Thursday, 1 April 2004
Just For Nick »
This isn’t an April Fool, though I suspect Mandelson emerges as new frontrunner to chair BBC is.
Today’s Torygraph has a picture of Janeane Garofalo (on page 19), and, as Atrios says, she is teeny. There’s also a picture and very good review of the future Dr Who, Christopher Eccleston, but neither seem to be online at all.
Just to spite Adam Yoshida, the Big Issue (not on the web, obviously) has a piece on polygamy. It’s the end, I tell you, the end. Adam has — boo! — removed comments, just as Michael Brooke and Peter Cuthbertson were poised to turn every thread into a private dialogue. Adam kindly supplies further evidence that he a hoax:
I’m watching To Play the King this evening. One of my favorite films, I strongly recommend it to all of you. The murders aside, Francis Urquhart is a stand-up fellow.
Well, what are a few murders in politics these days?
These 127 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT Permanent link.
Bye, Bye Beleaguered Beverley »
Hughes resigns over visa scam row for the cardinal sin of New Labour, ‘she had “unwittingly” misled people.’ Clearly, she wasn’t trying hard enough.
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:09pm GMT Permanent link.
42 »
The “answer to life the universe and everything” is also my age next birthday which is, to quote Buddy Holly, “everyday… a-getting closer, going faster than a rollercoaster.” I was reminded of the date by Chris Brooke’s Dead Socialist Watch post on Leon Blum, also born on April the 9th.
According to FamousBirthdays.com I share it with Dennis Quaid (star of at least two very good films, Breaking Away and Dragonheart), Jean-Paul Belmondo, Paul Robeson (a hero of Wales), and quite a few distressingly young celebs I’ve never heard of.
The Internet Movie Database goes further and lists lots of actors I’ve also never heard of, including Michael Kirkup, “Winner of the Bob Dylan Imitators Award at the 2001 International Bob Dylan Convention, Manchester, England” and Rita Svensson Hammond whose one credited film role was ‘Stripper in pornshop’ in, ah, a Swedish film.
The only famous person I already knew shared my birthday — and I’m proud to admit to at any rate — is Valerie Singleton. And I’m eight days younger than Philip Schofield, now, scarily, as grey as the proverbial badger, though otherwise he still looks 14.
The two birthdays which have left the deepest marks in my memory are my fifth, when our cat, Hodge, spent the afternoon up a tree having been chased there by a dog — he came down in his own time, and my 30th, though it’s the day after I remember most clearly, waking up to the confirmation on the radio that there really wasn’t going to be a Prime Minister Kinnock. Simon Mayo was playing “Tears in Heaven” when the alarm went off at about 6:30, and I spent the rest of the day in as complete a state of denial as possible while still functioning. I went for a swim (which is why I got up so early: I no longer bother as they pulled the pool down to accomodate the new Millenium Stadium and built a cinema complex dedicated to showing the worst films on release; the other pools are crap in comparison), and then a haircut where I lost my ponytail to some gum-chewing teenager, well she talked as if she were chewing gum, who seemed to think the result was some kind of victory.
This may seem a bit early to write about such a traumatic date, but in 2002, it was the Queen Mother’s funeral, and in 2003, it was the day the statue fell, so I expect nothing short of the Rapture or at least the arrest of bin Laden to overshadow it.
The Rapture story in the Torygraph isn’t a hoax either, though I’d like to think that they ran it today especially.
He has described homosexuals as “vile”, and breezily tells me that gay people, on average, die at the age of 42 as a result of their sins. He has previously suggested that it would not be a bad thing for them to receive “Old Testament capital punishment”.
That’ll surprise the gays I know. I was planning to hang in as long as Alistair Cooke, even though I’m not gay, and could get laid more often, I’m still fairly sinful. Still, too late to change now.
Come to think of it, April 9 is Good Friday, which is as good a day for the rapture as any. It’s hardly worthwhile making any plans. Yesterday, I optimistically — and impulsively — bought my present to myself (and I only checked the Amazon site when I got home). I saw the ‘Concise’ version for only 25 quid in a discount bookshop, didn’t buy it, and when I changed my mind, it had been sold. So I went to Waterstone’s and somehow got into a bidding war with myself. It’ll get some use though, provided the world doesn’t end.
I’m sure some pubs will be open whatever happens.
These 596 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:32pm GMT Permanent link.
Quote Of The Day »
Since Peter Cuthbertson seems to have undergone the most unbelievable conversion, perhaps I should start a “Quote of the Day” feature.
I came to agree with Nietzsche, that people believe things not because they are true, but because they are fortifying. (But did Nietzsche believe that because it was true, or because it was fortifying?)
Roger Scruton, On Hunting p20
These 26 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:33pm GMT Permanent link.
There’s Still Time »
Not quite midnight, so there’s still time to apply for the Google Copernicus Center.
The Google Copernicus Hosting Environment and Experiment in Search Engineering (G.C.H.E.E.S.E.) is a fully integrated research, development and technology facility at which Google will be conducting experiments in entropized information filtering, high-density high-delivery hosting (HiDeHiDeHo) and de-oxygenated cubicle dwelling. This center will provide a unique platform from which Google will leapfrog current terrestrial-based technologies and bring information access to new heights of utility.
For more information, email lunarjobs@google.com.
Found on Slashdot.
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 2 April 2004
But This Isn’t A Joke »
Identity cards in Blair’s sights:
Practical issues and logistics were the only things stopping the introduction of ID cards, [UK Prime Minister Tony Blair] told reporters.
He has got to be kidding.
Mr Blair said: “There is no longer a civil liberties objection to that in the vast majority of quarters.
“There is a series of logistical questions, of practical questions that need to be resolved.
“But, in my judgement, now logistics is the only time delay in it. Otherwise I think it needs to move forward.”
In Spain, they have ID cards; their bombers got through: we don’t; our bombers were caught. What am I missing here?
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:00am GMT Permanent link.
On Googlebombs, Spelling, Diploma Mill Doctorates, And Jews »
Last night, through my invaluable referrers, I found that this page (or the main page) is number one in Google for dave weedon. Of course, someone may have been looking for a “Dave Weedon” a homonym, if you like, even if it’s the way every vicarious form-filler assumes my name is spelled, unless they think I’m the tennis player. I think they were looking for me, and just got it wrong.
Back to my old standby, John Gray or perhaps John Gray PhD. The keen reader will remember that I checked out John Gray’s PhD two weeks ago, which came from Columbia Pacific University, since closed down by the State of California. On his own site, John Gray, author of Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus “received his degree in 1982 from Columbia Pacific University” and quotes a press release from the State of California which does indeed say, “CPU degrees awarded before June 25, 1997 are legally valid.” However (and I read this on the internet, so it must be true), there was more to the ruling on Columbia Pacific University:
And on February 21, 2001, the judge denied further appeals and entered a final judgement ordering CPU to:…Notify all students enrolled from June 25, 1977 to December 1, 2000 of the injunction and of their right to a refund…
I have problems reconciling this with Gray’s own claim,
At the time John Gray graduated and received his degree CPU was a highly respected school in its field.
The only way I can make sense of this is to accept that “highly respected” is a meaningless anodyne formula, in the way that all hits are “greatest hits” (when I was a kid, I thought that “greatest hits” albums would leave off the singles which sold least well, but they never have), and that “in its field” meant “in the diploma mill business”, as opposed to universities
for duffers like Oxford, Cambridge, and Cardiff, which waste profits on expenses like teaching, examining, research and so forth.
Surely the best fact uncovered so far about John Gray is
A Newsweek article reports that Gray spent nine years as a celibate monk and secretary to the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (October 2, 1995, Page 96.)
If you want advice on romantic relationships, who better to ask?
And, as googlebombing seems to be this morning’s theme, here’s a link to the definition of Jew. Found on Jewschool through Norm. The problem with this is that Google (and other search engines) typically display 10 hits for each search term, and that the ‘sensible sites’ use the term Judaism. So, only nine more to find.
These 361 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:50am GMT Permanent link.
Friday Catblogging »
I finally got some photos of Felix and his underpants fetish. Actually, these are just sweaty T-shirts and a pair of worn running shorts.
I don’t know what he thinks he’s doing. He doesn’t even live here.
These 41 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Well, Well, Well »
I’m nearly (OK, not that nearly) bored of this, but here’s Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus by John Gray (yet another one, I’m afraid) fisked. “Isn’t that Dr John Gray?” you ask.
