Saturday, November 1, 2003
Lunatic Infringements «
Jim Henley called the lunatic stalker a pussy and then worried if he had gone too far. Jim points out that said lunatic has updated his blog every day since then, but has not seen fit to deny the story that he threatened Atrios with a nuisance suit, or, indeed, expand on his reasons. Better legal minds that Backword’s such as Glenn Reynolds think the case is specious.
There is much about the lunatic that we fail to understand. It seems that Paul Krugman called him a ‘stalker’ which he duly recorded in an article with the charming title ‘We Stalked. He Balked.’ In this piece, he doesn’t deny the stalking charge; nor does he use scare quotes around the word ‘stalked’ to distance himself from it. Glenn Reynolds then used the phrase “stalking Paul Krugman” but no suit followed. Misha weighs in with some, to my mind, tasteless anti-Krugman invective, but wholehearted support for Atrios.
For one thing the lunatic calls his own site “Poor and Stupid” or “Poor and Stupid: The Maximum Leader of the Krugman Truth Squad” (“Maximum Leader”? sounds a little like Generalissimo) — this isn’t a self-reference, though for all we know it is true, but a shorter version of “The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid.” Poor, we have no issue with. The “Conspiracy to Keep You … Stupid,” we have. Albert Einstein did not speak until age 3. Now we accept that diet and environmental stimulation have some bearing on adult IQ, but most researchers accept that intelligence (if it is real) is largely genetic, so the mute infant was as clever as the prolifically theorising adult. He did not become clever, nor could he be kept stupid. One can be kept ignorant, but not stupid.
Trudging through turgid and paranoid prose is not our idea of fun, so we did not progress far with the site. We did notice this gem of misinformation. A reader has unearthed an old column of Paul Krugman in Slate. One quote:
…I do not think of myself as an all-purpose pundit. I remember once (during the air phase of the Gulf War) seeing John Kenneth Galbraith making pronouncements on TV about the military situation, and telling friends that if I ever start pontificating in public about a technical subject I don’t understand, they should gag me.
Well, Krugman is a professor of economics, so when he says “a technical subject I don’t understand” he means something outside economics, like war. When the lunatic says “Well, Paul, that’s exactly what I’m trying to do,” he interprets that as “a technical subject where others disagree with me.” Not the same thing.
There is also a huge difference between military adventures in Kosovo, which prevented (or at least retarded) a humanitarian crisis, and intervention in Iraq over non-compliance with a UN resolution. It was up to the UN to decide if Saddam’s behaviour violated the resolution, not individual nations. For all that Saddam defied the weapons inspectors, he seems to have produced few WMDs, if any. I detect no hypocrisy there either.
The other thing I cannot find anywhere is evidence of any conspiracy of any sort. The title of the site implies that were it not for said conspiracy, we — or some of us — would be rich and clever, which requires that there is a path to these things. To prove a cover-up of, say, aliens or black helicopters, you need to prove that these things exist, that the authorities know about them (there may be aliens who are so good at hiding that no one is aware of them), and that they somehow gag the media. If any of these stages are there, they must be in code, because all I see is ad hominem ranting.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:55 pm GMT
Sunday, November 2, 2003
Doubt Thou The Stars Are Fire «
Ken MacLeod unearths an anti-Copernician site.
You may laugh at such archaic views, but not everyone agrees with you. (Were I a better researcher, or were I being paid for this, I could even find links.) Dr John Watson, the military surgeon, expressed surprise that his friend and companion, the famous and celebrated detective and scientist, Mr Sherlock Holmes, did not know whether the earth travelled round the sun or the reverse. And somewhere, Ludwig Wittgenstein asks what it would look like if the sun went round the earth (the implication being that you couldn’t tell). My personal fixed point, William Shakespeare, writes
Doubt thou the stars are fire;
Doubt that the sun doth move;
Doubt truth to be a liar;
But never doubt I love.
Hamlet. Act ii. Sc. 2. As an aside, I’ve always wondered how Shakespeare pronounced ‘move’ and ‘love.’
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:39 pm GMT
Monday, November 3, 2003
Free Registration Required, Yada Yada Yada «
Gregory Djerejian ‘fisks’ Maureen Dowd’s NY TImes Op-Ed Pros at the Con. He’s clearly angry, and it distorts his vision. (I’d have been happier posting these criticisms as comments, but his site doesn’t take them.)
Leave aside the gratuitous insult about Sports Illustrated being the on-board read on Air Force I rather than TNR.
Dowd:
The new movie “Shattered Glass” recounts the absorbing tale of how a pathological and smarmy young man fooled the brainy journalists at the publication referred to in the film as “the in-flight magazine of Air Force One.” (Though Ryan Lizza, a political reporter for The New Republic, jokes that with the current administration, Sports Illustrated is the in-flight magazine of Air Force One.)
The comment may be gratuitous, but it’s not Dowd’s own: it’s a TNR reporter’s self-deprecating remark, which I think shows that the TNR staff don’t take that sort of sobriquet altogether seriously. Gregory again:
Leave aside how Dowd depicts Bush in a harsher ethical light than the Jayson Blairs, Stephen Glasses and Janet Cookes of the world.
Dowd again:
For Cooke, Glass and Blair, their editors were the marks. But at least that unholy trio only soiled newsprint. For the Bush crowd, the American people were the marks.
Perhaps Bush is in a “harsher ethical light” — being President does tend to put one there.
Now we come to the crucial paragraph that Gregory objects to is:
Now we’re in the postwar war, and President Bush is still manipulating reality. He wants to obscure the intensity and nature of the opposition, choosing to lump anyone who resists the American occupation in the category of terrorist.
I think Bush uses the word ‘terrorist’ in an intentionally duplicitious way: he means those who seek to attack the United States and those whom who we happen not to like who oppress their countrymen; we don’t mention Turkey (the Kurds) or Saudi Arabia (just about everyone).
So indulge me while I attempt to phrase a generous interpretation of the term: I suggest that ‘terrorist’ means someone who is not elected, yet who pursues political ends through violence, and claims legitimacy through a supposed representation of an oppressed and voiceless mass. OK. this looks very like ‘freedom fighter’ but I subscribe to the one man’s — is another man’s —. If killing civilians is the mere criterion, then Bush is as guilty as Arafat. Here’s the C-in-C himself:
We have sent a message understood throughout the world: If you harbor a terrorist, if you support a terrorist, if you feed a terrorist, you are just as guilty as the terrorists. And the Taliban found out what we meant. (Applause.) Thanks to our great military, Afghanistan is no longer a safe-haven for terror, the Afghan people are free, and the people of America are more secure from attack. (Applause.) And we have fought the war on terror in Iraq. The regime of Saddam Hussein possessed and used weapons of mass destruction, sponsored terrorist groups, and inflicted terror on its own people. Nearly every nation recognized and denounced this threat for over a decade. Last year, the U.N. Security Council —in Resolution 1441 — demanded that Saddam Hussein disarm, prove his disarmament to the world, or face serious consequences. The choice was up to the dictator, and he chose poorly.
I didn’t hear Afghanistan called a “safe-haven for terror” when the USSR invaded and the predecessors of the Taliban were a bulwark against the communists: at the very least the enemy’s enemy; the ‘Afghan people’ were not considered.
“The regime of Saddam Hussein possessed and used weapons of mass destruction” indeed it did, during the Iran-Iraq war, but not it seems more recently. Halabja, the instance when Iraq ‘inflicted terror on its own people’ was in 1988; if President Bush means something else by that phrase, unlawful imprisonment, torture, he should look at Guantanomo Bay, which is under his own jurisdiction before he criticises others. (Please note that I do not think that Guantanomo Bay is on a par with Saddam’s crimes, but that if you can’t live by your own code, you have no right to interfere with others.) “The regime of Saddam Hussein … sponsored terrorist groups” in that it donated money to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers — as did many other Middle Eastern states. How much of IRA funds originated from the US? Or was calling themselves ‘Republicans’ sufficient protection?
Bush:
I acted because I was not about to leave the security of the American people in the hands of a madman. I was not about to stand by and wait and trust in the sanity and restraint of Saddam Hussein.
I fully accept that Saddam threatened Israel, Kuwait, and Iran, but how the hell did he threaten America? Remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or Cruise Missiles being parked in the UK? These were new dangers because deploying missiles in Cuba meant that for the first and only time, the USSR could attack the US. What was Saddam supposed to have, a hidden fleet of Saturn V rockets?
Time to quote Gregory at length.
And in a key national address, Bush said as follows:
“Some of the attackers are members of the old Saddam regime, who fled the battlefield and now fight in the shadows. Some of the attackers are foreign terrorists, who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on America and other free nations. We cannot be certain to what extent these groups work together. We do know they have a common goal — reclaiming Iraq for tyranny.” [emphasis added]
Put simply, Bush has been careful to say that resistance in Iraq is stemming from both terrorists and Saddam loyalists/holdouts (with very few exceptions, where he doesn’t make such a distinction, such as this one).
To be pedantic ‘some’ and ‘some’ does not necessarily add up to a whole. Some of the resistance could be purely criminal, those who wish to control oil wells, or drug production, or protection rackets, and don’t want an interfering police force. And while I agree that the resistance fighters, if they win, will be tyrants, it is not true that they are “reclaiming Iraq for tyranny” unless ‘tyranny’ means some form of government different to that practiced in the US. The Ba’ath Party were secular, nominally socialist, and redolent of the Nazis. Some of the resistance is likely to be looking to impose an Iranian-style theocracy, admittedly tyrannical, but not a reclamation of Ba’ath tyranny; this would be an invasion.
And whoa there George, what does “who have come to Iraq to pursue their war on America and other free nations” mean? Why anyone would go to Iraq to pursue a war on “free nations” — wouldn’t it make more sense to pursue that war within those nation’s borders, as was done in Bali and on 9/11? What evidence is there that anyone, anywhere wants to pursue a war against the rest of the world? Even al-Quaeda has an agenda: if they can reclaim their holy cities their war will end. None of us may like that, but it is distinct from an indiscriminate war on all “free nations.”
I contend that some of the Iraqi resistance is composed simply of criminals and thugs, people with no political ideology or agenda. They are not all, without bending the word unacceptably, ‘terrorists.’Gregory quotes
The official Bush administration position is that the attacks on coalition forces inside Iraq are the work of isolated gangs of Saddam loyalists and Baathist die-hards who, in some instances, have teamed up with an assortment of “foreign fighters,” Islamic radicals and even common criminals for individual strikes on U.S. troops. But an alternative view is gaining acceptance within the U.S. intelligence community about the origins of the campaign. Scraps of evidence-most not publicly acknowledged by the administration — suggest that Saddam and some of his top Baath Party lieutenants began detailed logistical planning and purchasing for possible guerilla fighting in the months before the war, officials say.
in order to ask:
The point here is that, if Mike Isikoff can see that the “official Bush administration position” (re: the source of the continuing attacks in Iraq) is that said attacks stem from a mixture of Saddam holdouts, Baathist die-hards, criminals and terrorists — why can’t Dowd see it?
