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Hughes wrote;
I have no ethical framework. I have no moral framework
(To the Judge/Rest of the forum): No further questions, your honour.
Piffle of the first order, old chap. It is perfectly possible to interpret an act or word as demonstrating an underlying contempt of or hatred for women, just as it is possible to identify any other behaviour without any reference to an ethical or moral code. It is a matter of opinion, certainly, judgement, undoubtedly, but ethics and morality need have nothing to do with it.
But you said
you
found it repellent. You didn’t dispassionately observe it was, in your view, a misogynist idea, you said
you
were repelled by it, which to any reasonably educated member of the public suggests
your
ethical views on women were transgressed. Now you claim you were merely making a disinterested comment. You are now changing your story to fit your argument. If you are going to make these
de haut en bas
declarations please try and be consistent. Failure to do so can make a man appear an oily pseud.
I have snipped the expected heavy sarcasm, affectation and pomposity in your previous post. I feel no need to reiterate my thoughts on that. As for my punctuation and spelling, I don’t think posts dashed off in an internet forum are commensurate with published journalism; I do not, therefore, spend a great deal of time sub-editing them. You may do. May I take this opportunity to congratulate you on possessing the leisure time to do so.
This is the bit that interested me:
It is perfectly possible to use the word misogyny without ever entering the thorny maze of morality. Morality is the quality of being moral; that which renders an action right or wrong, based on religious doctrine or ethics.
Quite wrong, dear boy. To arrive at the opinion that something is misogynistic requires a process of
judgement
and judgements about misogyny (and its almost unheard of counterpart misandry) must always be based on
moral
positions, even if these vary from person to person, the arrival at the judgement has to be from a process of examining ethics and ethics are dictated by morals. You may believe that if you lard your arguments with enough sarcasm nobody will notice that they make no sense. That isn’t a sensible long-term strategy.
I made no moral judgement, on you or your proposed advert; indeed that would have been absurd.
See above. Bet you can’t answer this without being sarcastic. A little sportsman’s wager, old chap?
Bettingboy, in all your posts, you have, for some reason, seen fit to comment on my prose style.
I did indeed. It is remarkably affected; I thought it worthy of comment.
Clearly it irritates you, indeed, it must have been itching away at you all day, since you have returned some twelve hours later as full as bile
I can assure you that to point out that you have a taste for sarcasm and communicating it in a mildly pompous, early 20th century prose style is certainly not bilious. It is simply a statement of fact. It’s quite fun, actually, and makes a change from some of the more grossly proletarian interjections… I simply made the observation that what you said about the advert and the way you said made you appear rather priggish. You didn’t like this one bit. That is why I apologised.
Let us remember that this correspondence began when I commented upon your advert suggestion. I found it repellant. I still do. I thought it feeble, misogynistic and utterly without merit. I hadn’t thought further explanation was required.
How odd. You told me you would never bring morality into an argument. I can only conclude this was a
coup de forum
that pleased you so much you forgot that it makes no sense, for you go on to employ morality after all – one cannot call something or someone misonygistic without making a moral judgement beforehand. Check yer philososphy, Horatio, as Hamlet might have said. And make sure Gussie Fink-Nottle doesn’t hear you employing all this new-fangled commie jargon like misogyny – you’ll get black-balled from Lords!
I will, however, make a note to avoid your threads in future, since you are clearly a man intent upon a fight
Now, now. That is far from the case. This is a forum; we debated. I bear no ill-will on the matter, old chap. I hope we shall have many more discussions.
On the subject of find new people who wish to get involved in this sport: today’s racing was a classic example of how ridiculously irritating the game can be: prime evidence of Sod’s Law, turn ups for the book etc.
Fantastic letter in the Racing Post today from a VERY disgruntled punter, who has a pop at the whole shooting match and gives jockeys and trainers a richly deserved knock as well and, rather wonderfully, sums up the attitudes of the high street bookie in one sentence: ‘if they could, they’d have us post our stake money through the letter box.’