“The facts remain undisputed that none of John Gray’s degrees are accredited and he is essentially a high school graduate passing himself off as a doctor,” Rick Ross, the head of CultNews.com tells The Scoop, “and it’s doubtful that when people buy his books they understand that.”
Nope.
These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 3 April 2004
Focal Wisdom »
Brock Sides of Signifying Nothing asked readers to suggest a Schelling point for Memphis, TN. (As I can’t be alone in not knowing what he’s talking about, here’s a definition of Schelling’s Focal Point.)
The result seemed to be a tie between the gates of Graceland and the lobby of the Peabody Hotel. If I had to wait somewhere for a date who might never turn up (who thinks of these things?), I’d choose a comfy seat with drinks in a hotel over lurking outside on Elvis Presley Boulevard any day.
If you’ve never been to Memphis, or if you have and still don’t know the best place to meet someone, here’s The Duck March at the Peabody Memphis Hotel.
As Obelix would no doubt say, “These Americans are crazy.”
These 130 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:54pm GMT Permanent link.
Ambush »
It’s the economy, stupid.
On a sign put up at the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign headquarters by campaign manager James Carville. (Source:The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, 1999)
After what seemed like a month off, Doonesbury has returned to something like form on Bush spending plans (starting Monday and running through the week). Friday was particularly good on Bush financial restraint.
You see, Mark, only by overspending can we hope to curb spending.
I thought this Economist cover was a Photoshop mockup by Atrios, but Better ways to attack Bush is the real thing. As one of the captions says “Never hears a spending plan he doesn’t like.”
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:16pm GMT Permanent link.
Rapturous »
I mentioned the non-hoax story in the Telegraph about the Rapture on Thursday.
Neal Pollack tells you everything you need to know about the Left Behind novels.
These 28 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Grammar God! »
You are a GRAMMAR GOD!
If your mission in life is not already to preserve the English tongue, it should be.
Congratulations and thank you!
How grammatically sound are you? Brought to you by Quizilla.
Found through von and the pantheon at Obsidian Wings. I’d like to know how many — if any — I got wrong or ‘wrong’. I found it pretty tough.
These 65 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 4 April 2004
Whatever Happened To Tolerance? »
Matt Turner mentioned the Guardian advice column the other week, but Bobbie of PolitiX (who works for it) says it all. Example:
But then I realise the truth: speaking your mind has become the domain of the right — and I am just as angry the concept that I am no longer allowed to speak my mind without fear of being battered to death with celery sticks as I am about the idiotic questions put forward by these small-brained, small-lived, small-world individuals.
Bobbie also quotes one Roger Creagh-Osborne’s letter to the paper.
I left the Labour party with clause four and have been appalled by the official left’s descent into the morass of PC madness. How refreshing to at last hear some of the straight-talking which should be a hallmark of socialism — even if you do expect half your readership to treat it as ironic.
Would that I had had the sense to do the same, but that was around the period I rejoined the Party (for what I’m sure will have been the last time). I had planned a long waffle at this point into which I would drop the phrase “led by a desiccated solicitor”, but I paused to check the spelling, and just as well, not only because I had it wrong, but also because my new dictionary gives examples of historical usage, which, in this case, include “R.H. Tawney — Piety imprisoned in a shrivelled mass of desiccated formulae.” I’ve no idea what he was talking about (though Old Labour is an educated guess), but it nails New Labour.
Albany’s final words in Lear come to mind:
The weight of this sad time we must obey,
Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say…
I don’t know when the time was for speaking “what we ought to say”, but it isn’t now.
Nikolai, at Lenin’s Tomb, has a caption to a picture of Christopher Hitchens which had me nearly helpless on the floor.
H.U.H? has discovered the best blogger ever:
They are a modest and thoroughly mediocre species of man, these English utilitarians, and, as aforesaid, in so far as they are boring one cannot think sufficiently highly of their utility. One ought even to encourage them: which is in part the objective of the following rhymes:
Hail, continual plodders, hail!
"Lengthen out the tedious tale,"
Pedant still in head and knee,
Dull, of humour not a trace,
Permanently commonplace,
Sans génie et sans ésprit!
A lot like Oliver Kamm really, but with sensitivity, perception, intelligence, humour, and a way with words.
That kind of quality might be altogether too much to ask of blogs, going by the Atrios comments thread largely (as in entirely, with the exception of Atrios himself posting “It’s satire, people,” every so often) slagging off Jim Henley’s April Fool.
On a similar theme, I quoted from Roger Scruton’s “On Hunting” a few days ago — not as broad-minded as it may have seemed, because I am anti-anti-hunting. And Scruton, possibly the most irritating philosopher on the planet, gets things right here:
The odd thing, however, is that so many of those who object to hunting wish also to forbid it… New Britain disapproves of very little, but wishes all its disapprovals to be law.
In this mania for new things to ban or at least scowl at, the left and the Guardian have taken over from Mary Whitehouse and her undead hordes. Whatever happened to tolerance?
These 338 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Jew »
Jew is defined by Wikipedia.
Jewish Conspiracy: it doesn’t exist. Sorry.
Jew: all you’d ever want to know about who is one and so forth, including the Jewish people and the nation of Israel.
Jewschool has an explanation for this rather odd page.
Judaism is the religion of the Jews.
Even the BBC has a rather decent and informative page all about Judaism.
Holocaust. It really happened. There is lots and lots of evidence. Anecdotal, from survivors, eyewitness accounts from the military personnel who reached the camps at the end of WWII, as well as (a very few, because most were destroyed) Nazi documents. There are, should you really wish to see them, lots of photographs of concentration camps and gas chambers.
Holocaust Links: where to start looking to find out more about the Holocaust.
Is Superman Jewish? He’s single, and he’s neat — no, that’s something else. Anyway, this page takes forever on dial-up, and my connection went down about 80% of the way through, so I still haven’t seen the end, as it seems that I’d have to start all over again.
Jews for Judaism may sound like a tautology, but it’s a real organisation, with lots of up-to-date links and stuff.
As with all religions, especially the ones which have been around for a while, there are several Jewish denominations.
Jewish Passion: there being two sides to every story and all of that, but this is a site which aims to get some things right:
A Jew’s passion is for God. The first and most basic statement of the Jewish faith proclaims our love and faith in One God, and our commitment and covenant to serve Him with all our heart, soul and strength.
If you looking up this page because you’re considering conversion to Judaism, it’s not easy.
Anti-semitism may be on the rise in Europe, though as a European, I’d like you to know that it’s not anything like universal or socially acceptable. I put this down to North American envy because we in Britain have had a Jewish Prime Minister, while all US Presidents, with the exception of Kennedy, who was Catholic, have been Protestant Christians (and all white and male, on the most ethnically diverse nation on earth).
Known as a dandy, a novelist, a brilliant debator and England’s first and only Jewish prime minister, Disraeli (Earl of Beaconfield) is best remembered for bringing India and the Suez Canal under control of the crown. A Conservative, he was elected to Parliament in 1837 after failing to win election in four earlier elections.
Since I’ve mentioned colour, there are, of course black American Jews too. It takes all kinds.
These 351 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:16pm GMT Permanent link.
Excuse The Mess »
That last entry may take some explaining, but some day soon I’ll post all that I know about Google, PageRank, and how to be visible. Right now, I’m more concerned with getting comments working. I finally, after several sessions gawping at my old code and tearing my hair, got the comments form to finally write to new entries. Now it has to do something, but because I put so much effort into making it bulletproof — it should sort out comment spam, it should resist teenage hackers, and it should encode email addresses, though I think that last is still a bit awry at present — that it doesn’t actually do anything like record comments. So far, it does deign to tell me that someone attempted to post a comment, it just happens to eat it when it does so. I feel a late night coming on.
These 149 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 6 April 2004
The Coming Silence »
I’m having difficulty getting online — and finding time to be so, as well as having run a little dry of things to say.
I’ll be back soon. Knowing me, I’ll cave in to the desire to write one more post before I find better things to do for the rest of the day.
These 54 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:01pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 8 April 2004
Stranger Than Fiction »
Quote of the day:
To report an Anarresti managerial debate in full would be difficult; it went very fast, several people often speaking at once, nobody speaking at great length, a good deal of sarcasm, a great deal left unsaid,; the tone emotional, often fiercely personal; an end was reached, yet there was no conclusion. It was like an argument among brothers or among thoughts in an undecided mind.
