But phosphorous can be a serious problem for ecosystems, especially water systems where it can cause algal blooms. And it is very important to control the main channels through which it enters the environment. That’s why it’s so important to pick up leaves in urban areas.

Yup. One of the main sources of phosphorous pollution is fallen leaves (pdf), especially from the sort of deciduous trees you find bluebells growing beneath.

Pick up after your trees, Germaine.

It is partly the rise of selfish individualism, at the expense of the shared values of restraint. The Sixties had something to do with it; shared values seemed part of the stuffiness and conformism that young people found so repressive. (Reader, with my then shoulder-length hair, I was one of them.) Then came Thatcherism, which, for different reasons, had the effect of exulting the individual over society. To the yuppie, litter was something for other people to pick up.

It’s an interesting example, for me, because it’s self-refuting, in that it contains the correct answer while asserting the wrong one.

Although in the UK we associate it with Thatcher and the 1980s, the word Yuppie was an American coinage. The origin of the word is pertinent:

The term gained currency in the United States in 1983 when syndicated newspaper columnist Bob Greene published a story about a business networking group founded in 1982 by the former radical leader Jerry Rubin, formerly of the Youth International Party (whose members were called yippies); Greene said he had heard people at the networking group (which met at Studio 54 to soft classical music) joke that Rubin had “gone from being a yippie to being a yuppie”.

Those 1960s radicals keep cropping up, don’t they? Aslet says the ’60s had something to do with 1980s “selfishness”, Greene noticed that a radical ’60s leader had become an arch Yuppie.

In the USA, the syndrome was so well known and remarked on that later in the decade, in 1987, a film called Wall Street was made, exploring this phenomenon.

But that wasn’t the end of it. Juppie was coined for Japanese Yuppies. Buppie for black Yuppies, Guppie, for gay or green ones. The term cropped up everywhere, France had les Yuppies, Germany… all round the world. By the mid 1980s, Yuppies were everywhere.

So, here’s the proposition that Thatcher Derangement Advocates require us to accept. She came to power in 1979. Within five years, she had influenced the entire world and driven it to selfishness. Such was her power that this happened in the USA even before it did in the country she lived in.

This is complete drivel, fatuousness in a propeller hat, riding a unicycle in circles while making high pitched noises. Yet somehow it has become received wisdom, such that Mr Aslett could refer to it even while putting his finger on the real cause of the changes noticed in the 1980s.

We’re looking for a cause for this changed behaviour (though it was nothing like as clear a change as is made out), a cause that was world-wide. A cause that started to have its effect around 1980. Around the time that people born in 1960 were entering the workplace. Around the time that people who were teens in the 1960s were entering the most powerful time in their working lives.

Yup. It was the 1960s counter culture coming to adulthood. It’s as simple as that. The people causing the changes so lamented by Guardian writers were… the people who have become Guardian writers. If you doubt that for a moment, read this 2007 conversation between Piers Morgan and Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger.

As Mick Jagger put it, “We piss anywhere, man”. Others drop litter.

Now don’t get me wrong, I’m a child of the 1960s and the Stones were my band. But they were not caused by the woman who came to power 15 years after they became famous.

AVIVA-Berlin: How do you feel about the accusation that you have perhaps taken an anti-Semitic position concerning your statement about the Hamas and the Hezbollah as progressive social movements? (On: http://radicalarchives.org/2010/03/28/jbutler-on-hamas-hezbollah-israel-lobby/) Does that bother you more as a philosopher or on a personal level?
Judith Butler: Unfortunately, that clip was cut short and did not include all of my response. What I actually said was that although groups like Hamas and Hezbollah should be described as left movements, that like all left movements, one has to choose which ones one supports and which ones one refuses. They are “left” in the sense that they oppose colonialism and imperialism, but their tactics are not ones that I would ever condone. I have never supported either group, and my very public affiliation with a politics of non-violence would make it impossible for me to support them. The editing of my response was obviously an effort to distort my view, and I am very sorry that the distortion has been able to circulate as it has. Thank you for giving me the chance to clarify what I actually said and what I have always thought.