I forget what his name is but he said things that RP writers should be saying. A well-aimed fusillade against the whole organised rip off.I apologise unreservedly if my writing style causes you offence. I had no idea that such an inoffensive combination of verbs, nouns and prepositions was capable of inducing such disapprobation. I shall endeavour to do better.
My dear boy, you have not offended me at all. You affect a spinsterish writing style and that, along with your objection to my advert proposal made you appear priggish. Gentle warning: You’ll be asked to leave the Drones if you keep mistaking sarcasm for high comedy.
However, I do take exception to the suggestion that my writing was moralistic. No matter how fiercely argued the debate, I hope I would never stoop so low as to bring morals into it.
On what grounds did you make your objections on, then? Snobbery? Neurosis? Morality? Take your pick, old chap.
As for the now-legendary tongues advert, I had assumed that in offering up that advert for our perusal, you were inviting opinions, even, dare I say, reactions.
Of course! That is why this place is called a forum, surely? Then, once you comment/react, I, if I have something further to add, say something and lo, the dialectic continues and takes us a step closer to understanding. (Soz for sarcasm, it’s terribly catching)
Had I known that it was a purely rhetorical flourish
,
It wasn’t.
I would have refrained from telling you what I thought of it. A gentle warning though: if you continue to post on a public forum, I fear it is inevitable that others will wish to reply.
I like replies! Weak sarcasm is perfectly acceptable, but looks slightly inadequate when delivered in your self-conscious Edwardian prose.
It is a pity, bettingboy, that you are unable to discuss ideas without taking criticism personally or resorting to insults. But hey, if that’s your thing, then knock yourself out.
To observe that a person who finds a mildly humorous and mildly lascivious advert for horse racing ‘repellent’ is acting rather priggishly is not much of an insult, in my opinion, more a statement of fact. The whole tone of your responses have been self-righteously moralistic and superior, which, incidentally, is the definition of priggish in the Oxford English Dictionary. I don’t think you can really
mind
this since it is obviously the effect you seek. Otherwise you would not write what you write the way you write. However, if I have offended you I apologise.
You observe that selling things using sex appeal is an old idea – no s***, Sherlock! You observe that pictures of attractive racegoers appear on racecourse websites. True. But once people are looking at the websites they have already had their interest piqued – what we are talking about is finding
new
audiences and my advert idea, which was frivolous but still, I’d bet, more effective than any BHA effort, was for billboards.
Please remember that personally, I can rub along with racing as it is. I don’t wish to see it football-ized (perish the thought!) and trying to make more of a ‘narrative’ won’t work, in my opinion. The narrative is already there in racing – it’s called racing.
Since humans have the ability to sweat, I don’t see why it would be necessary for said young men to regulate their body temperature by panting.
And, since this isn’t the 1970s, I’m not sure a Benny Hill style advert in which a group of men chase a group of women would have the desired effect. Sounds like you’re targetting the 65-75 age group.
Personally, aside from hungry lions in the paddock and a free flesh-eating virus with every admission, there is nothing more likely to deter me from a day’s racing than the prospect of bumping into large crowds of ‘suited young men with their tongues hanging out’.
Given the choice, it would be Millwall every time.
Yes, I thought it was the tongues. In only included them to drive home th point. In the actual advert you wouldn’t need men at all.
I’m sure that if you were not so intent on appearing to be a sort of Wodehouse-ian prig you would have appreciated my point: that there is more to see at a prestigious race meeting than equine legs and that the spectacle is a selling point in racing’s favour. Nothing is more likely to deter you from a day’s racing than the prospect of bumping into large crowds of young men in suits with their tongues hanging out? Since they constitute a fair portion of racegoers already I take it you don’t racing very often, old boy.
I take your point but I assumed we were taking as read racing and betting’s marketing strategy is atrocious. Agree about the people who run the sport – as someone once said about a former Secretary of the Jockey Club, if people knew the tiny amount this man thought was a worthwhile bet they wouldn’t want him running racing. Like politics in this country, the sport seems run by people who haven’t seen enough of the business end of life – in the case of racing the dirty mug money that keeps the whole thing going.