Ursula LeGuin, The Dispossessed, chapter 12.
Who’d a thunk that a science fiction writer in 1974 would have predicted Usenet, let alone blog-arguments?
These 27 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:18pm GMT Permanent link.
An Excuse, Of Sorts »
I’ll writing (or, indeed, blogging) this from my local public library. I’ll be sans internet access until I get broadband installed (which I’ve resisted long enough) next Thursday. Until then, unless I can scrounge access to a UNIX computer (very unlikely), there won’t be any updates to functionality — like comments finally working — or links on the sidebar; and blogging updates should be scare too.
Until then, the links I ought to add include Chris Young, late of CY,’s new blog along with friends at Explananda (Latin for “those things which have been explained"?), and just to spite our friends at the Little Green Fedayeen, Nathan Newman and Kathryn Cramer.
Why did no one else vote for With God on our side in Norm’s Dylan poll? On Dylan’s “Unplugged” performance he played it as an encore, so he hasn’t lost faith in it. (Or he hadn’t a decade ago.) It’s shorter and funnier than Oliver Kamm’s argument, and gains points from me by being sarcastic rather than straight.
These 169 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 14 April 2004
Playing Along »
Norm discovered this game (reproducing the rules is, as you see, part of the rules):
- Grab the nearest book.
- Open the book to page 23.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
In my case, the nearest book happened to be Regime Change by Christopher Hitchens, which immediately presents a problem, being short — three or four page — essays. Page 23 has a title, a subtitle (which ends in a full stop, perhaps qualifying it as a sentence), and a dateline before anything which would qualify as body text. Playing strictly by the rules gives
But we need a more exhaustive and exclusive and discriminating definition of it, or recognition of it.
The ‘it’, by the way, is terrorism, but all the same, it’s not one of Hitchens’ most thrilling sentences. I much prefer its immediate predecessor,
The president himself, declaring us at war with this word, appeared unconsciously to try and hurry us past it, by slurring and condensing it into “terrism” or (it seems on some days) “tourism.”
If I understand Hitchens’ conclusion — if “Terrorism, notes toward a definition” indeed has a conclusion, and is not merely what the subtitle implies — “Terrorism” must be irrational, so Nelson Mandela was not a terrorist because he had a legitimate “beef” with South Africa. I have problems with this redefinition: “terrorism” already has a meaning, Hitchens seems to be classifying a subcategory, which he claims already has a label “nihilism,” and usurping the meaning of “terrorism” with this. His examples are perfectly fine, but he seems to accept that because the White House are using “terrorism” in a different way to the rest of us, and because they’re unlikely to back down, the English language has to roll over on George Bush’s command. I accept that the term as Hitchens uses it has the advantage of exonerating the president from being bothered by, say, ETA, and at the same time it clears Hitchens of being in an alliance against causes he continues to support, but it still seems to me, that it is al-Qaeda who should be redubbed “nihilists” not every other gun or bombing toting radical being evicted and forced to find a new label.
Apart from that, the book is more convincing that I expected. I still, on balance, oppose the Iraq war: regime change under the UN would have had more legitimacy for me, a year is not enough time to install a working democracy — but Bush and Rumsfeld tried to do it on the cheap, if you can call the cost of the conflict cheap, and if regime change ever was possible (which I largely doubt) it’s been given a pointed kick in the pants.
These 414 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:12pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 17 April 2004
Heigh Ho »
I’m back online, now with uber-fast broadband (the slowest possible) but it drinks up webpages the way Dylan Thomas attacked free whiskies. And I’m supposed to have moved this stupid site, but I’ve hit a problem with the index page which I can’t explain — it’s there, it’s just not being recognised as html by any of my browsers.
So for blogging goodness, pay a visit to any of the fellows on the sidebar, or take the Little Green Footballs quiz (do better than my not very statistically convincing — since 50% is chance — 69%). Or join The Campaign to Stop the National Identity Card.
These 106 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 18 April 2004
The Other Hutton Enquiry »
I haven’t read all of this yet, but the Sunday Torygraph is revelling (no other word really) in their Will Hutton scoop. There’s also a longer report which needs registration.
Hutton, author of “The State We’re In”, etc and an ex-editor of the rival Observer, is a critic of “prohibitive rents” — however his wife runs “First Premise Limited, a development company that has specialised in letting and selling of properties, many in inner-city areas of London.”
It is difficult to understand why First Premise, which has been in business since 1986, thinks it can charge almost double the local average. The flat, which overlooks some vandalised garages, has a security gate that hardly works and a dingy, badly-lit stairwell. It is next to a group of housing association flats, a number of which have been the subject of police drugs raids.
The newly-painted open-plan flat has no furniture apart from a fridge and a cooker—part of which fell off while we were being shown around. The bedroom and dining room are reached through archways rather than doors.
Ms Atkinson yesterday defended the rent. “The terms of our financing means we have to charge market rents. You should look at the flat — it’s huge.” She said that it was a live/work unit not a one-bedroom flat.
I think this one might have legs.
These 86 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:19pm GMT Permanent link.
Be Mine, Dictator »
I haven’t seen any comment on this disturbing story elsewhere in the blogosphere. Normally, I’m a fan of the Telegraph’s coolly objective style, but since Tony Martin seems to be a bit of a folk hero to some, I’d have been happier if they’d filed it as a non-story and binned it.
I particularly dislike:
The 59-year-old, whose conviction was largely based on evidence that he had a hatred of gypsies…
I thought that his conviction was largely based on a dead body with shotgun wounds in his garden, along with his being in possession of a recently discharged shotgun, not to mention his confession.
This may sound a bit anal, but there’s a word after the date in the Telegraph URL which seems all too appropriate; I’ve no idea if it’s intentional.
These 118 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 19 April 2004
Sex And Violence »
Norm has a post on the Vietnam argument, specifically an LA Times piece with the money quote:
[I]t’s hard to defend [Bob Dylan’s] status as an enduring icon of moral outrage and political integrity when he’s shilling for bras and panties.
Norm and I disagree on the Iraq War, and we read Dylan’s protest songs differently, but… what!?!
Bombing kids (if you’re against the war, as I am) or doing nothing about torture (if you’re pro-intervention and regime change as Norm is) are moral issues — and Dylan can be cited on either side, like every other moral authority — but sex, and “bras and panties” in particular? If you find underwear dirty, sister, that’s a kink, not a moral position. You’ll be complaining that Jesus preached peace AND talked to prostitutes next. Well that’s the end of another world religion…
These 117 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:07am GMT Permanent link.
What Experience And History Teach »
What experience and history teach is this — that nations and governments have never learned anything from history, or acted upon any lessons they might have drawn from it.
G. W. F. Hegel
To begin with a somewhat unethical practice, Jim Henley has an excellent post, which I here quote in full, because it’s short, and it deserves all the exposure it can get.
Warblogging II — Stayed home yesterday to do taxes and discovered that our regular mailman is back on his route—home from Iraq on his reserve stint. Where in Iraq? Fallujah. I’m glad he’s back, my neighbors are glad he’s back (I’ve talked to them about it), he’s glad he’s back, and we hope he’s back for good.
Thousands of other Americans are not back from Fallujah. His being back means that someone else has to be there (at least by the logic of intervention). We’re glad anyway, which means we’re glad someone we know slightly is out of a danger that someone we don’t know at all is in. Why is that? The answer is the beginning of political wisdom.
Well, I’m clearly nowhere on the road to political wisdom, because I don’t know the answer: I only know that it’s true of me as well.
Jim, who, like me, is against the war in Iraq, also discovered Arkangel, a blog by someone who served in Iraq, and a lot closer to danger than many of the cheerleaders favoured by Instahack. His post on Victory is particularly detailed and thought out.
I find, almost to my disappointment, that my views haven’t changed since last March, especially my regard for Robert Harris’s piece on the position we found ourselves in.
Arthur Silber found this Telegraph article, this Vietnam generation of Americans has not learnt the lessons of history.
Not for the first time since crossing the Atlantic, I was confronted with the disturbing reality about the way Americans make policy. Theory looms surprisingly large. Neoconservative theory, for instance, stated that the Americans would be welcomed as liberators, just as economic theory put privatisation on my interlocutor’s agenda. The lessons of history come a poor second, and only recent history — preferably recent American history — gets considered.
As Arthur says,
If I believed in intellectual crimes, which I most assuredly do not, then the crimes of ignorance committed by those in positions of power in our government — crimes with regard to history, political theory, and philosophy — would be worthy of the death penalty.