Well, Bush nowhere says “criminals,” while “Saddam holdouts” and “Baathist die-hards” seem to be the same thing, while “terrorists” is used to mean religious zealots coming across the border to convert Iraq to a theocracy. And it seems to me that Bush is indeed lumping these people together as “baddies.” Isikoff’s argument makes little sense: I fail to see how the ‘planned-in-advance’ argument is an ‘alternative’ to the ‘die-hard’ supposition, either way they’ carrying on Saddam’s work. The “dozens — and possibly even hundreds — of ‘suicide vests’” might have been intended for the ”terrorist groups” Saddam sponsored. The occupiers have to learn from previous wars. Poland was behind the Iron Curtain from 1945 to 1989. Over those 44 years, it was nominally an athiest state, yet it is once again a stronghold of Catholicism and produced the present Pope. I would be very surprised if Iraq does not harbour many religious fanatics who will die to resist an invasion of Britney Spears, swimsuits, Sex And The City. gay marriage, and so on. They might even find some supporters in the US.
In short, I see no factual inaccuracy in Ms Dowd’s story.
There are some excellent other pieces in the Times: Noam Chomsky interviewed. Blueprint for a mess: “The official line from the White House and the Pentagon is that things in Baghdad and throughout Iraq are improving. But an average of 35 attacks are mounted each day on American forces inside Iraq by armed resisters of one kind or another…”
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:28 pm GMT
Tuesday, November 4, 2003
You Don’t Send Me Flowers «
This is what I call a memorial: “Memorial gifts may be made to any organization that seeks the removal of President George Bush from office.”
We could not fail to be moved by this from one of Neal Pollack’s highly-reliable correspondents who file from anonymous email addresses:
“Dear highly-placed media professional: As I lay here in my bed gazing at the dappled skylight sun in the Walter Reed Medical Center, I weep with joy at the mission I have just concluded. I believe so strongly in the United States military and everything for which it stands. We’re defending freedom all over the world, helping rid innocent people of the scourge of terrorism. I would gladly sacrifice another arm if I could help President Bush win this terrible war for the future of civilization.…”
Read the whole thing.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:03 pm GMT
Wednesday, November 5, 2003
Cat Blogging «
Kevin Drum posted a photo of his cat, Inkblot, in a box last week, so I might as well post an old one of my ex-cat, Tim, in an Amazon box I was intending to throw out.
When I say that Tim is an ex-cat, in a sense he was never mine, even in the limited way that we ‘own’ cats. As far as I ever knew, he ‘belonged’ to the house directly behind mine, though as their street is longer, and the houses are slightly different sizes, I never knew it was from the front. Not that I was inclined to go round: for one thing, I had no idea what to say.
He slept on my sofa the day after I bought it. I chased him out when I came downstairs, but he moved like one used to be chucked out that I felt guilty immediately. I’d see him on my shed roof or on the fence every so often, and I dubbed him ‘Chessboard’ because he was black-and-white, and I had to call him something. He was clearly out in all weathers. Sometimes I saw him perched on the window sill of the house behind peering in to their kitchen. He’d been coming into houses for years according to next door’s daughter, but must have had a home, and that house seemed to be the centre of his movements.
I saw him out one very unpleasant November night hunched against the rain, and apparently so inured to it that he didn’t even look for shelter. I opened the shed to give him cover at least, but my imcumbent cat Henry slipped in and chased him out.
He next showed up a few days later when I was in the garden and the back door was open, and blocked by Henry. ‘Chessboard’ decided to go in anyway, despite Henry makes angry noises that can only de described as ‘ululations’ and you didn’t need to be Dr Doolittle to understand that they were not benign. ‘Chessboard’ walked up to him anyway, touched his nose to Henry’s cheek in what resembled a kiss, and went in. Henry was too flabbergasted to respond. From then on, I called him ‘Tim Nice-But-Dim’ after the Harry Enfield character. Somehow, he became a fixture.
He started off extremely filthy, as if he’d just been swimming in mud, and from a line down his chest straight he was dirty. Over the weeks that followed this line sank until only his paws were still muddy, and, eventually, he was clean. I gave him the collar he is wearing, partly to ward off fleas, but mostly to indicate that he had a new home. I took him to the vet when he developed an abcess on his face. I waited a day as I thought that he’d tried to eat a wasp, but I paid for his treatment, I cleaned the wound.
Then he disappeared for a few days, and just as I grew worried and thought about notices, I saw him in another garden. He stayed out another day, and then came home unworried. Then he disappeared again. This time it took me longer to grow worried, and I realised that I had new neighbours.
Bastards.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:59 pm GMT
If you live in the UK, you’ll know that the fireworks season lasts about as long as summer in these isles (two months for the latter, according to Byron). Tonight should mark the end of it for a while, though I heard my first firework today at a quarter to eight.
I’d like to see them all banned, though there are fears that doing so would only drive them underground. Illegal fireworks are already linked to Irish loyalist paramilitary groups and the Real IRA.
The BBC runs this extremely dodgy story on the University of Aberystwyth physics department’s estimate on the damage Guy Fawkes (they call him “Catholic Fawkes,” although they fail to explain why this might be significant) might have caused.
For the calculation, they assumed that gunpowder had roughly the same power as TNT, and that the explosion was outside rather than in a basement.
For the first assumption, if TNT has the same power as gunpowder, why did it take off? For the second, there were 36 barrels of gunpowder in the cellar, and I’ve always wondered how they got there, I’ve never considered Guy shifting the lot somewhere else by himself undetected. (It does provoke cartoon images of him holding a barrel his own size and hiding behind a pillar every time someone goes past.) If he used 25 times the needed gunpowder, might that not have been because the cellar, being underground, and next to a river, might have been damp? Pretty specious overall.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:31 pm GMT
Thursday, November 6, 2003
I Walk The Line «
It was only after I started this blog that I began reading others blogs. Just as it’s sometimes writing poetry that gets people reading it, keeping a blog made me look around for successful models. One of these was the eclectic and seemingly indefatigable Rebecca Blood whose site is lifted from the impersonal with her very succinct film reviews, her personality portrait, and her score on the Political Compass. Working under T.S. Eliot’s excellent maxim that “immature poets imitate, mature poets steal” I filched this idea for myself.
I got bored of it quickly. That was my adolescent phase of blogging, picking up and discarding trends in search of a style.
I largely forgot about the political compass test, but last month I had an email asking how I’d score (from a friend who turned out to left-libertarian like me, when both of us considered him more left than me, and more communitarian, if not authoritarian; I’m the anarchist — he’s the regular socialist, and so votes for Plaid).
Well, imagine my surprise when Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber announced that Tim Lambert had constructed a chart of bloggers’ scores with the following proviso
At the moment about two thirds of the entries are on the left side. I think this is because left bloggers are more likely to read left blogs, so links to this page have propagated more in left blogspace.
I’d add another, bloggers, by definition spend a lot of time alone (I couldn’t imagine doing this with normal office distractions), so the results may be unrepresentatively skewed toward ‘libertarians.’ the cells on the table are not evenly sized: those above 0 on the Authoritarian/Libertarian axis are much smaller, and a graph shows the true state of play. The other possibility is that we have all accepted the dangers of deference to authority from the example of Nazi Germany, and consider that the ‘right’ answer is one which favours personal responsibility. (I have no idea how to test this.)
Most of the results lie along a line, which suggests that the two dimensional model is unnecessary. There are one or two exceptions, Russell Arben Fox being alone in the top left. He has written a paper called “Towards a ‘Canonical’ theory of Mormonism” which may explain something; the Mormons being communitarian and practice tithing, ie voluntary progressive taxation. He notes:
…one thing is certain: if quizzes like these, with all their faults, fairly accurately reflect or reveal the overwhelming liberal individualist ethos which shapes the modern world — and I’m afraid that they do — then communitarians like he [The Plainsman] and I are going to have a pretty lonely time of it, for perhaps a pretty long time.
Certainly, their position is where I would expect the traditional left to be. Orwell called himself a ‘libertarian socialist’ but he took pains to distance himself from the established parties. Maybe, because we have all read Orwell, and few have really read Marx, he has turned his revolt into style.
I’m about to let my Labour Party membership lapse, even though Dennis Skinner is still on board. I thought I was too left-wing for the party these days but British Spin is to the left of me, as is Nick Barlow, and he’s a Lib Dem!
The tests make no allowances for intelligence, as I added myself to the table a second time when I reloaded the page to see who else had registered. Nearly two hundred now.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:21 pm GMT
ESA may cancel its search for earth-like planets.
Ballpoint pens work in space (from Metafilter, naturally).
Voyager is about to cross the “Termination Shock” (see helpful (!?) picture).
While the exact location of the termination shock is not known, it is very possible that Voyager 1 will complete the termination shock phase of the mission between the years 2001 and 2003 when the spacecraft will be between 80 and 90 AU from the Sun.
New Scientist thinks that it has reached a boundary where the Sun’s influence starts to wane, and has a slightly clearer graphic which shows the planetary orbits but not the interstellar wind.
In around 2020, Voyager 1 is expected to reach the heliopause at roughly 135 AU. This is where the Sun’s influence fades away entirely and interstellar space begins. Astronomers will then get their first chance to measure the magnetic fields and energetic particles of interstellar space.
And I only wanted to know whether that hot borg was still onboard.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:25 pm GMT
Conspiracy (via Metafilter) or cock-up (from DangerousMeta, who uses the reliable comic standby of computer translated text)?
Ten years ago, one of my flatmate’s friends on Cardiff’s post-grad journalism course spoke Arabic, and planned to work in the Middle East. I told him that if he did, he’d be approached by the security services. He told me not to be so stupid. I always wonder if he was.
Whatever, the truth is likely to be stranger than we imagine, and all parties will have acted in stupider ways than anyone can conceive possible.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:42 am GMT
Friday, November 7, 2003
No Going Back «
Christopher Hitchens’s latest spiel.
Before the war, it was a staple of anti-interventionist argument that Saddam was too well-armed to be attacked and would unleash weapons of mass destruction in a horrific manner.
This is one of the ironies of the conflict: now the pro-war side are pleased that he hadn’t any such weapons.
Thanks to the intervention, Saddam Hussein has been verifiably disarmed, and a full accounting of his concealment and acquisition programs is being conducted. Where is the objection to that? Why so much surliness and resentment?
Because we fought a war over WMD, and now that Saddam has been “verifiably disarmed” he is as armed as he was before.
I am pleased to notice the disappearance from the peacenik argument of one line of attack — namely that Saddam Hussein was “too secular” to have anything to do with jihad forces.
Well, I always thought it was the other way around; they wouldn’t have anything to do with him. I still do.
The alliance between his [Saddam’s] murderous fedayeen and the jihadists is now visible to all — perhaps there are some who are still ready to believe that this connection only began this year.
Hmm. Max Hastings; Arthur Silber.
The literal-minded insistence that all government rhetoric be entirely scrupulous strikes me, in view of the above, as weird. It can only come from those who were not willing to form, or to defend, positions of their own: in other words, those for whom Saddam would not have been a problem unless Bush tried to make him into one.
