is being discussed. I don't see this harming Morrissey's image in the long run. If anything, the more the subject is discussed, the more people will see how utterly ridiculous this whole "racism" panic has become.

In a certain way, I am actually glad that this occurred, since it is such an obvious tabloid maneuver by the N.M.E. that at least, in America, will be laughed as silly British needling.

Hopefully the English will stop being held hostage by their naive University crowd who has nothing better to do in the country than to muckrake, or foolishly idealize human nature.

Do not believe Morrissey is a hatefull racist..Think he is looking more like what it means to be English,British at present...I am a citzen of the World first and take people as i find them..Living in London it cannot be denied space is getting bit short." To be standing by the flag not feeling banefull,shamefull or racist "...

Look, I just wanted to say in Mr. Morrissey's
defense or however anyone wanted to take it
that the fact is that a lot of countries
that have a high rate of immigration are
quite naturally destined to lose their
"identity" to a greater or lesser degree.
I don't want to actually say what I think about what Mr. M allegedly said, but living in Australia I am
constantly mortified at the extent of racism here.
Not to mention the sad fact that most of the Aboriginals were killed off long ago (thanks Britain)
they are now subject to a total lack of privacy and
shame in their lives as the government have had to step in to stop the child abuse and control how
they spend their money. We have always had a lot
of immigrants here, dating back to the sixties, from European and now African and Asian countries.
I actually think it is a good thing, but I don't actually know anyone who thinks the same way as me unfortunately. I could never say enough times that racism is a horrible disgusting thing.
Now come to think of it, I think Mr. M was just
being a little off the cuff. And we all know the royals will be gone in the not too distant future.
We also know that Mr. M doesn't even live in the U.K anymore. Perhaps he was just trying to upset
an applecart for the hell of it!? Who knows......

With all of this talk about "racism" it appears that most people do not understand the definition of the word. This is not surprising considering the invention of the P.C. hysteria in Western countries since the early 90's, thanks to the neo-hippy, baby boomer generation.

"Racism" is the the belief that one race is superior to another. That's it. Now, you can bastardize the term, and create a never ending cascade of meanings for it, but the reality is, it has become nothing more than a controlling buzzword applied as a Scarlett Letter by those who can't engage in rational debate.

It's similar to "Godwin's Law" which suggests that the longer a debate goes on, the greater likelihood that someone eventually will be compared to Hitler.