It’s not that Americans can’t learn from history — Robert S. McNamara could and did.
Norm has things to say about the theory that the “anti-war liberal left has apparently stood in peril of being silenced, of having its dissenting voice smothered”. I think the ‘"anti-war” side, of both left and right, are in danger of not being heard by GWB, and not heeded by Tony Blair, but it’s hardly being suppressed.
I’ve lived long enough to see the rehabilitation of Nixon; I doubt that I’ll ever see the habilitation of GWB. As Simon Hoggart put it
The thing that strikes me about George Bush is that, unlike his father, and certainly unlike Ronald Reagan, he doesn’t seem to have the faintest idea of what he is doing or why…
With Reagan you felt that, while he didn’t have the attention span to cope with complicated decisions, the people around him knew what he wanted and delivered it. Like the Statue of Liberty, everyone knew what he stood for without him needing to speak. But Bush seems to be tossed round like a cork on a tidal wave.
This reminds me of the description of the civil service’s view of Margaret Thatcher in Jeremy Paxman’s The Political Animal:
Their initial lack of enthusiasm was replaced by the fact that she had a clear set of priorities. ‘The great thing about Mrs Thatcher’, one of them once told me, was that you didn’t have to ask her a question to know what her answer was.’
I’m in the middle of Paul Routledge’s hatchet job Mandy. Mandelson was an admirer of Thatcher in a way, but there’s one respect in which they couldn’t be more different. I’ve only ever seen one tribute band, and that was a Jerry Lee Lewis impersonator in Memphis, of all places. There’s a heck of a difference between a performance coming from inside, and one that’s been learned by studying videos and copying moves and the experience sickened me. Bush is a third rate impersonator of Reagan. He’s got the doziness, but not the confidence, or the comfortable and comforting assurance. Hoggart again:
[Bush] is supposed to be for lower taxes and lower spending. But spending continues to soar. Take the grotesque new national highway bill, just passed by the House of Representatives.
This includes funding for two bridges in Alaska. One, according to the New York Times, will link the small town of Ketchikan to an island with just 50 residents — and a small airstrip. It will be 24 metres (80ft) taller than the Brooklyn Bridge, and will cost $200m (£112m).
The other bridge would span two miles of sea from Anchorage to a port that has one regular tenant and virtually no homes or businesses. That will cost $2bn. In that vast country, each household will have to stump up around $20 for these pointless structures.
The reason is that Don Young, Alaska’s sole representative in the house, chairs the vastly powerful transportation and infrastructure committee.
Will the bridges be built? Probably. Bush seems unwilling or unable to stop them.
Still, he scrubs up nicely, and looks good in his action man dressing up flight suit, if not so good actually making decsions or talking to the people or leading or any of that presidential stuff, which he’s managed to cut from his job description in favour of bass-fishing. South Know Bubba on George Bush: deer in the headlights. Why can’t Bush answer a question on his biggest mistake? Everyone makes mistakes, and it’s a perfectly reasonable job interview question. You’d think that there was some decision that makes Dubya lose sleep, but apparently not.
If Tony Blair has any principles, how can he live with himself after Bush’s concessions to Sharon, described by Simon Hoggart as “bizarre.” Principles, what principles?
These 491 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:41pm GMT Permanent link.
Ugandan Discussions »
Michael Brooke discovered Ugandan discussions and the excellent, splendid, and still-topical 22-year-old Ariel Sharon Private Eye cover. If I’d discovered it myself, I’d have hesitated — no, that’s too ambiguous, I’d have refused — to link to it. There are a number of superficial, and not so superficial, problems with it: it expressly references Adolf Eichmann’s defence at Nuremberg (the trial, not the rally) as reported by Hannah Arendt. The Eye’s editor at the time, Richard Ingrams, is still a columnist on the Observer, and continues to receive brickbats for his (perceived, perhaps — I don’t read him, so I have no opinion) anti-semitism from the blogosphere and the wider world. Also, accusing Israel of Nazi-like behaviour is guaranteed to generate a comments thread of several hundred flames. There was a row over the LGF Quiz (but I can’t remember where I found all the angry comments), mostly along the lines of “The Nazis hated Jews [true]; We’re pro-Israel [true]; therefore we can’t be Nazis or Nazi-like [I’d say false, but I accept that it’s not intuitive or obvious].”
In academic psychology, we talk of in-groups and out-groups. Everyone, no matter how liberal, divides the world into “us” and “them”. Ideally, we sublimate such things into sport, but most of us identify with groups at certain times, and consider anyone different as, at best, missing the point.
The question isn’t whether we take sides, it’s what we do about it. The LGF mob, whom I’m happy to label the “Little Green Feyadeen,” because, as far as I’m concerned, in their moral certainty and their zero-tolerance, they’re the mirror-image of their supposed foes, go all the way in calling anyone against them “vermin”, “sub-human”, and so forth. In “Homage to Catalonia,” George Orwell was on sniper duty when a target presented himself running from a latrine. Orwell forbore to shoot him, because, as I recall, “you don’t shoot a man when he’s pulling up his trousers”. Even a fascist, even someone who might not hesitate to kill you. This is the voice of civilisation. Many on the right have it, and some on the left do not. Thus you have my own in-groups and out-groups.
The other LGF tic that bothers me is the ‘inverted syllogism’ — Hitler believed X; Hitler was German; therefore Germans believe X. Um, no, guys. Just because Yasser Arafat believes something, does not mean all, or even any other, Palestinians believe it. Ditto for G. W. Bush and Americans. Ditto for Ariel Sharon and Israelis. And vice-versa, opposing certain individuals does not imply a necessary hatred of their countries or their peoples.
But back to Mr Sharon. I don’t know what Private Eye thought all those years ago. And I don’t question Israel’s right to exist and to defend itself. I just wish that they had a leader who was more like a diplomat and less like a thug.
These 484 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 20 April 2004
The Common Factor »
Johann Hari has an excellent post about his appearance on Richard Littlejohn’s show.
For [Littlejohn] to present himself as a neutral arbiter between the BNP and non-fascists was so absurd (and typical of Rupert Murdoch’s empire) that I thought I could have a chance to expose that too. After all, BNP leader Nick Griffin has described Littlejohn as his favourite writer. The hero of Littlejohn’s semi-literate “novel”, To Hell in a Handcart, says, “Don’t give me multi-fucking-culturalism. The only culture these pikeys have is thieving.”
Littlejohn makes a great fuss about condemning the BNP as a “rabble”, but what exactly in their political programme does he disagree with? No, Littlejohn pumps out the anti-asylum sewage and the rats of the BNP inevitably feed on it. With this in mind, I arrived on the set. He was already ranting about me, saying to his producer that I was “a nutcase”. I coughed politely. He twitched and shook my hand.
As we were waiting, I thought I would have some fun with the notoriously homophobic Littlejohn. “My friend Peter Tatchell really likes you,” I said softly as we were waiting. He shifted awkwardly. “Oh. Does he read my columns?” “No Richard, he really likes you.” (Apologies to Peter. It was for a good cause). Silence. With that, we started the show.
This is my favourite paragraph.
Soon we were off air, and Littlejohn started to screech at his producers. “I told you not to ask him on! I told you not to ask this nutcase on to my programme!” He looked genuinely upset. I tried to explain that if he doesn’t want to be humiliated he should make his articles correspond with reality. He began to howl, and one of the floor managers suggested I leave.
Howl? Is he saying that a respected journalist on, let’s not forget, the favourite channel of the honourable gentlemen is barking?
Which rather reminds me of Littlejohn’s fellow Murdochian hack, over on the equally impartial Fox News, Bill O’Reilly. Catchphrase: “Shut up, shut up.”
I looked up Littlejohn’s novel To Hell in a Handcart on Amazon. We’ve all heard about authors reviewing their own books under pseudonyms, although, for some reason, I suspect that the five-star rave by “Adolf from Paraguay” was not from the man himself.
These 105 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:31am GMT Permanent link.
Satire »
Today’s Boondocks. Rather wonderful, no?
Back to the old Private Eye covers (they age well), the Labour Conference issue is the one after Norm’s choice. Not a lot has changed.
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 22 April 2004
A Few Good Men »
The United States of America wants to charge the two of you with murder & you want me to go before the judge with “Unit, Corps, God, country"?
A Few Good Men, Aaron Sorkin
Joshua Rozenberg asks “Is President George W Bush above the law?”
