The dogs are whistling...

Zionist and Crusader - two descriptions that can be deployed in many contexts in polite anglophile conversation without the need for summoning a disciplinary committee immediately afterward. 

But when Osama Bin Laden spoke of ‘the Zionist-Crusader alliance', something else was going on. Both appellations had acquired a slightly kooky, reality-detached emphasis. 

Fanatics and other kinds of ideologues do this - they kidnap epithets and zap them with their wacky rays before releasing them back into the discourse, now bearing secret-handshakey added meanings. (Viz ‘Neoliberal’, as used by many on the Left today.) 

Now, while to almost all outside the Al Qaeda filter bubble it’s quite apparent that George W Bush was not literally a Frankish knight with a red cross emblazoned on his shield, many on the Corbynite Left seem unable or unwilling to comprehend that most Jews are not what the bloodthirsty bearded one actually meant by ‘Zionist’ either. 

And they habitually deflect criticism by hiding behind the fact that it surely remains possible to use the term 'Zionist' in an un-loaded fashion. 

Something similar is going on with Boris and his niqab letter boxes. It strikes me as  a more sophisticated version of the Trump Twitter idiom - a set of words designed to sit just on the edge of what liberal sentiment can currently tolerate, whilst bearing a hidden payload of meanings (complete with virtual high fives) for the co-religionists on the other side of that line. 

I am usually solidly in favour of free speech, but there can be little doubt that these are techniques that are being used to game our system of liberal democracy

The Hitchhiker's Guide to La Antigua

Radio listeners and readers of a certain generation will call how the inhabitants of a planet called Golgafrincham managed to rid themselves of a useless third of their population by creating three oversized intergalactic vessels to seek out a new world, but only one of them, Ark Ship 'B', the one with all the telephone sanitizers and hairdressers, was actually launched into deep space. 

Thanks to Youtubers like this, Antigua is becoming that spaceship...though Douglas Adams mysteriously omitted yoga teachers from his examples. 

Travel Mum appears somewhat deluded about the market in La Antigua as you will almost never come across an actual farmer in there, and a quick visit to our local tomatera just outside town would quickly disabuse her of any notions of cleanliness in the cultivation techniques used around here. 

$4 or $5 for a beer?! (Even if it does actually appear to be a margarita.) 

She's not wrong about the dearth of decent Asian food though. I recently had a dire shared experience of El Chinito Atroz featuring chunks of soggy teryaki 'chicken' which may well have been sourced from the canine community that amasses outside the matadero beside El Calvario. 

Are nutty parties necessary?

Ultra-ist parties are on the rise across the EU. France had to invent an ersatz populist movement to keep its own demons at bay. 

I'd been reflecting recently that the way the UK has apparently 'contained' its extremes within the traditional two-party system was perhaps admirable and certainly historically very familiar. 

But I am still not sure, and Matthew Parris disagrees... 

"A substantial minority of British voters, to both the right and the left of what we may call the centre, are frankly nuts. 

"They need and deserve nutty parties to vote for. Take the left. It’s a tragedy of our era that voters, activists and a few politicians too who are rank Marxists, not democratic socialists, should have lodged themselves within the Labour party so securely that they now control its leadership." 

He goes on to conclude that a re-surfacing of UKIP, would thus not be such a bad thing, as it would purge the Tory party of some of its own crazies.