Belfast Blogs.com

'Civilisation is crumbling,' said Bill the Butcher (right) in 'Gangs of New York.'Bill was correct, of course. Just a century or so premature in his diagnosis.But two news items today indicate that Bill's prescient prediction is now coming true.Firstly, a book written by a chimp has been nominated for a best first book award.Now, I'm going out on a limb here, but I reckon that the monkey didn't write the book. No matter how many years he was chained to a typewriter. I'm guessing it was written by a bunch of marketing scum, seeking to 'create some buzz' around nothing by billing their verbal silage as being the product of a monkey.Every year, tens of thousands of debut novels emerge onto the market to a resounding silence from the media, the review pages, the awards lists. This is how it...

Are we all programmed to be racist? Is a degree of racist response endemic in our DNA? I was wondering about this while the Celebrity Big Brother programme row over racism raged last week both in the media and in comments from senior politicians like Gordon Brown.I have a theory, which I will happily admit to nicking partly from my old pal Missing Neighbour, about the nature of racism and why, despite the fact that our contemporary intelligence would counter such insane prejudice, many people are still capable of iterating racist opinions.The gist is basically that we're predisposed to fear as 'the other' those from visually different tribal backgrounds as ourselves, since back in the day they offered a tangible threat to available resources (ie they'd nick your bint, your grub and then...