It [Guantanamo Bay] has its own schools, power system, and water supply. In the past, the US Congress has repeatedly extended federal statutes to the base, and US courts have long exercised jurisdiction over disputes there.
Even those of us who only knew the US even had a base in Cuba because of a Demi Moore film knew that.
That is not to say that an English or Commonwealth court would necessarily set the prisoners free. But it would examine their status and decide whether their detention was justified — which does not seem a lot to ask.
I don’t think that’s unreasonable. Jack Nicholson’s character might have.
These 44 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:08pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 23 April 2004
No Fear »
Nick and Michael approved of Shaun of the Dead, which I wanted to see since the telephone box advert made me laugh. I had the same doubts as Michael who said “I had a few qualms before going in, largely because I was worried that it might be one of those overly parochial spoofs…”. I was at a greater disadvantage because, besides never having seen Spaced, I haven’t seen any zombie movies apart from Night of the Living Dead and the video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller.
You may infer from the above that I don’t really do horror films — I spend my time in the ones I’ve seen thinking “Why are they doing this? What’s their motivation?” So unless there’s some political analogue, as with Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, I don’t get them.
I don’t do ‘Romantic Comedies’ either. If the principals are very good-looking, I may just survive one, but they lack the misanthropy and frustration that make me laugh.
Worse, I went to see it with a group of lads (if you can call six people with a mean age of 37 ‘lads’) after a couple of pints of Guinness to limber up the laughter muscles, and we’d have been a embarrassing collection, making frequent trips to the exits if the whole cinema hadn’t been similarly inclined. We tittered a little, the people in the row behind laughed a lot, and those in the row in front played games on their mobiles and sent texts throughout.
Everything Michael says is true, but there’s not as many jokes as in a good 25 minutes of Black Books (and Dylan Moran was wasted, and not because of an unusually strong breakfast wine), and not nearly as many as in a poor 22-minute episode of Seinfeld.
If Confucius really did say “Comedy is your neighbour falling off his roof” I take him to mean that one component of humour is the gladness that it’s not happening to you. There was no fear at all. There was the rather feeble enthusiasm of minor TV people to appear a film in any role whatever, which was also a feature of Bend it like Beckham.
And the Zombies didn’t even dance.
These 368 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Sentences For Life »
For want of something better to say today, here’s a couple of rather wonderful quotes from my present reading matter.
From Dennis Healey’s The Time of my Life (p xiii):
Enoch Powell, like Karl Marx, wrote romantic poetry before he entered politics.
I knew both of those facts; it never occurred to me to put them together.
And this one is more of a paragraph.
It is striking how often the masters in this art have repeated each other’s discoveries. George Orwell said that the prime responsibility lay in being able to tell people what they did not wish to hear. John Stuart Mill (who by a nice chance was Bertrand Russell’s godfather) said that even if we agreed on an essential proposition it would be essential to give an ear to the one person who did not, lest people forget how to justify their original agreement. Karl Marx, asked to give his favourite epigram, offered de omnibus disputandum ("everything must be doubted"). A pity that so many of his followers forgot the pith of his saying. Rosa Luxemburg roundly declared that freedom was first and last the freedom for those who thought differently. John Milton in his Aeropagitica proclaimed that, whatever one believed to be the right, it should be exposed to the claims of the wrong, because only in a fair and open fight could the right claim or expect vindication…
Letters to a Young Contrarian (p 29-30) Christopher Hitchens.
These 53 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:39pm GMT Permanent link.
Meme Of The Week »
Bobbie and Nick have linked to this week’s Doonesbury. Luckily or not, Gary Trudeau’s timing was immaculate as “Former U.S. professional football player Pat Tillman, who gave up his lucrative sports career to join the military’s elite special forces, has been killed in a firefight in Afghanistan, a U.S. official said on Friday.”
Yesterday, Lenin featured the photograph for which Tami Silicio was fired from her job with a contractor in Kuwait. Arthur Silber, in not-amused mode:
It’s not bad enough that all the original justifications for the war with Iraq have disappeared into nothingness. Now, if you dare to make real that this war actually results in deaths, you’ll be fired.
Kevin “Still no return of catblogging” Drum has a different take.
Depressing stuff, all the same.
These 94 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:29pm GMT Permanent link.
Update »
As I like puns (you may have noticed): this is a double update.
First, I’ve moved (you were redirected). I’d appreciate it, if you link to me or have me in your bookmarks (that is, both of you), if you updated…
Second, with reference to my post earlier, — ahem — Steven Den Beste thinks, to paraphrase G. Orwell: “Two sides bad! One side good!” That’s my interpretation. But I found his post through Oliver Willis who “completely misses the point.”
These 81 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:40pm GMT Permanent link.
Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood »
I’m just a soul whose intentions are good
Oh Lord please don’t let me be misunderstood
B.Benjamin/S.Marcus/C.Cadwell
Did I ever suggest that Oliver James was a bit of a wanker? I did? Well, my mind hasn’t changed. I used the dread phrase “Andrew Orlowski” in a comment on Chris Brooke’s blog, and he responded, as any well-informed, up-to-the-minute, Oxford don would, “Who’s Andrew Orlowski?” But this is getting ahead of myself.
Roughly this time last year, I agreed with Andrew Orlowski over Antiwar slogan coined, repurposed and Googlewashed. I still do. I quoted the Christopher Hitchens thing today, but its point held before I read it. We don’t all agree; and Dave Winer’s roommate’s (whose name I forget: his footprint was that big) idea that we all just get along appealed to me as much as (to quote Hitchens again, this time on Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh — who had some impact on my parents’ friends’ lives) “’Shoes and minds,’ said this sign, ‘must be left at the gate.’” However, the Register and friends go too far in assuming that because there are some verbose phonies, and others who have to assuage their inferiority by adding “Doc” to their name (what, there’s no “Doc” Brooke, no “Doc” Geras, no “Doc” Bertram? these guys must be inferior…) all bloggers are the same. At the risk of defending blogging (which I contend is heartily anarchist) we’re all very different. Most of us need to write.
Whatever, the Register, ever on the pulse, discovered this ten month old Times article.
In his view the fundamentals of blogging are “loneliness and narcissism and the need for contact with others”. He says that historically the diary has played the role of confidant to lonely people. Now, in cyberspace and particularly with the cloak of anonymity, people can “have relationships with a lot of other people without the hideousness of flesh-and-blood relationships. It’s attractive.” He adds: “There is a curious assumption that exists, particularly among young people, that the most tiresome aspects of their lives are interesting to other people…
To quote Hitchens yet again: “Noam Chomsky recalls hearing the news of the obliteration of Hiroshima as a young man, and experiencing the need need to go off and find solitude because there was nobody he felt he could talk to.” Poor neurotic.
Poor Oliver James, but, as far as I know, among friends “the most tiresome aspects of their lives” are interesting. But perhaps I’m lucky (or witty).
As for the “hideousness of flesh-and-blood relationships”, you said it, old son. Ever been psychoanalysed by a Klingon?
These 327 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 24 April 2004
The Last Man In Europe »
I am not a number…I’m a free man!
I find this story terribly sad.
Found through H.U.H?
These 10 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:04pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 25 April 2004
Fight Fire With Fire »
Sigh. It’s very rarely that I agree with Stephen Pollard, but I agree with him over this. This is, naturally, a difficult issue, and I know that this means ostensibly defending the ‘baddies’ (although that’s not what I intend doing: I’m defending free speech, free congregation, and so on). I’m not in a hurry to defend racist political parties — mostly, but not entirely, because those parties often employ physical intimidation, which I deprecate — but all ideas, when expressed in open debate, are equal. I don’t wish to imply that I’m recommending how you should vote (indeed, I avoid the declarative wherever I remember to: I refuse, except in irony, to say, “read the whole thing,” for example).
I hold no brief for the VB [Vlaams Blok]; were I to have a vote in Flanders, I would not vote for it. But that is not the point. What happened in Ghent on Wednesday is a frightening but classic demonstration of the political mindset which lies behind the EU’s “ever-closer union": if you do not sign up to certain beliefs then your politics are, by definition, beyond the pale and thus illegitimate.