I’ve read this several times, and I just want to know what the Hitch is smoking. None of what came before seemed like a justification of government lying (which is what I take unscrupulous rhetoric to mean). The second sentence passes all understanding. Those who Hitch counts as ‘forming or defending’ “positions of their own” naturally took his position, taking any other is, clearly, cheating. C’mon Hitch, “problem” here is a weasel word. Say “threat” however, and I’m your man. “Saddam would not have been a threat unless Bush tried to make him into one.”
Arguments about democracy and reform cannot be phrased in terms of U.N. resolutions — especially when two of the relevant regime’s clients are among the permanent membership of the Security Council — but there is every reason to believe that the United States has chosen the right side in the region, in principle as well as in practice.
This rather begs the question that there is a ‘right’ side, something I do not subscribe to.
Credit to Hitchens on one point, he takes on the sleeping giant that is George Bush, Snr. and Brent Scowcroft’s A World Transformed. He does in it in a way which is not entirely scrupulous with his own rhetoric. Take his title Waiting for Saddam to change is what got us into this mess in the first place, and then read the passage that he quotes. Where do Bush and Scowcroft even hint that they were waiting for Saddam to change?
Hitch in Slate has tended to be pretty good, but this piece should come with the warning that it was recommended by his fellow JFK liberal, Pollard.
I admit that my own crystal ball was cloudy; I thought the war would take longer than it did.
Realistically, we can’t withdraw. The consequences would win us no friends and make us look weak. But staying in looks like giving us Ulster with suicide bombers.
Dave Winer claims we can’t win in Iraq so let’s get out, now, and links to his earlier piece written on March 28, three days before I said that we couldn’t leave. He was right.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:55 pm GMT
Saturday, November 8, 2003
Two Can Play At That Game «
Ughh. Cockroaches.
Joe set down the bowl of microwaved Freedom Fries. He couldn’t eat and watch those disgusting insects, or, or whatever they were. Too late, he realised that he’d knocked the remote with the bowl and it now sat at the far end of the coffee table, just beyond the length of his arm.
President Bush came on the screen, but Joe couldn’t follow what he was saying. Why was the Pres talking about cockroaches anyway? Joe took a slug of his beer to half empty the can and, there!, tapped the remote using the can to extend his reach. Then he glanced at the screen, damn cockroaches again. What were they talking about?
The TV showed a big city, there was a big clock and red buses. Joe knew that place, that was England, London, or was it the other way round? Then more cockroaches. He looked away and tapped the remote again. C’mere baby! but as he dragged the remote back with the can he pulled it too hard and it flipped off the coffee table and landed somewhere near Joe’s feet, in that blind spot obscured by his stomach.
Unable to see, Joe kicked about, and checked the screen again — more cockroaches, then another city, this time the one with the pointy building. Joe didn’t see how people could live in that. It must get cold in winter. Then people eating those green things that jump! That was almost more disgusting than the cockroaches.
“France,” the announcer said, “a country roughly the size of Iraq.”
Joe kicked about a bit and sent the remote skittering across the floor. He could see it now, but it wasn’t even worth trying to retrieve.
Joe sighed and watched some more cockroaches and people in some funny ruins and driving like idiots, and others drinking beer while wearing silly shorts. President Bush came back on. Joe cast a hopeful glance at the remote, hoping that a breeze might blow it back to him.
It looked like he might have to get up.
“So you see,” President Bush said “Europeans are worse than cockroaches, but don’t worry.” Was that a wink? “We begin bombing in five minutes…”
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:43 pm GMT
I admit that I have been sceptical about BBC bias in the past, but it was brought home to me with great force over my cereal this morning.
I’ve become an admirer of Clive Anderson’s The Sharp End since I first caught it two weeks ago. The formula seems to be, after three viewings, two MPs (one Tory, one Labour, no Lim Dem), one journo, one popular culture person, divers others to make up numbers.
Labour were represented by someone I’d never heard of, who strongly suggested Agent Smith having taken possession of Michael Meacher’s body. Perhaps getting older makes policemen look younger, and all politicians looks the same. Or perhaps they always did. A glamourous young Asian woman stood for the Tories — if that’s Howard’s first move, I’m very impressed. Sadly, she clearly assumed that if Blunkett and Straw could just steal Howard’s ideas, she could use New Labour speak, and nothing she said after the phrase ‘joined up’ registered. To be fair, at the end, she unwound a little and started talking a more natural Estuary demotic which was much more appealing.
The others were George Galloway, better than exected, a good-looking Times journo who slagged off Granita brilliantly, describing it as so poor that if you proposed there, you knew the marriage wouldn’t last, if you even arranged to meet someone again, you knew even knew that would get broken off. Like the Asian Tory, he was mostly overruled by the other, duller, speakers, which is where we come to BBC bias.
I know that television is entertainment, and that hacks and pols can be dull, but has ‘comedy terrorism’ entered the mainstream? I don’t know who the other guy was (I’m lousy at names), but someone should tell him that he should get some jokes first, and that Harry Enfield did ‘Tory Boy’ years ago, when it was topical; it’s merely poor taste now. It was clearly the producer’s idea of running down the right: they produce an acceptable candidate, so we sent them up with someone who’s watched a bit of Ali G and decided that he can act daft on telly too. It made you yearn for the good old days of discussion programmes, when they had real people on, like Tracey Emin or Oliver Reed. If he had been real, he would have worn a poppy.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:14 pm GMT
Sunday, November 9, 2003
The Ultimate Question «
(Made with the Chuch Sign Generator.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:33 pm GMT
Some stuff is too good to forget, but I haven’t the time or the energy (or the intelligence) to add decent commentary. So here, in the first of an occasional series are a few decent blog entries which I think are worth reading.
Sociobiological Song Lyrics (2 Blowhards).
Courage in honesty (Tacitus).
“[I]t is neither rational nor reasonable to expect those who can opt out to opt in.” (Timothy Burke).
L’Affaire Easterbrook (Jim Henley).
Donald Luskin (Atrios).
The Meatrix cannot be explained; you have to see it.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:19 pm GMT
Monday, November 10, 2003
Kim, Ill-Hung? «
The Antic Muse disses a certain essay in her usual acidulous manner. And that, I thought, would be the end of it. When dissed by the Muse, one stays dissed. But the Philosoraptor, while admitting that the piece is “not worth the powder to blow to hell” does just that, with great style and vim.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:17 pm GMT
I originally found these pictures through Ken MacLeod.
Atrios takes it to a whole new level. (I particularly like the placard of the NYFD fireman in silhouette. There was a fireman in the Village People? Disco Inferno!)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:52 pm GMT
This has to be the BEST Crooked Timber Post EVER!
Read the whole thing. Yay!
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:06 pm GMT
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Donald Luskin Is A Big Idiot «
Is it coincidence or is Neal Pollack’s answer to his critics strangely redolent of Atrios, Paul Krugman, and the stalker? Pollack deserves the final word but the New Yorker keeps its jack knife out of site until the fatal moment:
Luskin’s Krugman-baiting … is the latest incarnation of an old tradition, dating back to the days of that great Colonial pundit Thomas Paine, who was hounded relentlessly by William Cobbett, …
While both are largely out of print, at Amazon there is rather more of Tom Paine than there is of William Cobbett. And I know which of them I learned at school.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:40 pm GMT
Ale, man, ale’s the stuff to drink
For fellows whom it hurts to think:
Look into the pewter pot
To see the world as the world’s not.
A. E. Housman
One of the things I hate about Cardiff is that there is so little decent beer. Hell, I moved here in the belief that all Welsh ale would be as good as Felinfoel Double Dragon, but as that’s brewed near Swansea, and all the pubs here are owned by the Cardiff brewer Brains, it’s easier to find a pub in London that sells it than it is here. So, by unconscious but appropriate choice, I drank Spitfire (from Kent) last night. Appropriate because Sunday was Remembrance Sunday (Veterans’ Day in the US). I nearly gagged at finding a photo of Michael Howard drinking the same in the News of The World.
As I only opened the paper because of their headline Is Charles Bisexual? I was in no position to condemn anyone. I mean someone held it up during the Conway pub quiz (one of the snobs, who, like me, instincitvely corrected Cath’s pronounciation of ‘Arkansas’). It’s been a long time since I read Plato, but aren’t we all bisexual? I consider myself heterosexual, but I experienced enough Michael Portillo moments when younger to live by Terence’s maxim: “Nihil humanum a me alienum puto.”
Roy Hattersley argues that royal behaviour is irrelevant to the debate, anyway.
On humanity, I don’t know what to make of this The host, Andrew Wilcow, is saying that the NBC movie is “all liberal propaganda”" to “make the Iraqis look human” from Hesiod’s comments. The Iraqis aren’t human? Are they Venusians? or blood-drinking nine-foot lizards? or cockroaches? Did we invade Iraq to liberate animals? We should be told.
I have so much to say on these subjects, that I keep trying then editing myself. This is as close to a raw (and regrettable version) as I can accept.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:31 pm GMT
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
They Also Survey «
For all its superficical idiocy, I’m beginning to wonder if there isn’t something in Kim duToit’s nation of women theory. (I’m not even going to raise objections to the argument beyond pointing out that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, and that the Davy Crockett example, apart from the fact that he didn’t look a bit like John Wayne, implies that other men didn’t go to Texas.) We, men, and we are largely men, have taken to filling out surveys, a passtime which used to be confined to the inner pages of Cosmopolitan. Of course, those surveys were largely about body shape or sexual activity, where our manly surveys are about politics. (Would now be a good moment for a Chinese election joke? No.) It comes to the same thing. Skiving and mindless narcissism in one package.
Chris Lightfoot has developed another survey following Tim Lambert’s chart of bloggers’ scores on the Political Compass. Again, it’s a two-dimensional model. (When I was a student, I considered multidimensional models of personality and behaviour, and then started envisioning them in hyperspace. I nearly went crazy. Two dimensions is nice and safe.) I’d like to see them actually test some bods like Tony Benn and Charles Kennedy (obviously Hilter, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein are not available) rather than second-guess their answers.
I’m Position 1 left/right -6.8884 (-0.4146) 2 pragmatism +3.1217 (+0.1879) which puts me a touch left of and more pragmatic than Charles Kennedy. (Would now be a good moment for a drinking joke? No.) I’m quite near Tony Benn. (Yay!) I don’t really get the idealistic/pragmatic aspect at all. I’m as pragamtic as Michael Howard, which will enormously disappoint any Tory who knows me, and hoped for something better of the new leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition.
Again there is a page for showing the results of your navel-gazing.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:38 pm GMT
Last night on Radio 4 Jack Straw blamed “knee-jerk anti-Americanism” for the planned demonstrations next week (also discussed in the Torygraph). Bush has his fans: The Thinker draws our attention to the George-Bush-is-great-a-thon over at Pollard’s Place. Mr Straw is not alone in his analysis:
A crass anti-Americanism has crept into our culture.
Irvine Welsh interviewed in the Guardian. He continues:
We need to remember that it’s the oil-greedy government led by an Ivy-League rich brat who used his family connections to avoid serving in Vietnam, who are sending troops into Iraq, not the American people.
Ridicule of Bush is all over the US: check Metafilter, as well as individuals like Atrios, Counterspin, and TBOGG.
