I’ve watched about twenty minutes of it so far. I’ve been a skeptic ever since people who expressed doubts started to become pilloried as it had all the classic symptoms of PC- death to the heretic.

When Bjorn Lomborg changed his green views and the ad hominem attacks started I knew that there was more to this than meets the eye.

It strikes me that if it is a big swindle (and the indications are strong that it is) then our MP Colin Challen is going to look a bit of a fool.

(When searching for the phrase Fool and Colin Challen together in Google just to see if anyone already thought he was one, I found something very foolish about American High School Puritanism, worth a look.)

A guide to purging the political correctness within is the epilogue to The retreat of Reason, some chapters of which are available online.

The author makes ten points which he sources as being originally from the essay of an American philosepher, Sidney Hook. Hook also said:

The cardinal sin, when we are looking for truth of fact or wisdom of policy, is refusal to discuss, or action which blocks discussion.

Does that remind you of some recent posts?Repent, Morley Town Council, repent!

Here is Anthony Browne’s first suggestion for the purge.

1. When you say something in public, ask yourself are you saying it because it is politically correct, or because you know it to be factually correct? Are you choosing intellectual laziness over emotional discomfort?

As part of that loose collective called Blogpower, we are encouraged to review other participant sites, so here goes.

In deciding which ones to choose, I had a dilemma. Blogpower is a broad church and there are some that leave me cold because they talk about stuff that goes over my head such as religion and Classics. If you click on the RSS feed button to the right, you will find An Insomniac all by itself under the left of centre subset.

Now many people assume I am a Tory Boy. I’m not, I believe in both personal and economic freedom. Torys generally are big on economic freedom but are all too keen to interfere in how we live our lives (although there are Libertarian Tories around, if they haven’t defected to UKIP).

Traditional Labour, however, believe in freedom of the individual, but want to control the economy on the basis that business is evil.

NeuArbeit, as we know, is big on personal and economic lack of freedom with all of their authoritarian ways. They disguise it by appearing to be big on personal choice (drugs, sex lifestyle, civil partnerships etc.) but they give the game away with ID cards, surveillence, bans on smoking, foxhunting and punitive taxation.

An Insomniac is written by Matt Murell and we don’t immediately know too much about him other than he may have a beard and spiky hair. Rooting through the blog archive, he reveals that he is an English Grad, a libertarian left and an atheist. I’m fine with that, I put up with practically everything apart from ignorance, malice and boredom.

His posts are well structured (you’d expect that from an English Graduate!), his topics are broad and he gets good comments, always the sign of a good blog. However, he had a bit of trouble with Blogspot, that classified his content last year as spam-can be recognised by their irrelevant, repetitive or nonsensical text, along with a large number of links, usually all pointing to a single site.

I hope he has got over this unfounded automatic insult!