The ruling was merely the latest in a series of attempts to destroy the VB because of the threat it posed to the Belgian status quo. In 1999, “undemocratic and racist” parties were banned from receiving state funding (private donations of more than 125 euros are illegal in Belgium). This decision was immediately followed by an action against the VB on those grounds. When a Flemish judge refused to issue a judgment, arguing that these were matters for the electorate rather than the courts, the head of the Centre for Equal Opportunities, the quango which had brought the case, said that he would continue appealing until he had found a judge who would find against the VB. This week one emerged: Alain Smetrijns, who happens also to be the chairman of the Lions Club in Ghent, a francophone pro-Belgian group.
Unlike Mr Pollard I have no problem with the 1999 ruling. I admit that it undermines state funding of political parties, which worries me, because parties become answerable to political correctness of one sort or another.
There are always those who will not listen. But, because of that, they won’t be persuaded by canvassing anyway. It seems to me that those of us on the anti-racist side of things have strong arguments in our panoply (well, they persuaded me).
The Belgian Establishment has responded not by defeating it in argument but by banning it.
Which is wrong.
For the same reasons, I disgaree with this. Found through Norm (who linked to a different post on the same page, but that’s my being greedy; I’m not attacking Norm for who he chooses to link to, only attempting to demonstrate that I don’t crawl all over the web looking for items to take offense at). Ironically, this is the first thing I’ve read (excepting the headscarves thing) which has made me reconsider France’s position at the centre of the democratic universe.
I accept that courts make mistakes — but they make fewer mistakes than ministers or partisan journalists. Blocking legal aid is shameful and wrong.
These 307 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:50am GMT Permanent link.
In Excess »
Julian Sanchez notes a couple of hilarious corrections. (I think it’s to the credit of both papers that they acknowledge their fallibility, but the errors in question are rather more than slips of the pen.)
While Tim Ireland (no permalink, so I’ll have to quote) gets all paranoid over the Richard Desmond story.
Those of you who read Private Eye will know that Mr Desmond has been (ahem) rambunctious and outspoken in many a high-level meeting.
- Isn’t it funny how this particular outburst goes fully public on the very day he turns on Blair?
- Isn’t it funny how everyone who crosses or questions Blair ends up getting fitted for a light-weight straightjacket?
Well, I wouldn’t go that far myself, preferring Daily Express switches support to BNP.
When I saw that edition of the Excess, I thought, “how kind of them to take credit for my disillusion.” (And what’s so clever though about “crusading"? Surely taking religious intolerance into foreign lands was one of the most shameful episodes in our history.) I didn’t read the paper, so I don’t know what the survey questions actually were, but however much I disagree with the Prime Minister, I’d be one of the remaining 7%. For one thing, I refuse to answer questions about what other people think, and I’m not going to be goaded into giving my opinion about the vast majority of the country, most of whom I’ve never met. Anyway, “We … all” must include the right honourable member for Sedgefield himself, and I doubt he’s had enough, which makes the statement false in my book. Bet the Excess complains about falling standards of education as well.
These 218 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:17pm GMT Permanent link.
The General And I »
British Spin posted the other day, This story will make you like Geoff Hoon a little more. Well, I don’t know about that, as I said in the comments — but Slate’s Condensed Bob Woodward made me like General Tommy Franks a little more.
Page 281: On Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy: “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.”
Not to mention the marginalised 65th Secretary of State.
Page 182-83: Powell reveals that he detests Rumsfeld’s circuitous manner of speaking — “One would think …"; “Some would say …” — which he dubs “third-person passive once removed.”
Colin Powell rocks.
These 57 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:14pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 26 April 2004
Telegraphy »
Lots of good stuff in this morning’s Torygraph. Alan Hansen defends Ron Atkinson — as Patrick Barclay did yesterday.
Jim White is depressed that “that the spoilsport tendency at the heart of officialdom has used the mask of health and safety to win yet another minor victory in its puritanical crusade to purge us of all colour and fun” as Oxford (both town and gown, it seems) prepares to crack down on end-of-exam celebrations.
The only hope now is that student activists are already organising to demonstrate against the Draconian regulations. Maybe there is some heroic Hooray Henry planning to become the first flour-bomb martyr. Already I can hear the call-and-response chants echoing down Broad Street:
“What do we want?”
“The right to spray champagne.”
“When do we want it?”
“During the end-of-exam period, if that’s all right with you chaps.”
Would Chris Brooke, proud owner of a growing collection of Left Book Club editions have chanted so meekly?
Bill Deedes is particularly strong today. I’ll talk about his main theme in another post, but I like this.
Most people’s idea of how the UN goes about its business is pretty vague, so inevitably some of this new food-for-oil scandal which is unfolding is going to brush off on the work of its humanitarian agencies. That would be unfair.
Those who have to deal with refugees, food aid, and women and children in need are frequently over-stretched, but they don’t take bribes.
Nice of Bill to be so certain, but I doubt he’s wrong.
Meanly, they haven’t put Ben Fogle’s account of the Marathon des Sables online, and Ben Hammersley has yet to blog his own version, so I’ll link to my friend Andy Cleves’s write-up of his 2001 effort.
These 160 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:47am GMT Permanent link.
More Corrections »
I mentioned newspaper corrections yesterday. Don’t suppose that these are limited to the liberal press. Perhaps the Grauniad and the NYT are just honest enough to admit their mistakes.
Salman Rushdie corrected the Telegraph, via their letters page (quoted here because I have no faith in the link staying up).
Sir — It’s a little disappointing that, even at a time as joyful as a wedding, your columnist Spy has felt the need to have a little go at me. He quotes (Apr 24) the traditional “anonymous friend” as saying: “Salman is the sort of writer who doesn’t like to have any competition, and I believe that’s why none of his peers, such as Melvyn Bragg, were there. He likes to be the centre of attention…” and so on.
Gosh, I suppose that is why there were no writers present — except, of course, for Paul Auster, Gioconda Belli, Carmen Boullosa, Bill Buford, Peter Carey, Michael Cunningham, William Dalrymple, Don DeLillo, Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Helen Fielding, Jonathan Safran Foer, Francisco Goldman, Philip Gourevitch, Christopher Hitchens, Siri Hustvedt, Jonathan Lethem, Kathy Lette, Bernard-Henri Levy, Alan Lightman, Larissa MacFarquhar, Patrick McGrath, Jay McInerney, Steve Martin, Pauline Melville, Reggie Nadelson, Zadie Smith and Edmund White.
Of course, it could just have been an exercise in name-dropping.
These 61 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:17pm GMT Permanent link.
Why Don't They Come? »
How cold and late it is! Why don’t they come
And put him into bed? Why don’t they come?
Disabled, Wilfred Owen
I said I’d come back to Bill Deedes, and despite being knackered, I have.
The mother of a British soldier in Iraq sends me a sensible letter. No, she doesn’t complain of the dangers to which he is exposed, nor that his tour of duty there is proving longer than he or his family expected. Her point is a more fundamental one. How far can he feel that he enjoys British public support?
For soldiers engaged in risky operations overseas, feeling assured that the folk back home reckon they’re doing a thumping good job matters more than we might suppose. Are we conveying this feeling to British troops in Iraq?
Well, I’m sure that the British forces are “doing a thumping good job” — I’m less certain that there’s any end in sight. I know how Geoff Hoon plans to reward the troops.
The Ministry of Defence is facing angry protests over plans to cut the pay of thousands of Britain’s troops at the same time as allowing senior officers to retain the perk of first class train travel.
I suppose Mr Hoon, being New Labour hasn’t read Kipling. As Arkhangel notes in Combat Support.
But it’s true. Many people, especially in the military, vote Republican because they believe the GOP supports the troops. And, in a sense, they’re right. The GOP does support the troops; the only thing is, that support is more vocal than actual. And never has it been more obvious than this past year.
Leaving aside the question of whether we should have gone to war with Iraq to begin with, I think that if you’re going to go to war, the least you can do is properly support the troops and their families with the training, materials, and money they need to successfully wage and endure war. And, especially after the occupation, the Bush Administration did neither.
Many units deployed without the necessary body armor for their troops. For example, I didn’t receive my IBAS (Interceptor Body Armor System) until September 2003 — five months after crossing the border. Prior to that, I was equipped with the same kind of flak jacket that John Kerry wore in Vietnam.
That was, of course, Donald Rumsfeld’s brilliance at work. I think Garry Trudeau did a brave thing with B.D’s amputation. We should remember the bravery of our soldiers.
Yesterday was Anzac Day. Lest we forget.
These 98 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:34pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 27 April 2004
So Put Down Your Books »
Iraq may not be Vietnam, but Country Joe & the Fish are somehow topical.