Calling it anti-American is just an attempt to make Mr Straw’s opponents look prejudiced. Americans call other Americans anti-American: witness Citizen Smash’s humourless bullying in response to Tom Tomorrow’s ‘chickenhawk’ cartoon. I was prepared to make an attempt to like Citizen Smash (as he took his military moniker from The Simpsons), but he misses the point by a mile (the fact that some ‘warbloggers’ have served in the military does not mean that some haven’t). And I thought thin-skinned mewling and reading oppression into every joke was a ‘politically correct’ liberal trait.
I like Americans. I think that it would be a good thing if we were more like them: fully republican, with our own Bill of Rights, and a Constitution which protected free speech. When will we see Melanie Phillips or Stephen Pollard write with this level of honesty and candour?
Update on the Citizen Smash/Tom Tomorrow dispute: Democratic Veteran grumbles about reservists coming home to no jobs. Kevin Roderick calls Mr Smash ‘thin skinned.’ and Oliver Willis agrees, while in Oliver’s comments comments, nate-dogg says:
That cartoon made me think of Andrew Sullivan and Den Beste and Lileks and quite frankly, I laughed my ass off. Those guys are fucking tools and I can’t see enough fun poked at them.
Fellow poster, Gregory Litchfield, takes offense:
Nate Dogg — So the stifling of dissent and suppression of freedom of speech is perfectly fine with you, when it’s done to the right?
‘Fun poked at’ == ‘stifling of dissent and suppression of freedom of speech.’ Thin-skinned indeed. (Links found through Blogdex.)
FINAL UPDATE: The Mighty Reason Man posts a timeline. READ THE WHOLE THING.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:15 pm GMT
Thursday, November 13, 2003
Kenny Come Home «
The Thinker thinks that Ken Livingstone should not be readmitted to the People’s Party.
Just because Livingstone is powerful, popular, and has not been the widely-predicted disaster as Mayor for London, he should not have the rules bent in his favour.
British Spin disagrees. Too late. I paid the price for waiting: I thought that, given the choice between winning an election and acting on principle, Blair would choose the former. Good to see the old Blair back and behaving in character.
Paul “The Thinker” Richards clearly considers this an exception; I think that it’s part of a pattern.
There are many reasons I dislike Blair, and one is that he’s surprisingly weak. He should have sacked Clare Short earlier this year when she called him “reckless”; he should have done something about Gordon Brown. Again British Spin disagrees.
I find these stories terribly annoying, because as with a marriage, the secrets of the relationship lie only with the affianced.
Terribly gallant, but what of the others in the marriage, like Charlie Wheelan and Alastair Campbell?
In both their interests (Brown’s especially, if he ever wants to be leader), Brown should have been moved to a different ministry. Brown treats the Treasury as one to the manor born. Political careers always end in failure, as Enoch Powell noted, and ministers should keep moving while they are ambitious. Brown knows everything about raising money now and nothing about spending it. I would be unhappy with a prospective Prime Minister who had not run one of the large departments of state. Blair had an excuse.
The decision to rehabilitate Ken is shocking given Ken’s plans for the POTUS visit next week. Does Blair think he can call the protests off?
On that subject, there is not one paragraph in Peter Oborne’s leader in the Spectator on the state visit that does not shock me.
I think that we’re already in the post-Blair era, only we don’t know it yet. If Tony is to survive, he needs a “night of the long knives” and to show the party who’s boss. Clare Short can insult him openly with impunity. Brown seems to ignore him. Ken Livingstone can flout party protocols.
The Labour front bench looks much shabbier than it did in 1997. Robin Cook was a classic parliamentarian. He’s gone.
Frank Field had original ideas. He’s gone.
Clare Short seemed human. She’s gone.
David Blunkett is embarking on Labour’s answer to the poll tax: ID cards will offend almost everyone, be expensive to introduce, and gum up the machinery of the state.
Unless Blair radically reshapes the government before the end of the year, kicking out almost all the dead wood, the party will riot like The Belles of St Trinian’s.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:48 pm GMT
I once got out of an elevator on the wrong floor. That was years ago and I’ve never done it since, but this despicable cartoon clearly degrades me and tens of thousands of others who have made a similar mistake.
Also, I was never selected to be an astronaut. I don’t know why, I made my own space suit out of bacofoil and everything, so the accompanying article running down scientists and NASA is a disgrace, not only to those who have flown in space, but to those like me who watched them on television.
If it helps, I really liked Apollo 13 too.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:28 pm GMT
It may be a little perverse, but I’m cheered by Michael Howard’s leadership of the Tories so far.
He had a good first PMQ, rebutting Blair’s expected attack on his ministerial and ideological past with a dossier of Blair’s stated opinions from his early days in Parliament. (Even though I warmed to the erstwhile-CND member, who had praised the strikers at Wapping and criticized ‘American state-sponsored terrorism.’)
The Prime Minister looked as if he had not expected that dossier. It rather evened things up. But Mr Howard’s arrival as Opposition leader had evened things up all round.
Frank Johnson in the Telegraph. Nick Assinder for the BBC, expects Mr Howard to “continue to unnerve the prime minister.” In the Guardian, Sarah Hall wrote that “Howard’s display delight[ed] Tories,” but her colleague Simon Hoggart was less impressed especially with the “demented cheering” and the “noise [that] roared and swilled round the chamber, sloshing against the walls like dirty water in a washing machine, the sound of the world’s most aggressive sycophants.”
It’s nice to get back to decent opposition. It feels like a democracy again.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:57 pm GMT
Friday, November 14, 2003
Wild As Any Freedom Loving Racist «
Wild as any freedom loving racist
I applaud the actions of the chief
Tell me now oh beautiful and spacious
Am I in trouble with the Jazz police?
Leoard Cohen Jazz Police
The Independent calls it a “fraught and ill-timed exercise.” The protestors say “If he wants to make a state visit that isn’t marred by protest, he should do it on another island.” Excellent links and commentary on MeFi.
What will happen when he comes? Well the Queen would rather he didn’t embarrass the palace again (the way he did in 1991), and she’d be happier watching the horses and Corrie, according to the Spectator. Bush doesn’t want to meet the common people either: US wants ban on protests during Bush visit.
The Americans are only now waking up the the fact that London is going to greet Bush with what at best will be massive demonstrations against him, and at worst violence, rioting and maybe even terrorism.
Then again maybe even not, of course, but don’t let considerations like that stop Melanie Phillips. Note subtle, almost accidental, confusion of peaceful protest with terrorism.
But surely this reaction is just anti-Americanism? Compare these views.
I think George W Bush will come to be regarded as one of the truly great US Presidents: courageous, determined and strategically and morally perceptive.
But getting back to Bush. If we use old-fashioned paper ballots and have them counted in the precinct where they are cast, he will be swept from office. He’s made every error you can. He’s wrecked the economy. Unemployment is up. People can’t find jobs. Poverty is up. It’s a total mess. How does he make such a mess? Well, he is plainly very stupid.…
Well, nobody has ever wrecked the Bill of Rights as he has. Other presidents have dodged around it, but no president before this one has so put the Bill of Rights at risk. No one has proposed preemptive war before. And two countries in a row that have done no harm to us have been bombed.
Gore Vidal. Only one is American.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:20 pm GMT
I know that I run down all the bias-seekers in the news, but I have my own complaint to make about the World at One. This goes out at lunch time, a time, in this country at least, when people eat lunch. They should introduce a humour warning before certain items, especially those which don’t seem to be funny at all like this story.
Margaret Hodge, one-time leader of Islington Council, wrote to the BBC and described a victim of child-abuse as “extremely disturbed.” Not funny at all, until Nick Clarke casually mentioned that the victim, Demetrious Panton, now worked for John Prescott. What if I’d been eating a pretzel? What if I had fallen over and hit my head? My death would not be at all funny (unlike other people’s which are routinely hilarious).
I don’t know whether this is part of the New Labour tradition of departments spinning against each other, or whether she is “in need of a long rest” — as Catherine Bennett (last article) put it. Hodge is backed by Peter Hain, minister for permatanning, so she should go.
Did you know that Peter Hain was in fact born in this country? So how does he speak with an accent? Because he never listens to anyone.
OK, it’s an old Henry Kissinger joke, but it’s still funny.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:19 pm GMT
Have you seen the old man,
In the closed down market,
Picking up the papers,
With his worn out shoes,
In his eyes you see no pride,
And hanging loosely at his side,
Yesterdays paper,
Telling yesterdays news,
So how can you tell me you’re lonely,
And say for you that the sun don’t shine,
Well let me take you by the hand,
And lead you through the streets of London,
I’ll show you something to make you change your mind.
Ralph McTell
The political commentary that appeared yesterday was my response to finding hits from the Daily Kos (a sort of political Slashdot), where I was listed as in reply to a user’s question about British ‘political blogs.’ (The user who mentioned me gives Political Site of the Day as his/her homepage.) So I thought I ought to at least attempt to live up/down to my reputation.
I’m listed with three other sites. British Spin, yes, understand that. Peter Cuthbertson, Mm-hmm, serious wonk. But Last Night’s BBC News? At least us three make stuff up. (But not as much as Alastair Campbell, ha ha.)
Just the name takes me back to the old Ralph McTell song, which reached number 2 in 1974, according to EveryHit.com. Broke my heart, it did. (And like Yoda speak, me it made, yes.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:58 pm GMT
Saturday, November 15, 2003
No Direction Home «
While we understand that The Poor Man put an end to list-making on the internet, the Guardian still forges ahead with its world’s 40 best directors. I can’t fathom the criteria; they seem to be living — so no Eisenstein, Bergman, or Kubrick. But quite a few are past their best.
I can’t see how any list can include Lynne Ramsay whose Ratcatcher was excellent on period detail and realism, but deadly boring.
Pedro Almodovar “spins soulful, spellbinding stories and creates characters that ring with life” or alternatively churns out dull camp trash that makes “Queer eye for the straight guy” look like Tarkovsky.
Paul Thomas Anderson? I loved the first half of Magnolia but I lost the will to live when it refused to end.
I vowed never to see another David Fincher film after Alien 3, and OK, Fight Club was acceptable, but I never saw the point of Se7en, I mean were you supposed to say “Se-seven-en”? Rather cruel to survivors of unusual speech impediments, and it was like CSI with a bit of voodoo and none of the intelligence.
Gus Van Sant made that film where River Whatisface fell asleep all the time. Every time I tried that in the cinema, some bastard’s mobile rang.
Martin Scorcese’s better films are behind him, so why not his contemporaries Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and George Lucas? No Woody Allen? Michael Mann is a long way from finished. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator was technically brilliant, and Alien and Blade Runner are close to essential movies. Has Spike Lee called it a day? Is Sam Mendes officially old now? Don’t Peter Weir or Baz Luhrman count?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:00 pm GMT
Sunday, November 16, 2003
Bush Baby «
British Spin has added eloquence to his usually trenchant analyses of late. On the subject of George Bush, however, he commits the old, and indeed, rather tired canard of assuming that the proposed protests against the state visit stem from anti-Americanism.
As regular blog-readers will know, discussion of American politics, especially where it concerns the president, arouses strong feelings.