I agree that racing is exciting in itself – i’ll sometimes watch some very undistinguished races on ATR just because of that curiosity factor.
I thought of a billboard poster campaign that would be very effective in getting 18-30s going racing: A group of sexily dressed female racegoers being followed along by some suited young men with their tongues hanging out. Then, in big letters: YOU DON’T SEE THIS DOWN AT MILLWALL ON A SATURDAY AFTERNOON… That should sort it…
The future is in the exchanges,mechanical as it is,the days of Punter/bookmaker exchanging
cash on the high street are dying!I agree but arbing isn’t the entire future, or, if it is then there isn’t much of a future. How people hunched over betfair will replace the levy contributions to racing and beef up attendance figures at race tracks isn’t clear. Whether the arber realises it or not, he needs new mug punters drawn into the sport to keep the cash circulating so he can get his rake-off.
if somewhat light on solutions./quote]
Well, yes. But the biggest solution to attract new punters will be bookies
making it easier to win
. Not all the time but sometimes. But they are too greedy.
Some interesting points, bettingboy, but if you’re suggesting that breeding a generation of compulsive gamblers (to go along with the binge drinkers and criminals we have already successfully cultivated) is racing’s saviour then I’d rather see the sport vanish without trace.
I’m not saying that, but I am saying that gambling in inextricably linked with racing, always has been and the more people who understand the pleasures of punting the safer racing’s future will be. This doesn’t have to mean the creation of problem gamblers, just people whose interest is piqued by having the winning experience. Winning and losing, be it horse, punter, trainer or jockey is what the whole thing boils down to.
However, the gambling industry is shored up by ‘problem’ gamblers just as the alcohol industry grows fat on alcohol misuse. Although brewery and distillery bosses might say otherwise, they’d be mortified if the general population started to religiously abide by government health warnings about drink – thin pickings for them. So it is with the big bookies. It’s never a pretty sight to see these sad sacks pacing up and down in bookies and betting on dog races at 11am and the idiots mewling after they’ve lost 100 quid on an odds on fav, but Mssrs Ladbrokes, Coral and Hills LOVE ’em and wouldn’t want to be without them.I think the whole thing is managment consultant nonsense based on the idea that Premiership football, that all-pervading, moronic force in British culture and society, is something that all sports should aspire to.
When I used to work at the Racing Post I often wanted to write something in reply to the endless think-pieces on how to make racing more popular, but the conclusions I came to about flat racing and its declining popularity were never going to be well-received in an editorial atmosphere of bookiephilia and libel-paranoia..
The real problem with racing is that it is very much an acquired taste. If you talk to members of the public who go racing through a works jolly or corporate hospitality, more often than not they will say: ‘I never usually bet because I always lose.’ That’s the starter for ten. As things stand it’s too difficult to win and its rules and variables are of byzantine complication. Me, I quite like this because I have acquired the taste and enjoy racing for its own sake, plus I now win regularly enough to keep my interest up.
But if you made a racing diagram consisting of satisfaction = blue and disappointment/irritation/rage = red, regardless of what venerable old gentlemen punters and highly philosophical gamblers say, for average joe newcomer the red would be as high as the national debt and the blue as small as the amount of Labour voters you’d find in the winners enclosure at the Cheltenham festival.
If I had a pound for every old timer who’s said to me: ‘it just gets harder and harder.’In the past, when people had more patience and larger attention spans and fewer options leisure-wise, punting your hard-earned cash on horses was massively popular. Everybody did it. Housewives did it, schoolkids did it – if they could. Now, with declining attention spans and the availability of many ‘instant gratifications’ (please note ironic apostrophes) the average newbie punter is likely to find the whole thing alienatingly annoying and absurdly weighted in favour of the bookmaker at all times. Youth would, rightly or wrongly, rather get smashed, snort a line of cocaine and watch football than squint at form for ages, place a bet and, as likely as not, watch a horse make a mockery of the formbook and the betting. The payoff is too elusive for the average person to keep coming back. They are up against the bookie’s margins (‘The golden age of punting is over’ – Dave Nevison, A Bloody Good Winner) and that strange, tight-lipped community of trainers and jockeys, who, let’s be honest, often are in possession of knowledge or instructions that would significantly alter their nag’s price if it was widely known. I am not saying this is crooked, but anyone who doesn’t think there is what we might call gamesmanship in racing is deluding themselves. Racing has a slightly seedy reputation among the general population and it has only itself to blame for that, though I accept that much has been done to clear the sport up.