Yeah, come on all of you, big strong men,
Uncle Sam needs your help again.
He’s got himself in a terrible jam
Way down yonder in Vietnam
So put down your books and pick up a gun,
We’re gonna have a whole lotta fun.And it’s one, two, three,
What are we fighting for ?
Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn,
Next stop is Vietnam;
And it’s five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates,
Well there ain’t no time to wonder why,
Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.
Say what you like about the proposed reintroduction of the draft, it’ll make popular music interesting again.
These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:44am GMT Permanent link.
And So On »
Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite ‘em,
And little fleas have lesser fleas, and so ad infinitum.
And the great fleas themselves, in turn, have greater fleas to go on;
While these again have greater still, and greater still, and so on.
I thought I heard Freddy Forsythe, for whom I have a great deal of time, even if that doesn’t extend to actually reading his books, on the Today programme yesterday. He was talking a great deal of sense — well he agreed with me about Spain having ID cards, and that apparently having done nothing to prevent the recent terrorist atrocity there. Digital radio may yet be a wonderful thing: it might have warned me that I was listening not to the author of The Day of the Jackal, but to Peter Hitchens, agreeing with whom I’ve considered an early symptom of madness — like Margate, he’s several stops after Barking.
But as the Tories are now supposed to back ID cards (though how the Tories are united enough to have a collective opinion is beyond me), we need all the help we can get.
Has David Blunkett’s declared war on ‘clever people’ perhaps finding terrorists too recalctrant? His proposals include:
- 2008: 80% of economically active population will carry some form of biometric identity document
- 2013: MPs to vote on whether registration should be compulsory
So it seems to me that if terrorists want to get by without compulsory ID they can:
- Be economically inactive, which may include students supported from abroad, or religious fanatics too holy to bother with money, instead scrounging off supporters;
- Carry a (forged) foreign passport from a country which doesn’t insist on biometric data (or one whose data storage is incompatible with ours);
- Refuse to carry the thing, and as that won’t be a criminal offense, all the police can do is send a letter to a (possibly false) address;
- Find other ways to evade detection, of which I’m sure there will be lots.
Does anyone believe that ID cards will help us recognise real terrorists? They just seem to be an excuse for more techno-crazy and expensive government schemes.
When Blunkett was asked on ‘Today’ about the civil liberties implications of ID cards, whether they altered the presumption of innocence for example, or whether they effectively re-introduced the ‘sus’ laws of the 1970s, he said that he was introducing further laws to prevent such abuses — and presumably if there are loopholes, there will be yet more legislation, and so on. Beggars belief really.
Chris Brooke publishes an extract from Against All Enemies, which is — ah — interestingly revealing about the efficiency of the FBI.
Apart from Blunkett’s ‘clever people’ slip of the tongue (or is he really taking tips from the Khmer Rouge these days?), the ID card hallucination does seem to be a uniquely left-wing fallacy (so perhaps I’ve been wrong about the Home Secretary). It seems to hold to the idea that, given sufficient technology, the state can micro-manage the people. The most attractive proposition of libertarian conservatism for me is the realisation that this is necessarily false and an expensive and harmful waste of time.
Still we can always hope that Rupert Murdoch might find something to object to. Someone tell him that the EU approves. If there is hope, it lies in Australian US newspaper magnates.
These 520 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:51pm GMT Permanent link.
I See Red »
If everyone in the People’s Party was like Tim, I’d rejoin today.
These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:34pm GMT Permanent link.
The Fatted Calf And The Pig's Bladder »
Maria Farrell has an interesting post on the prodigal son — Bush is the father, Blair the good son, Sharon the eponymous hero.
I have a lot of time for Maria, for no reason beyond my being the first to comment on her post about Matthew Parris’s autpbiography, she sent me the book! I ‘payed it forward’ by sending an old P.J. O’Rourke to Jackie D (once of Au Currant), who now has to be nice to someone else. Who calls the blogosphere incestuous?
I think she’s wrong (though I didn’t at the time) about Grenada:
Nothing new here of course. For all of Thatcher’s famous closeness to Reagan, she barely got a head’s up when the US invaded Britain’s former colony, Grenada.
Wrong, because we felt far more betrayed by the US neutrality during the Falklands, when they attacked us. Looking back, the US invasion of Grenada was a good thing. (I remember that the leader of the revolutionaries speculated that the US fleet would founder in the Bermuda Triangle: in fact what happened was the Delta Force, the supposed spearhead, attacked on Florida time, while the backup attacked on local time, arriving first: they still won.) The invasion (by counter-revolutionaries, yet) was a blow which giddied my political consciousness. Reagan was liked, and by poor Caribbean blacks yet. It was so unfair.
Reagan is a difficult president. (Which one isn’t?) Jim Henley argues that the “Reagan Administration was actually quite chary about committing American power.” I can’t fault him there.
(It’s nice to find the root of my ‘anti-Americanism’ — scare quotes needed because it real, but extremely local — confirmed by no less than John Perry Barlow, quoted on the interwebthing by Kevin Drum:
The MX was, and indeed still is, a Very Scary Thing. A single MX missile could hit each of 10 different targets, hundreds of miles apart, with about 600 kilotons of explosive force. For purposes of comparison, Hiroshima was flattened by a 17 kiloton nuclear blast. Thus, each of the MX’s warheads could glaze over an area 35 times larger than the original Ground Zero. Furthermore, 100 MX missiles were to lie beneath the Wyoming plains, Doomsday on the Range.
Any one of the 6000 MX warheads would probably incinerate just about every living thing in Moscow. But Cheney’s plan —- cooked up with Brent Scowcroft, Don Rumsfeld, Richard Perle, and other familiar suspects — was not about targeting cities, as had been the accepted practice of MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction). The MX was to be aimed instead at the other side’s missile emplacements.
The problem with this “counter-force strategy,” as it was called, was that it was essentially a first-strike policy. The MX was to be placed in highly vulnerable Minuteman silos. In the event of a Soviet first strike, all of the Peacemakers would have been easily wiped out. Thus, they were either to be launched preemptively or they were set to “launch on warning.” The MX was to be either an offensive weapon or the automated hair-trigger was to be pulled on all hundred of them within a very few minutes after the first Soviet missile broke our radar horizon .
The MX — and its rationale — was the reason for my CND membership, and if I may make a poor induction a certain Tony Blair’s as well.)
Margaret Thatcher, despite the rhetoric, was no warmonger either. The hole in Jim’s argument is that, before WWI, they said that capitalism wouldn’t allow it. (And when it did start, the newspaper columnists fell about pacifist priests no less than they attacked Rowan Williams this time round.) I’m not a pure pacifist: I don’t have the courage. I admire, naturally, Robert Lowell, who refused service in WWII, but forty years on, I’ve yet to outgrow my inner two-year-old. I haven’t the intellectual spine to say ‘never’, I just haven’t seen an example in my lifetime when violence did any good. (OK, I’ve conceded Grenada — and by implication, the Falklands, but both of these were reactions and directed at the military, which is not trivial.)
To come back to Maria’s post, the comments attempt to explain Blair’s relationship to Bush as Stockholm syndrome (I’m more reminded of the guy with the dog in L’Etranger — for Bush to Blair), but Max Hastings has a percipient analysis. I’d support a European superstate as a means of being more than ‘Airstrip One”, but not this one.
We should go it alone. As for Sharon, only one “fattened calf (flame-roasted Texan style)"? have you seen him lately? He should do more ironing.
These 498 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 28 April 2004
Thom Gunn »
He became his admirers.
Auden
Chris Bertram notes that Thom Gunn has died.
The New York Times obituary is overly keen to pigeonhole him in the Movement. (I’ve yet to encounter an artist who embraced a critic’s label.) I’m not sure what “Their verse was celebrated for its dry, skeptical rejection of what they saw as rhymed grandiosity” means either. All Gunn’s early verse rhymed — he was the most Appollonian of the 50s poets. As he wrote in ‘JVC’ in ‘The Man with the Night Sweats’ (1992) [p448 in my Faber Collected edition]
He concentrated, as he ought,
On fitting language to his thought
And getting all the rhymes correct,
Thus exercising intellect
In such a space, in such a fashion,
He concentrated into passion.
The NYT is circumspect regarding his private life.
His death was announced by his companion of 52 years, Mike Kitay.
While The Guardian is more informative.