Some of this dates back to the 2000 election. Many people feel that the victory was Mr Gore’s. Many Americans felt at the time that this presidency would be a disaster, or as the Onion presciently put it, “Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over.”
Other commentators have claimed that “anti-war left, who let the visits of Mugabe and Assad pass without much protest” (spot the weasel-word “much,”; Peter Tatchell has always protested Mugabe). (Some of us foolishly trusted Mr Blair when he told us that his government would have an “ethical foreign policy” and that New Labour would not court dictators.) But, it is true, Bush will attract more protest than other visitors. We have just fought a war in his name. We were lied to, to get us into that war. The American people were lied to. Many of them are angry. Many of them have been told that they cannot protest. If there is one right worth protesting for, it is the right to protest itself. If that is taken away, they can do what they like. I have grown tired of hearing about the “special relationship” — that was a bond between Thatcher and Reagan as ideological friends, not between the British state and the incumbent president.
Our police are accountable to the British public. Do we want unaccountable gorillas shooting our citizens? Perhaps Mr Spin does. I do not. Yet that it what the SS asked for.
George Bush said “See, free nations are peaceful nations. … Free nations don’t develop weapons of mass destruction.” (here) The man is either a liar or a fool, or he believes that the US is not free. (Or, I suppose, that the US does not have the weapons we have been led to believe it has. Many taxpayers would like to know what happened to their money in that case.) Whichever of these, I would not want him as my leader; nor do I want my country to have anything to do with him.
Mr Spin says:
President Clinton was welcomed with open arms. Here was a man who fit our stereotypes of the nice American.
Balls. Unlike Bush, he was a friend:
President Clinton did enormous good for Britain, particularly in the Northern Ireland peace process where he was a great help, and we never gave him a state visit.
Robin Cook. There are comparisons between the two men. My knowledge of politicians’ biographies is a little sketchy, so I give you Philosoraptor, an American’s take:
When Clinton was about thirteen, he started standing up to his large, drunken, abusive stepfather in order to protect his mother from being beaten. If you’ve never been in a situation like that, you probably can’t understand how impossibly scary that is. … Here’s the closest W ever came to doing this: he came home one night after driving around drunk with his 15-year-old brother in the car, crashed into the trash cans, and then tried to start a fight with his father, saying “I hear you’re looking for me. You want to go mano a mano right here?” Yeah, apparently he actually said “mano a mano.” Another “youthful indiscretion?” Not exactly. Bush was in his 30’s at the time (which would put his father, the war hero, well into his 50’s.) So you can see that it takes some pretty serious RPMs to spin Bush as a hero.
If you’re interested, the Telegraph has the Bush story.
Mr Spin says:
First, he appears to be a Christian of the televangelist school.
Balls. The Christian religion was founded by a man who was put to death. I don’t care about the faiths of politicians, I do care when they profess one thing and act altogether differently: “As governor of Texas, Bush executed 152 prisoners.”
Bush Baby’s visit has everything to do with getting a head start in the next election. I mind that he proposed preemtive war, and that our troops (and like Mr Cook, I support our troops; I want them to come home) have the unfortunate habit of attracting friendly fire. I mind these things very much. I think we in the UK should care about them because they affect us intimately. If protesting gets us a different president in 2005, it will be worth it. We will be richer and safer for it.
Protest against Bush. Your freedom depends on it.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:29 pm GMT
Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:30 am GMT
Monday, November 17, 2003
Bush Baby II «
Some more dorking around on the LoserNet. Reuters gets it. It’s hostility to Bush:
But now, after wars in Afghanistan and Iraq where British and Americans fought side by side, [Americans in the UK] face a wave not of anti-Americanism but anti-Bushism. …
“When you think about World War Two, that will never go away, the brotherhood will never go away.”
World War Two will never go away, but attacking “old Europe” was just so diplomatic. Going it alone was sheer brilliance. Clinton wouldn’t have done that. Making “terrorism a domestic political tool” — well, words other than “Genius” fail.
Our support for Americans will not fail, though individual US soldiers sorely try us with bogus accusations against our brave heroes.
One reason that it will not is US support for us. It cheers me up to hear that an American hopes that our Queen “slaps some sense into that smirking jackass.” Melanie Phillips, Stephen Pollard, and so on want to protray the protestors as anarchists, unwashed crusties, and the like. Tell that to Lianne Seymour.
As a Briton (since I was born and grew up in Edinburgh, as did my mother — my father came from Salford, and I now live in Wales), I may be biased, but I believe that our soldiers and our police are the best in the world. They handled IRA terrorism calmly for years. The IRA bombed the Tory party conference hotel in 1984, and fired a mortar at Downing Street in 1991. That is what living with terrorism is like. The British, being British, got on with things. They don’t need a “heavily armed Black Hawk helicopter hovering overhead.” Do we need hundreds of armed security officers, instructed to carry guns and use them in defence of the President if need be and who can’t even remember suspect’s names?
Hugo Weaving: Mr Anderson…
Keanu Reeves: My name is Neo.
Tim Ireland (sorry, no permalink) thinks they’re a little creepy as well.
Metafilter asks Is the president not expendable? Which was my point yesterday: there is a bond between the British state and the US, and it is deeper than individual leaders and parties. If Blair fell under a bus, or Bush performed his pretzel trick again, that bond would survive.
Contrary to what Harry suggests, I’m happy to call Saddam a fascist, because he is (was?) one. I do not “identify with bombers and not teachers, administrators and policemen who are building the country.” I can’t be certain, but I doubt there is anyone who does. This, like British Spin’s spin is just plausible sounding rubbish. As with most Hollywood films, you suspend disbelief in order to enjoy them, knowing that they would pop under the slightest examination.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:21 pm GMT
Memo to Glenn Reynolds: it’s 2003 in the rest of the world. We don’t know how you managed to update your site through the temporal vortex, but we salute your ingenuity. 1945? Hokum!
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:02 pm GMT
Tuesday, November 18, 2003
The Anticipation Of Disappointment «
I said before that I would go to see Master and Commander whatever. Letter from Gotham has the first blog review (found via Jim Henley). It’s not good:
The jingoism was blatant. Spoiler: At the end of film we do get our climactic battle, and of course the slimy French get their nasty French asses whipped by our fair-haired boys (literally: what’s with the silly dye job on Russell Crowe?, who had no less than two hairstylists), and yup, they were slimy dark Mediterraneans. You see them lying dead and dying and the image that comes to mind is cockroaches or rats in need of extermination. It was a very ugly scene, shame-inducing. The thought of getting up and singing “The Marseillaise” (a la Casablanca) crossed my mind, but I didn’t want to embarass my friend.
Kevin Drum gets the second, with a longer assessment in his comments.
Never mind the “silly dye job” did they make him taller? Jack Aubrey was blond (until he went grey), that’s clear in the books. I don’t see the books as jingositic: they are at war with Napoleon, viewed by Maturin as having betrayed everything good about the Revolution. Aubrey’s motives are fairly simple, — he does what the Navy wants him to do (provided it enriches him), while Maturin is fighting a more ideological war, and there is always the possibility that he would change sides if he thought it were the moral thing to do. He is politically outspoken early on — against slavery, for the Irish.
He [Patrick O’Brian] is a private man.He is not a man who has sought the limelight. There is therefore something utterly delightful about the way the tide of recognition for his achievement has come flooding silently but inexorably from every quarter of the globe and every kind and condition of people. The CBE from Her Majesty. High honours have come not only from the Royal Navy… but also from the great sibling navy, the US Navy, which took him to the bottom of the sea in a submarine of awesome power.
William Waldegrave, ‘Speech at the Painted Hall, Greenwich’ (published in The Yellow Admiral).
I don’t believe that the US Navy allow tourists on board their operational submarines, so this was quite an honour. It’s probably a mistake to consider that patriotism can be measured, but if the US submariners don’t take offence at the portrayal of Americans, I’m not sure anyone else should.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:23 pm GMT
Backword is one year old today.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:11 am GMT
Wednesday, November 19, 2003
The Maturin Process «
Jason Epstein finds Master and Commander On the Far Side of Credibility. I’m not looking forward to this at all. It simply has to be endured. When I think of the friends I’ve nearly lost by demanding that they read O’Brian, I just know that I’m going on my own.
Peter Weir is a fine director. Russell Crowe may be the finest actor in his generation. Maybe when scientists get to grips with the ‘mystery’ meson, they will find it governed by the fundamental law of nature normally expressed in pages of complex mathematic symbols, but summed up for the plain reader as “every successful novel will sooner or later be turned into a dud film.” (The extended “general” theory covers the rare cases where the film is not a dud, but PhDs have been wasted searching for a formulation which does not involve division by zero on both sides of the equation.)
I don’t want the books touched at all, yet anticipation and imagination can only be worse than the actual experience. The name still bothers me: Master and Commander is not the title of the series; they are not as I thought before I read the first one a ‘master’ and a ‘commander’: “Master and Commander” is the title for a temporary captain, one who is not entitled to a pesion and can be returned to first officer status. By The Far Side Of The World, Jack Aubrey is a Post-Captain of many years, and the usual rites of maturation are behind him.
The first book where the characters are developed would be a better starting-point. He is more reckless when younger; when his ear is clipped by a sniper’s bullet, his concern is that he doesn’t bleed on his single epaulette, and later he is deafened when with his men he uses too much powder sabotaging the enemy. The physical damage the young Aubrey sustains could not be kept up through the series, and he gradually gains a back story where he was court martialled for stowing a woman on board when a teenage midshipman and acted as an able seaman for months, learning more about the Royal Navy below decks ranks than most captains ever do. Much of the pleasure of the books is the imagination: the coca-emboldened rats, Aubrey’s adult son by the woman he took on board as a youth, whose resemblance to him strikes everyone familiar with West Indians, and escapes his wife. I don’t see either being a success on film.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:24 pm GMT
Bush in Britain: Views of the Hosts. (NY Times, FRRYYY, found through Garret.)
In our long history we have fought many wars. Usually, they were in direct self-defense of our nation. Most of us didn’t see Iraq as a serious threat, and much as we might loathe Saddam Hussein, let’s face it: if you aim to get rid of all the nasty people in this world, you will be in conflict forever.
If this is supposed to dampen the enthusiasm of the neo-cons, it’s doomed. If you want to get through, you must say, “if you aim to get rid of all the nasty people in this world, you will have to raise taxes on the rich” and expect a long-winded semi-choerent rebuttal which amounts to “if Ayn Rand had expected us to pay taxes, She would have made us poor.” The final letter ends on an optimistic note:
When we [Americans] harken to the better angels of our nature, as our country has done so often in its history, no one will honor us more warmly than those demonstrators in the streets of London.
It’s not ironic that the letters a newspaper prints are “broadly representative of the correspondence it receives” though popular singer/songwriter Alanis Morissette considers the Guardian’s letters to President Bush to be worthy of an extra verse should she update her best (and only) known song. Ms Morissette (using her nom-de-losernet, Josh Chafetz) recorded her feelings in her online diary, known to the cool as a ‘weblog,’ and to a select, deep-frozen inner circle, as a ‘blog.’