I’m starting to find this sort of thing rather charming. There’s only one movement today that seeks to establish a genuine, non-metaphoric, empire, colonising the whole world in the process. It’s lovely to see Judith say, of two of the most prominent members of this movement, that they “oppose colonialism and imperialism”.

And look! She’s channelling the strapline of Howard the Duck:

As for vulnerability: it seems clear to me that in being named “a boy” or “a girl” we are vulnerable to the language that others use to describe us. We are brought into the world by being named by others, and that primary vulnerability is there, before we have any power to name ourselves. Do we ever escape the social interpellations of others? Do we ever escape the social imprint? Or do we struggle with and against that legacy we never chose?

Lovely, lovely, lovely.

The piece is educational too. Setting aside for a moment the struggle for the basic human right to be born spontaneously, into a vacuum, without parents or language, she explains an important concept to her German interviewer:

So if we fight for the rights of gay people to walk the street freely, we have to realize first that some significant number of those people are also in jeopardy because of anti-immigrant violence – this is what we call “double jeopardy” in English.

Yes, “double jeopardy” is what we call – in English – facing two different types of threat. Double, as in two; jeopardy, as in danger. See?

Does the professor genuinely not know that double jeopardy means being tried twice in court on the same set of evidence (and is widely prohibited around the world), or is this performance art? Does it matter? Can it affect our delight at her suggestion that war might be prevented by dance?

Of course not. For people of my age – which is roughly the same as that of Butler, these Cretaceous feminists are as comforting, and irrelevant as a long-lost ball of darning wool: a reminder of one’s childhood, completely useless today.

Let’s end with the sight of her wibbling away about overcoming “otherness”, contentedly oblivious to the irony that her entire life seems devoted to creating a sense of “otherness” and the denial of human commonality – a commonality that makes it completely proper, a duty even, to apply the same standards to everyone, regardless of race, colour or gender, even though Ms Butler thinks of such universalism as racist.

AVIVA-Berlin: In an interview with Jill Stauffer you said that getting to know “the other” is connected to the challenge of reacting non-violently. But to what extent is it possible to understand the other? Is it important to admit a certain “opacity”?
Judith Butler: Yes, we have to move away from the idea of “knowing” as mastery. Perhaps there is a way to think about “acknowledging” the vulnerability of the other, the equal rights of the other, and to pursue the question, “who are you?”. The question is a direct address, a way of entering into relation, but it is not the same as trying to possess the other through knowledge or relegating the “Other” to some permanent site of unknowability.

Judy, baby, the only person trying to relegate the “Other” to permanent unknowability is you.

Even intelligent commentators seem to think it unarguable that deeply-held beliefs against immigration, homosexuality or some religious beliefs are bigoted.

He writes as though it were a good thing to hold strong beliefs. This is a common error. That someone might have any beliefs at all is a bad thing, that they might be deeply-held is worse. Even if beliefs are not always bigoted, they’re unlikely to be right. If they were, no belief at all would be needed to hold them; the weight of evidence and argument, reason, would be sufficient. It should be an adequate refutation of a point of view merely to show that it is a belief, especially a deeply-held one.

And bigoted beliefs are always deeply-held. Cranmer continues:

Anyone who maintains their view in the face of modern social pressure is only following their conviction, which is often rooted in faith.

Well, that’s true enough, though disingenuous. Hatred of gays, transsexuals and other completely normal, natural forms of human sexuality, for example, has to be maintained not in the face of “modern social pressure” but in the teeth of modern knowledge.

The word ‘bigot’ does have an accepted meaning: it is the obstinate and blind, often nasty and hypocritical, attachment to a particular creed.

Well, yes. Quite.

A self-refuting argument. That calls for a new tag, I think.