The whole thing about racing personalities is a bit overplayed: look at Lester Piggott, a man with all the personality of a paper cup but still the housewives’ favourite in his day simply because he won them money regularly and made people feel they were getting their stake money’s worth! Jockeys, to quote Jeffrey Bernard, are ‘rich little men’, a description in which I’d replace ‘men’ with ‘miseries’, but that doesn’t matter, because if they win enough and big enough they’ll have their followers.
Racing has also vanished from popular culture. When you think about how our language is littered with racing terminology it’s strange that, unless you go out of your way to follow it, it has become almost invisible. I put this down to a certain creeping liberal priggishness about anything that makes money out of animals, especially animals that are whipped to succeed. The fact is that in an age when our popular culture is molded by nominally centre-left, youth-obsessed trendies, anything to do with a sport enjoyed by the Queen and the monied country set in general will be deeply infra-dig. The fact that it has a following at all classes is overlooked, as we saw from the BBC’s attitude towards it. Why isn’t a brilliant sportsman like Tony McCoy a household name?
In the end, I concluded, the only thing that can arrest the slow swan dive of interest in racing in Britain will be if the big bookies, greedy leeches that they are, are prepared to do something that is an anathema to them: give something away. Most industries have loss leaders. Look at pubs. They’ve created a generation of alcohol abusers by the simple expedient of making the top-shelf within the financial reach of everyone. They will, at various times, have had to take a hit to do it. Pubs that have house double special deals on spirits find that after the deal is up people drink at the raised price. Bookies will have to do something similar, because in order to profit from a taste you first have to create that taste in the first place: if young people can be induced to blow money on some of the drinks they do, then there’s a chance they can be induced to throw their money away backing favourites that lose – the bookies bread and butter and the racing industry in a nutshell.
Of course, the big bookies won’t do this. For them it’s roll on the day that it’s all cartoon racing and bleeping FOBs. Some bookies, like Paddy Power and Bet365 do new things and give bits back. But look at Ladbrokes’ loyalty card – after you’ve lost a packet with them they’ll give you a 20 quid free bet – and deduct the 20 quid which wasn’t free but a LOAN. I’m sure the managing director of Ladbrokes is one E. Scrooge.Somewhere in all this is a great sport and great fun. But, as I say, it is an acquired taste the younger generation will find it hard to take to.
The thing I hate about betting shops is when you drop by one early to have a look at the runners and the paper and the numbers game and the cartoon racing is all going 19 to the dozen, very loudly, and not a soul in the shop.
Tom wrote:
‘I see a few on here think they are an elite little group who criticize others but seldom start a thread themselves’
I don’t know about that but I wonder if this group, like most internet forums, will turn out to have an alienating faction of posters with an ungovernable taste for pedantry. I am a journalist by trade and, for a couple of years, ended up in racing journalism while working as a freelance. What was previously a fairly minor interest became a major one and I wanted to learn as much as I could about racing. One of the interesting things I found among racing journos – and to be fair it is a disease of the trade – is the amount of ego and pedantry involved. Perhaps that’s the same here, I haven’t been on her long enough to make the judgement. I start threads out of genuine desire to know what other racing fans think: eg. Is form study worth it? My biggest wins – in the thousands – came not from entirely random picking, but random picking within a framework of generally fancied horses and bookie’s odds. That has always paid better for me than form study, which is time consuming and laborious. Though I find form study pays off much better for me in jump racing.