What is ironic is that the Mirror, normally critical of Bush is suddenly so concerned for his well-being. I can’t begin to explain to any American readers the bad faith at work here. Mirror writers pose a palace lackeys on a regular basis, usually to spill the beans on such all-important scandals as ‘how Queen ruins horses teeth by giving them sugar lumps’ and ‘Charles knows bugger-all about architecture.’ (Well that winds me up; I don’t think it bothers the typical tabloid reader.) If the reporter was there for a reason, it probably had more to do with the Prince Regent’s sex life.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:08 pm GMT
Bush is not America. America is not Bush.
Richard Wolffe of MSNBC says Let’s Face It :
…[I]t may be hard to digest the sight of Queen Elizabeth II inviting an American president to stay at Buckingham Palace. However, there are precious few protests when Blair (or any other European leader) is invited to stay at Camp David or the president’s ranch in Texas.
I regard this as a little disingenuous. When Tony Blair visits Camp David he does not bring a small army of security guards (possibly with diplomatic immunity), ask for a helicopter gunship, and suggest that public transport be suspended.
In fact, compared to their European neighbors, the British protestors should count themselves lucky. Tony Blair has been wholly successful in carving out his niche as the most trusted, most influential ally of the Bush administration. In that sense, the British have far more power with the world’s only superpower than any other nation.
I won’t deny a word of that, except to note that being “the most trusted, most influential ally of the Bush administration” is a lot like being the tallest of the Seven Dwarves — it’s not a distinction which matters. Wolffe ends with a criticism of Bush:
And it’s time Bush returned to the kind of foreign policy he said he wanted during the 2000 presidential campaign: strong, yet humble.
I’d prefer realistic to humble, and with a sense of history. Charles Glass compares the current situation to the last disastrous adventure.
America lost 58,000 dead in Vietnam. It killed two million Vietnamese. It was warned against that war, as it was warned against this one — and often by the military men who did not want their soldiers to risk their lives except in defence of their own country.
…In Iraq, the Bush administration promises a different outcome [to Vietnam] — despite pursuing the same goals with the same methods.
The New Statesman carries a perceptive leader (found through Gert).
America’s friends, therefore, can reasonably argue that it is better to live in America than in most other countries and that we should be glad it, not the Soviet Union, won the cold war.…Quite simply, the whole world cannot live like the US; the planet could not support it, and it is doubtful that it can continue to support Americans in the manner to which they are accustomed. To those who say there is no alternative to America, the answer is that there can be and there must be.
Meanwhile the Mid-Columbi Tri-City Herald doesn’t like Ken Livingstone:
Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council, which Livingstone chaired, to get rid of him. Labor [sic] Prime Minister Tony Blair expelled him from the Labor Party, whose platform Livingstone once dismissed as a “load of old guff.”
Shutting down the GLC was one of Thatcher’ finer legacies wasn’t it? Still when he ran for mayor, he won. Bloody democracies, can’t trust ’em.
It seems no one has told the Herald that Tony Blair himself planned to readmit Ken to the Labour Party.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:16 am GMT
Thursday, November 20, 2003
Realpolitik Means Take It Or Leave It «
David Frum asks, Why won’t you listen? (That would be this David Frum.) That might be because there is so little of substance. The speech sounded a lot better on the radio last night; but that might have been the “dog walking on its hind legs” effect.
The greatest threat of our age is nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons in the hands of terrorists, and the dictators who aid them.
Hmm. Since Saddam didn’t seem capable of making his own, perhaps we should just stop manufacturing them?
We must shake off decades of failed policy in the Middle East. Your nation and mine, in the past, have been willing to make a bargain, to tolerate oppression for the sake of stability. Longstanding ties often led us to overlook the faults of local elites.
Michael of 2blowhards links to “provocative assessment of the Iraq conundrum by Ivan Eland for the Independent Institute, nobody’s idea of a bunch of lefty nuts.”
The president correctly accused Cuba, Burma, Zimbabwe and North Korea of being “outposts of oppression in our world.”
Such harsh rhetoric, however, should be compared with the praise the president doled out for at best slight advances in political freedom by the equally tyrannical regimes in Egypt, Saudi Arabia and China. … He also found something nice to say about progress in the autocratic, but “friendly,” countries of Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Yemen, Kuwait and Jordan.
But my favourite sentence, in the light of Bush’s noble bromides above is:
No matter that the Palestinians elected Yasir Arafat as their president, but Bush — to comply with the wishes of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon — refuses to negotiate with him.
Joi Ito asks, “Who will be left when they finally come for you?” Appropriate when Kevin Drum (whose first commentor asks pertinently “Are you sure it is a war on terror and not a war on muslims?”) and Ted Barlow have their own takes on the Maher Arar outrage.
I have to confess that the low turnout of protestors disappointed me, even if today saw 150,000 protest at Bush visit.
The Times has the seating plan and menu at Buck House. It doesn’t matter that the food is in French: the choice is simple — take it or leave it. Dare we suggest that that is appropriate?
I sent an email to an American friend (a registered Democrat), and told her “you can have your president back now.” She replied “Yeah — thanks for ‘guarding’ him from potential convicts and would-be assassins. Damn. Couldn’t you use REAL assassins???”
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:08 pm GMT
I doubt that anyone else cares but Charles Spencer seems to have really enjoyed Happy Days. This sort of thing makes me miss London.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:15 pm GMT
Friday, November 21, 2003
Do They Protest Too Much? «
Glenn Reynolds, after smirking at reports of low turnouts, changed tack and, as always, using someone else’s words (David Carr of Samizdata) calls the protestors “ugly” (though the photos don’t confirm that for me; we just have to take Mr Carr’s word for it).
That would be these protestors.
No one would admit to being anti-American, even as they rested on their placards showing Mr Bush’s name with the slogan: “World’s Number One Terrorist.”
That might be because they’re not anti-American, of course.
Her husband David Rumsey, now retired, joined CND because of what he learnt about weapons of mass destruction during National Service. He said he needed no lectures from Mr Bush or Tony Blair about the wickedness of Saddam Hussein, having joined a much smaller march in London against the Iraqi dictator in protest about the gassing of Kurds in 1988, when the West supported Baghdad.
There goes that trendy-lefty paper again, peddling nonsense, what we need is a dose of Guardianista David Aaronovitch:
Where is the red paint to protest against the blasts at Najaf, of the UN in Baghdad, of the Red Cross, of the synagogues, of the Bali night-club, of the Arab-Jewish restaurant in Haifa? Where are the ‘No Suicide Bombings’ posters in the Muswell Hill windows?
See, no one demonstrated against those things. It’s all left-wing lies. I well remember the fun we had in Trafalgar Square blowing whistles outside the old South African Embassy. It always made us feel good (though not as good as the well earned refreshment I usually slunk off to after about half an hour). I don’t think it did much good though. To put it another way, since we can demonstrate here, we should be bloody grateful, and not do so. I think that’s what Mr Aaronovitch is saying. It sort of makes sense. (Cabalamat thinks there is no point in protesting at Al-Quaida.) This is a veritable orgy of giant-slaying:
To give but one example, writing in last week’s New Statesman, a journalist called Neil Clark accuses America of being behind the Russian oligarchs who President Putin is so wisely (if unconstitutionally) cracking down on at the moment.
Don’t you just hiss and make Gollum-noises at that word “journalist” and then settle back and feel cozy inside knowing that you would not be caught reading one of them. Mr Aaronovich does not stoop to deny the charge against Putin, instead he points out the signifier of the true moralist: the man who tears up the constitution when politically expedient. (Yesterday, former Bush speechwriter David Frum gloated that “Lincoln even suspended the writ of habeas corpus.”)
Lesser writers would have patted themselves on the back and left their desks for a well-earned cup of tea or a glass of chablis. Our scribe’s scope, however, is wider than theirs.
In this month’s New York Review of Books, always a good guide to the thinking among liberal academics,…
We know now, if we did not before, that we are in the presence of a weary intellectual traveller, not one of these hacks who thinks “it’s a long way down the road to the chemist”. You can’t trust these academics see (as we say here in Wales, like). All they do is sit in their bloody offices, read, and pontificate. They don’t go out into the real world. One of these types,
Professor Steel concludes: “To ask why the world must be made safe for democracy is a subversive question.”
A simple, fresh-faced student might think that, subversive or not, it is a question worth answering. Naturally, our hawk-eyed guide doesn’t fall for this trap in the way that a sophomore would. Mr Aaronovitch knows the true path: he ignores it, and interprets the so-called academic in his own way
[W]hat does the professor mean? That it is better to sit it out while, say, the Falangists slaughter the Spanish republicans because the Spaniards might — for all we know — quite enjoy a dose of fascism?
I don’t follow the intellectual leap here, but why should I? If we all understood such reason, there would be no need for Great Men like Putin and Bush, and that could mean — anarchy! I do think is that young kids who join the armed forces (and they are braver than I ever was) do so to defend their own country (or learn a trade, or get off the dole, or meet girls). I think fighting in the Spanish Civil War was a noble thing. George Orwell went. Laurie Lee went. I admire their moral courage; but it was moral because they have a choice. Sending off a bunch of callow lads because a few opinion-formers safely over conscription age thought it was a good idea and might secure the next election would have been outrageous. But, I suppose, those kids are cannon-fodder anyway. If they don’t get blown up by the fascists, they’d only be vandalising and robbing and fighting on the terraces and hanging round street corners looking dirty. Who said “War is good for absolutely nothing”? Two uses right there: it gives chickenhawks a reason to feel useful, and it makes the streets safer.
When last seen, Glenn had forgotten the demonstrators and was telling Salam Pax to get grateful, or else.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:16 pm GMT
Summer seems so long ago. The birds have flown south (though I can see a few pigeons — the only birds which can suck — scattered along the rooftops). Leaves have fallen, rotted, and been washed away by the rains.
I found a butterfly in my computer room yesterday. I don’t know how it got in. It was beating its wings against the window, making the sort of noise that those little cards in the spokes of kids’ bikes used to make. I could have let it out, but the window has locks and the key is somewhere downstairs. Anyway, it wouldn’t last long in the cold.
It was still there this morning, and Gordon refused to go on the sill (he usually watches the world while I type). Followed by my increasingly useless cat, I went to get the window key. The window was unlocked of course (so much for security), but I needed two CD boxes to steer the butterfly out and it took about a quarter of an hour.
Moe Lane, once of Tacitus, has a great post on the events of yesterday and butterflies.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:48 pm GMT
Tim Robey actually likes Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, though since O’Brian spent more time in nuclear submarines than in cinemas, I doubt that any film treatment would have him “beaming in his grave.” Unlike him, I still have to see the bloody thing.
One of the delights of being a Torygraph reader is that I don’t expect to agree with anything it prints. It’s a sort of mental exercise in finding where I’m not (as I think Anthony Howard once suggested). Robey seems rather indifferent to the documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer, but the Telegraph also runs a good interview with director Nick Broomfield.
Broomfield is outspoken in his criticism of those in favour of the death penalty, including the shadow home secretary David Davis
British Spin reasons that Davis’s position is “absolutely meaningless” (and I agree). The Telegraph wasting column inches on this sort of bleeding-heart liberal stuff will sorely disappoint Peter Cuthbertson (rightly recognised “probably the most gifted right-wing commentator writing at concom.blogspot.com today” by Matthew Turner).
Another particular delight were the letters in yesterday’s paper, which may have been broadly representative of the ones received: M A Ward, Brian North Lee, M J Annett, Martin Clifford, and Nigel Farrar. They’re an ungrateful lot.
One final pleasure: the slideshow of protest pictures.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:12 pm GMT
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Ugly «
I guess I shouldn’t have strangled her to death,
But I had to go to work
And, besides, she had acne
And if you’ve got acne,
Well, I apologise for disliking you intensely
The Stranglers, Ugly, Rattus Norvegicus
I hope that Nick Barlow’s comment to yesterday’s post (Do they protest too much?) doesn’t mean that he thinks that I might possibly agree with David Carr.
I have the highest respect for the pulchritude of protestors. I will go to my grave thinking of the gamine who tried to sell me The Next Step (the organ of the now defunct, I think, Revolutionary Communists) outside Embankment station the first time I ever went to London on a CND march in 1980 or 81. I was surprised that she even bothered to look at (to adapt Sybil Fawlty) “a stick-insect like me.” She was much, much trendier than I was, in that post-punk all-purpose Oxfam non-style you can get away with at that age.
Then a policeman moved her along.
She was utterly astonished that I moved along too. I think I asked if I could spend the rest of the day with her, but she had papers to sell and I was never in much danger of actually joining a political party. (I don’t take politics seriously, despite the impression I may give here. I think we should all just be nice to each other and try to get along.) I have joined Labour twice: in 1987 when I was gutted that ‘we’ lost the election (I left the following year when my girlfriend rang on the night of a meeting and said “I know you’re off the party tonight but…” when I’d used the meeting as a excuse to cover a drink with someone else); and in 1992 when I was gutted that ‘we’ lost the election. I think I’ve laspsed now. I haven’t had the heart to ring up and just leave, if only because I can use vernacular abuse with the best of them, and I don’t think some poor apparatchik deserves to have me on the phone saying, “That Tony Blair, that Jack Straw, that Peter Hain, that David Blunkett, they’re all…”
I met and went out with someone even prettier when I was selling Anti-Apartheid News (or something like that) in Holborn Station. She walked past and clocked me and came back and said, “I know you from somewhere don’t I?” She did, but I wasn’t going to tell her that it was from the time six months before when I took my best friend from school, M, out to the Hawley Arms the night before he flew to Nigeria to work for VSO, and I’d spent the occasion, as best friends often do, chatting up the barmaid, who was not impressed, and was F. I used to love the Hawley Arms in Camden. It was a pub with a real sense of history. It was rumoured (and utterly untrue) that the Clash drank there.
She lived in a squat between Mornington Crescent and King’s Cross opposite the School for Tropical Diseases (which was where I took M two years later when he got back, and decided to infect my flat with amoebic dysentery) and from the cemetery where Shelley met Mary Wollstonecraft. If that’s not romantic, I don’t know what is. (Keats and Yeats are on your side/Wild, wild Wilde/Is on mine.)
As these things do, it came to an end when she stood me up. She did phone the next day and explain that she dropped some really heavy acid and spent the night before tripping in a police station out East, and had only just crawled home when we were supposed to go out. It might even have been true.
I can’t find the lyrics for Ugly (they’re from memory), but Google did find the first NME review. I’d forgotten how shocking they were, especially if you didn’t realise that they were joking. Of course, Amazon can sell you the Rattus Norvegicus CD, but you can help bring capitalism to end by downloading it from somewhere, copying it from a friend, or simply stealing it.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:16 am GMT
Sunday, November 23, 2003
The Best Words In The Best Order «
To judge by reactions in blogs and rival newspapers, the Guardian’s letters to President Bush seems to have touched some raw nerves. The one which attracted the most commentary, or the most quotation anyway, is Harold Pinter’s.
Stephen Pollard, to his credit, prints it entire, and even replies to a commentator who asks, “Writes astonishingly simplistic for a playwright though, does he ever utilize more "sophisticated" syntactic structures…?” Pollard: “The anger which infects his bizarre political statements is put to much better use in his work. If you haven’t seen The Caretaker, The Homecoming, The Birthday Party, Old Times, Moonlight or his many wonderful screenplays then you really are missing out.” (Bravo.) To my knowledge, noone has yet praised those 31 words for doing their job so well. He was asked to write to Bush, not to give an account of his personal philosophical or moral journey, and he was asked to do so to sell newspapers and cause discussion. He succeeded.
I tend to think of the Guardian as a British publication, really of interest only to us Brits. And it mostly is, except when a) it can be used show how ‘silly’, ‘out-of-touch’ and so on the left are, or b) when it can be used to show that ‘even the Guardian’ agrees with some position (usually by ideological yogi Glenn Harlan Reynolds). One mid-Westerner. and unlikely Guardian reader is James Lileks, but you don’t need to follow the link, as Arthur Silber has a very long, very reasoned, very historical, and very angry reply, which happens to include the whole thing. Dan Drezner slaps Lileks around the head some more. Shame that many who comment seem to feel that Lileks was right. I think they really do feel that because they supported the war (by posting on the losernet), and other people got killed, through some metaphysical and vicarious process, they actually suffered themselves. Pass the Purple Hearts, one of our boys has RSI.
While Pinter uses language wonderfully, the same cannot be said for our elected leader. Nick Barlow links to this wonderful deconstruction of Blair’s bilge on the London News Review.
Could anyone possibly say less on the subject of terrorism than to say “terrorism causes terrorism”? I don’t think so.
Jack Straw is almost as bad now, last time I heard him on TV, he kept repeating “never, ever” as if he was dictating his letter to Santa. His interview on Today on Friday was absolutely brilliant. Provided you accept that, for a dare, he answered all question in the character of David Brent, on valium, underwater. He had Brent perfect, all that “I win, no, that is what I said, well, what I meant to say, anyway, I’m the boss, etc”
Nick also found The void stares also, a well-reasoned “why I hate GWB” piece.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:58 pm GMT [2 comments]
Monday, November 24, 2003
Sick of Spin «
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
Wilfred Owen, Dulce et Decorum Est
I’ve wanted to write about my father for a while. David Aaronovich’s piece seems to provide a suitable hanger.
My father was 45 when I was born. He was born in 1917, a year which may hold some significance for my left-wing readers, but when I was growing up, was merely the year before the Great War ended.
George Weeden was born in Salford, Manchester, on February 18. Salford became famous for the “matchstick figures” of L.S. Lowry, Coronation Street, and the (immortal) Smiths. Although he was regularly late for work when I was growing up because he walked me to school (in this, my best friend, DL, reminds me of him, as he is more devoted to his children than his (ex-)wife is), and we talked, I have only sketchy knowledge of Salford in the 30s. I know that when I was at primary school, all the teachers were female and in their bloom, and I understood (and it was an imaginative leap too far) the teacher he remembered was male, had only one arm, having lost the other in the trenches, and in its place had an enduring anger. So much for the promised “land for heroes”.
He left school at 15. The arithmeticians among you will have worked out that this was as the Depression hit. I know that he was on the dole and that he worked in a library. I know that he did not go to Spain, though many miners, as poor as he, did. When I was younger, I wanted to condemn him. “Yes I am Spain” and all that. (Though did Auden go?) But I loved him. His parents called themselves “respectable” working-class, and his father had a removal business, complete with horse, but they were working class. For whatever reason, and that is something lost along with him, he didn’t volunteer for Spain.
I think the Spanish Civil War is alone among the wars I know of in not “being made by the criminal in us” but being an expression of nobility and freedom, and precisely because we celebrate those, we cannot condemn those who chose not to fight. Those of us who had no choice, Mr Aaronovich and myself, can wish we were Orwell, but are condemned never to know.
I don’t think I am brave enough to join such an army. I think I would stand out in the way Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy did in the Foreign Legion. Of course, I want to think otherwise, that given the right challenge and the right luck I would be a hero. But I cannot condemn those who were not.
My father was conscripted. I’m never sure what he thought of Hitler, or of the rightness of the Second World War, which seems so set in stone with hindsight. I don’t think he looked forward to being killed. He went to Dunkirk. By the time his boat got near the beach the Allies had already lost. He told me he was glad to be saved. And I find it easier to love someone who would rather be alive than slaughtered by some distant machine-gunner, already stiff and deaf as if he were holding some holy pneumatic drill of souls.
He spent the rest of the war away from the infantry, which he was as patently unsuited to as, say, James Lileks. In REMIE, which was an engineering Corps, he he rose to Staff Sergeant, instead of remaining a useless infantryman. (He always identified with Bilko, also smart and self-serving in the class-war.)
World War II killed his mother and hundreds of thousands of others on this island, but it got him out of Salford. Like Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, both five years younger than him, it got him to university.
I know that we had many good books at home, mostly in paperback: we had the Penguin Nineteen Eighty-Four, and a early printing of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. There are many, in government and fortunately restricted to the losernet, who would repeal, or at least reinterpret, both. I owe him many things. I am one of those who could say and spell ‘pterodactyl’ before ‘dog,’ which is, in my opinion, as it should be. The only clues I have to his politics are that he went on a march against Gulf War I, and that he named our first cat, acquired just after I was born ‘Lev.’ Lev is merely Russian for ‘lion’ but I’ve come to understand that it was a subtle joke on Lev Davidovich — Lev, son of David. I doubt such a joke was picked up at his work, if he even mentioned it, where he was a programmer, or more accurately worked on the algorithms, for missile guidance systems for a defence contractor.
The one fact I have held back is that he resented leaving school at 15. All his peers in Salford left then, or younger. But he spent four years from 11 to 15 at Manchester Grammar on a scholarship. I don’t think he forgave his father taking him away.
There is one photograph of him on the net. It surprised me. He would have been 63.
There are many war-zones and injustices in the world. If they upset you, don’t swear, it looks bad. Voluntary organisations of all kinds want help. Don’t condemn, at least until you have done better. If you thinks Salam Pax is a coward, some mercenary army will take you.
Lev disappeared before I gained memory. After him, we had Fred, a rescued cat who died of some inveterate sickness. The next one, Hodge (after the great, Scot-hating, Samuel Johnson’s pet), made my first memory.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:29 pm GMT [1 comment]
Tuesday, November 25, 2003
Do Not Adjust Your Set «
I’m having problems tonight connecting to anything. I couldn’t get this site with either HTTP or FTP until the sixth try; my RSS reader couldn’t find most channels. Even Google has been out of contact.
I think my ISP is clogged with spam, judging by the amount I get (in excess of 100 emails a day; all deleted at the server). I hope it’s just my ISP.
Just as well, because I can’t think of anything to say. I was thinking of adding more links, but that can wait.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:59 pm GMT [1 comment]
Wednesday, November 26, 2003
O O O that Shakespeherian Rag «
To be, or not to be?
What is Your Shakespearian Tragic Flaw?
Via Gert (Not that I couldn’t second guess the questions and give the only acceptable solution: it also happens to be the only one which fits).
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:15 pm GMT [No comments]
Any man who finds himself on a bus at the age of 26 can account himself a failure Margaret Thatcher
(Sing, Michael, Sing) On the route of the 19 bus Strummer/Jones Rudie Can’t Fail
I blame Mrs Thatcher. I have a low opinion of pop music lyrics, I just happen to have a near-perfect memory for them. In my opinion they should be funny, scandalous, or totally unintelligible, in that order. All the same, I think today’s lyrics are poor. I get the feeling that too many songs are written by the professional Pete Watermans to what yoof is supposed to want to hear, rather than any actual teenagers in love. When did you last hear a song like Summertime Blues?
I wrote to my Congressman
He said, quote:
“I’d like to help you son,
But you’re too young to vote”
No one writes songs like Pete Townshend’s Magic Bus anymore. Or Jilted John. All we get is ‘aspirational’ empty-headed crap.
Chris Bertram and Kieran Healy have had some good posts recently on Crooked Timber about academia’s falling economic status. People are still poor, or poorer than others and ambitious, but there are no songs like Sitting On The Dock Of The Bay.
I heard Sting on Front Row tonight, talking about growing up, listening to Elvis, and the supposedly repressive Eisenhower/McCarthy/MacMillan years seem like the Renaissance to our pusillanimous times. We have the governments we deserve.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:38 pm GMT [2 comments]
Kevin Drum has Bill Clinton’s favourite books, and it’s a list that I’m largely ignorant of. I have the Marcus Aurelius because it’s cited in Silence of the Lambs, and I don’t see why Thomas Harris should feel smarter than me, but I can’t say that I got on with it. I’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude, but really can’t recall anything about it. As for the rest, there are a few outght-to-have-reads in there: I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings and Invisible Man, but the ones I know are all British — and should be on every list: Homage to Catalonia is a great book; Four Quartets and the Collected Yeats are cheats, but ones I would include. Politicians usually graviate to Dylan Thomas; it seems to be phonies recognising one of their own, so it’s good to see real poets recognised.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:04 pm GMT [No comments]
To use a quaint British phrase, I know sweet Fanny Adams about the media on the other side of the pond. I know that the Washington Post (update: I meant the Times, of course, comments) is owned by the Reverend Moon, who I’m sure uses it to further philanthropic causes. I know that Fox make The Simpsons and some TV news. I have spent the occasional lazy day getting mildly stoned on coffee, with the Sunday New York Times splayed every flattish surface, and reading stuff for hours which I would have no recollection of the following day, but I don’t claim to be an expert on the paper.
We British often claim that we are familiar with the States through television and what the sociologists call “cultural hegemony” and we feel that our US counterparts couldn’t tell David Beckham from Jonny Wilkinson. However, there is a bold band who have read every other page of the Guardian.
Matthew Turner drew my attention to “the strange ranting behaviour of Jeff Jarvis” and I pointed out in his comments that Mr Jarvis is ill: note the many references to his heart and visits to his doctor.
Well, feel free to slap my around the head with the piscatory club of your choice. Mr Jarvis may well have a couple of health problems, but he’s not in the market for sympathy when he digs at Greg Dyke as reported in the Guardian.
The BBC exhibits as much balance as Christopher Reeve on a tightrope.
Now that’s a tasteful similie.
And Greg, I have two words to remind you of: Andrew Gilligan.
Balance is an emergent property. It is not a matter of where your right arm is or where your left arm is, but where they are in relation to each other. To remind myself of l’affaire Gilligan, I looked through my own archives where I found Mau-Mauing the Flak Catcher (where Boris Johnson claimed Andrew Gilligan got it right) and Light Shining Out of Darkness (with the Guardian on Gilligan and Matthew d’Ancona in the Telegraph on Dr David Kelly). I don’t see what Mr Jarvis is getting at.
The Guardian:
In a robust defence of public service broadcasting Mr Dyke said TV was not “just another commodity” like Starbucks or Coca-Cola and disagreed with those who said it should be left to the market.
This causes Mr Jarvis to suffer some kind of stroke and start talking ‘English’:
Face it, mate: News — especially TV news — is already a commodity. Cable — and, in your case, satellite — and the Internet already accomplished that.
Mr Jarvis may get excited if I referred to George Bush as just a man, but it would do his case no good if his first stab were to claim that I denied that Bush is a man. That would be to misunderstand the word ‘just.’
Without having read every word Mr Dyke has ever written, I feel that he casually employs ‘commodity’ with the usual university graduate nod to Capital (don’t tell me you read it in German). News was a commodity in that sense before any of these media existed. News was a commodity in Citizen Kane. I don’t see how being electronic changes it at all.
I don’t get this rant. It’s just anger for its own sake. Matthew was right.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:37 pm GMT [3 comments]
Thursday, November 27, 2003
Separated At Birth «
Harry’s Mutual Appreciation Society post made me see Andrew Sullivan in a new light. Until last night, I had no idea what he looked like.
A lot like Garry Bushell, TV presenter, columnist, novelist, and Mensa member. You wouldn’t know from his website, but I think he’s the sort to bear a grudge. You wonder who would be more offended.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:29 pm GMT [No comments]
Green Fairy woke in the middle of the night, wondering how the whole dubbed Gerry Adams thing started.
Adams is covered in a BBC News profile:
He has been the key strategist in moving republicans from Armalite to ballot box, telling them as early as 1979 that victory could not be achieved solely by military means.
The ban is discussed by Charter 88:
In October 1988 the British government introduced a ban which was seen to be one of the most serious restrictions on freedom of speech and expression in peacetime. There was no debate in parliament; the imposition of the ban was empowered by the 1981 Broadcasting Act. In September 1994 the ban was finally lifted, also without parliamentary debate.
The Northern Ireland Notice of 1988, issued by Home Secretary Douglas Hurd, outlawed the broadcasting of speeches by selected individuals on television and radio.
This meant that:
Anyone at all who expressed support for a proscribed organisation could not be heard in a programme expressing that support unless the comments were made in parliament at Westminster. This applied even to MPs speaking outside the House of Commons.
The BBC and other broadcasters immediately tried to find loopholes, and these were glaring. Only the “broadcasting of speeches by selected individuals” was prohibited, not the reporting of those speeches, so newspapers were free to report verbatim if they chose. The BBC therefore used actors to read the words verbatim over film of the speakers. What is surprising is that it took six years for the Notice to be repealed.
This was also counter-productive:
Sheena McDonald interviewed Adams for the BBC’s On The Record. McDonald pursued the point that peace proposals had little chance of success while the IRA continued to use violence. Although Sinn Fein’s leading spokesman was both nervous and defensive the ban meant that viewers could not hear Adams struggling to respond effectively.
If it matters, it also affected BBC reporting in less democratic countries:
Around the world, the restrictions were positively harmful to the reputation of Britain. BBC correspondents in Sri Lanka, India and Egypt have all had the Notice quoted against them when they have objected to the intrusion of government censors.
Give a story like that to the right person, like Sully, and he will use it to prove that the BBC stand by the terrorists while resisting their own government.
It’s clear to me that the BBC should be more like Fox News. Less of this sort of thing.
ED: Campbell has complained again about you uncovering stories he doesn’t like.
GILLIGAN: That shows that there’s some dirt out there. I’ll keep digging.
And more of this:
ED: Campbell has complained again about you uncovering stories he doesn’t like.
GILLIGAN: OK chief, room for one more on the Michael Jackson story?
Jeff Jarvis (mentioned yesterday) doesn’t get the idea of balance at all. Whether we should go to war, fund stem cell research, or legislate for gay marriage are matters of opinion, and it’s reasonable to debate them. Alastair Campbell lied in the Iraq dossier; there is nothing to debate. You don’t have debates about whether the earth goes round the sun or not; it’s a matter of fact.
Now that’s out the way, Julian Sanchez rails against being called ‘simplistic’ by a well-known blogger. Heh. Read the whole thing. (Found through Jim Henley.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:58 pm GMT [No comments]
Friday, November 28, 2003
We Have The Advantage Of Surprise «
I didn’t expect to, but I enjoyed it enormously. Russell Crowe can do no wrong by me ever again. Paul Bettany could have been a little more Irish. Which David Thelfall as Preserved Killick was excellent.
Mowat, Blakeney, and especially Pullings (who you always want to know more about in the books) did more than their duty. The ambiguity of the books is preserved, as are the jokes, the deft characterisations, and the science.
I may even see it again.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:00 pm GMT [No comments]
The fateful hour has arrived. I’m off to see Master and Commander: Yada Yada Yada. Still, it’s only £3 at the multiplex they built after they razed the Empire Pool. Even Kevin Drum couldn’t complain. (About the price, not about the destruction of the only decent length swimming pool in Wales.)
It is a far, far nobler thing, etc…
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:54 pm GMT [No comments]
Saturday, November 29, 2003
Cunning Stunts «
Kevin Drum thinks the Independent headline The turkey has landed goes too far, while Hesiod draws parallels with B Clinton in Kosovo, and H Clinton in Afghanistan, and Matthew Yglesias calls Bush’s two-and-a-half hours in Iraq a little stunt.
Bush had to fly “in under cover of darkness”: his enemies are everywhere.
Even Laura Bush, the President’s wife, was reportedly kept out of the loop until the last moment. In a deft stroke of misinformation, the White House had said that President Bush would be eating Thanksgiving Day dinner at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, and even released details of the menu.
His parents, George and Barbara Bush, travelled there expecting to see him.
(The Independent.) Hillary Clinton, by contrast, stayed two days, and actually saw some of Baghdad, according to Newsday.
Norman Geras has a considered post on Anti-Semitism. I think he’s right most of the time, apart from the British Political Cartoon Society’s winner where I lean to ‘not proven’: I don’t consider it enough that the cartoon bears some resemblance to ‘blood libel’ depictions, proof of intentional anti-Semitism requires that similar illustrations of baby-eating were not used in cartoons against others. Roger Simon discusses the cartoon too, and Hoodie Craw says in the comments:
The Kaiser eating babies on WWI british posters, now that’s an image I know. Or the statue in Berne of an Ogre eating babies, that too. But not Jews eating babies. Like I say, my ignorance.
In my view, if the German Kaiser was depicted the same way, and that were the inspiration, then the cartoon is not anti-Semitic. However, further down in the same comments rzs offers a correction:
Hoodie, I have seen the same statue of an a baby-eating ogre in Berne. It is hundreds of years old, one of the oldest statues still standing there. When I first saw it I consulted a tourist guide published by the Swiss government, which stated it represented either an ogre or a jew eating a baby.
So I guess you are familiar with an image of a jew eating babies, even if you weren’t aware of it at the time.
I’m close to buying this, but I think I need to study all ‘baby-eating’ pictures before I decide one way or the other. I think the British Political Cartoon Society could have chosen another cartoon, because this isn’t funny, and criticising another country hundreds of miles away is pretty tame. Plus, you’d think they would know more about the history of such things.
James Taranto in the Opinion Journal (permanent link not available, however he is quoted with approval by permalinked Glenn Reynolds) calls Tom Rosenstiel a “self-styled rabbi of reportorial ‘excellence’”. Now is it just me, or is that offensive? Rosentiel doesn’t seem to use the word “rabbi” to describe himself.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:59 pm GMT [No comments]
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