…Mike Kitay, an American who was to become for Gunn “the leading influence on my life, and thus on my poetry”. It was primarily to be with Kitay, his lifelong partner, that Gunn applied for a creative writing fellowship at Stanford University, California, which he was awarded in 1954…
He was, among other things, an outstanding love poet. ‘The Hug’ (again from ‘The Man with the Night Sweats’, p 407 in my book).
It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who’d showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And dozy with the wine dozed on one side.I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your body set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you,
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.
I hope, when it comes the Telegraph obit doesn’t conclude with “He never married.”
These 141 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:27am GMT Permanent link.
Dirty Tricks »
It’s a lie, of course.
Found through Lenin.
These 9 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:09am GMT Permanent link.
Quote Of The Day »
Aaron McGruder in Boondocks:
It’s like the Presidency has become the special Olympics and everyone wants to give him an award just for trying.
I hadn’t noticed that he was even trying.
While in Doonesbury, Zonker hears the good news.
These 20 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21am GMT Permanent link.
Totally Bats »
Michael Howard’s “majority is just under 6,000 and a 6.5% swing would give the Liberal Democrats a trophy unlike any other.” Found through Nick.
Tim of Bloggerheads doesn’t seem overly bothered that this chap thinks that vampires are a Hungarian stereotype. “You’d rightly go mental if we published something similar with Boateng and Abbott doing an African tribal dance.” Well, I can think of a few reasons for that. There is no racial stereotype here — the vampire thing is clearly a reference to his character, not his origins. Someone should mention that neither Paul Boateng or Diane Abbott are African, and, anyway, most Africans haven’t done tribal dances for generations.
More about Labour on The UK Today, self described as “Being the musings of a citizen of the Peoples Republic of South Yorkshire.” South Yorkshire? Isn’t that Sheffield, where the Home Secretary has his constituency? Help beat Blunkett, now there’s an idea.
Does anyone else find Gwyn Prosser a little creepy? (If he wasn’t already immortalised in rhyming slang, he is now.)
He told the programme: “I think any reasonable person would judge the judges’ decision as poor or even perverse and I have got no problem at all in calling it bonkers or barmy.
“It just flies in the face of common sense to my mind.”
He added: “Sometimes I think the judges aren’t connected with the real world, and what I admire about this particular home secretary is that he injects a massive amount of common sense into these arguments. ”
My Mac doesn’t play real media clips, and I missed him on Today, but I’d like to know if he said this live, or if he pre-records his opinions. Note that he doesn’t name David Blunkett, so perhaps all New Labour MPs are press-ganged into making all purpose announcements about “the Defense Secretary”, “our Foreign Secretary” and so on, which can be deployed by Millbank in any crisis.
Christopher Hitchens, in “Letters to a Young Contrarian,” mentions the Teamster boss who was asked by a Senate committee if he was powerful, to which he gave the guarded answer (from memory, as I’ve taken the book back to the library, and it seems to be out of print) that being powerful was like being ladylike, “if you have to say you is, you probably ain’t.” The same goes for the possession of common sense (plus everyone believes that it isn’t common at all, as there’s never enough to go round). It probably goes for every other desirable intangible. Hamlet pretended to be mad; Melanie Phillips has to aver she’s sane every day. Reminds me of the old days of Radio 1, when DJs like Paul Burnett and Dave Lee Travis (neither among nature’s Nobel candidates) needed jingles to repeat their names, as they otherwise might have forgotten them in the course of a show.
These 398 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Corps Values »
The next day opened with a tour de force from Aneurin Bevan, the South Wales Labour MP who was emerging as a major debater and political figure, although never commanding Churchill’s admiration or respect. This was one of Bevan’s most memorably destructive wartime speeches, including the damaging aphorism that ‘the Prime Minister wins debate after debate and loses battle after battle.’ Then, after a pause, and one can easily imagine the stoop, acusatory finger and slight stutter culminating in a rush of words with which he did it: ‘The country is beginning to say that he fights debates like a war and the war like a debate.’ He went on to accuse the army of being ‘riddled with class prejudice’. Had Rommel, he said, been in the British Army he would still have been a sergeant’. This precise claim — the specific always makes more debating impact than the general — no doubt rang like a pistol shot around the chamber, even though it ignored the fact that Imperial Army officer-cadet Rommel of 1910 had already passed through several commissioned ranks in the First World War, quite apart from subsequently.
Roy Jenkins, Churchill, p 697
Sometimes I succumb to sense-of-humour fatigue, if not outright failure. Only this morning, I read Chun’s This “Book” Thing (long list of canonical books, with the ones he claims to have read in bold). I was feeling quite chuffed with myself, during the Cs, having read virtually everything. It wasn’t until I reached the Ds that I realised that he was claiming not to have read any of them.
As one of his comments says:
It is a dangerous joke to so thoroughly confirm one’s enemies’ prejudices with so straight a face.
In the same vein, reading Crooked Timber’s shockingly titled Brooks makes sense post (don’t worry, gentle reader, he doesn’t; it’s verbiage as usual), I took exception to Dan Hardie’s comment:
Indeed, it’s as if the British House of Commons had debated the conduct of the Prime Minister and his government at a time of maximum crisis in the war — say, May 1940. If the naysayers and nervous nellies had been around then, insisting on arguing about who was responsible for the failure of the Norway campaign or of pre-war rearmament and failing to back good old Mr Chamberlain, who knows what might have happened.
It was only after I’d typed out the quotation above and reread everything, that I realised that he was being ironic (and not all that subtly, either — the Chamberlain reference is a dead giveaway).
As the Labour Party campaign makes clear, there hasn’t been anything like proper parliamentary debate over the Iraq war, no robust confrontations and no giants like Bevan and Churchill.
We need an opposition. I haven’t heard the plaint of the apparatchiks that the BBC is acting like the unofficial opposition for a while. Over the pond, it’s the other way round.
On what planet are these people found? According to Ignatius, because neither party was blast-faxing warnings, “journalistic rules” meant that scribes couldn’t raise concerns by themselves! (His claim that “policy analysts” weren’t voicing concern is so absurd that, as a courtesy, we’ll avert our gaze from the remark.) And by the way, can this astonishing “explanation” really appear in the Washington Post? We wonder if Woodward and Bernstein had heard of these rules — if they knew that journalists can’t report facts until the two parties have sent them a leaflet? Ignatius’ comment defies comprehension — except as a description of the repulsive, dinner-party “journalism” that has made a sick joke of our lives.
The Daily Howler excoriates the press corps’ values.
These 210 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 29 April 2004
Pre-breakfast Bloggage »
I shouldn’t read the interwebnet before I have some tea. I swear that I thought, insofar as my thoughts were articulate at all, “Heh. Robots. Cool.” (Written after the first cuppa.)
Well, Norm did write, “Male bloggers, write more about your inner feelings.” That’s enough feelings for today.
These 48 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:10am GMT Permanent link.
Tony Blair »
Tony Blair does something I like — for the first time in a long time. (Found via Labour supporting Tim.)
These 20 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:42am GMT Permanent link.
Screen Test »
Excellent Boothby Graffoe joke. “This beggar comes up to me and says ‘Got £15:75 for a cup of tea?’ ‘£15:75? That’s a lot for a cup of tea.’ ‘They give you cakes too.’ ‘Still a lot.’ ‘And dancing.’ ‘Where is this?’ ‘The Ritz.’ ‘Couldn’t you go somewhere cheaper?’ ‘I don’t care; it’s not my money.’”
Spy Blog objects to the House of Commons security screen. Given that al-Qaeda’s MO seems to be truck bombs and suicide plane attacks, I can’t see the point even if did operate as advertised. And Spy Blog claims that it won’t.
The air supply to the Houses of Parliament is that of a draughty old Victorian building, and obviously does not have a filtered air supply equivalent to that of a Level 4 containment Bioweapons research laboratory - the “security screen” simply cannot protect MPs from these weapons.
It will have other beneficial effects.
The “security screen” can drown out the shouts of protestors, and its looming presence is presumably psychological pressure to enhance the “bunker mentality” of MPs when voting for Anti-Terrorist measures.
Which is reason enough, don’t you think?
You know, because I hardly watch TV news (the pictures are better on the radiogram), I have difficulty picturing this screen. I keep picturing this thing like a room divider or one of those screens women got undressed behind in prim 50s and 60s movies. I’m sure you can buy them from Ikea. And I just imagine the conversation.
Architect: It’s a special security screen, guv’nor.
Blair: Are you sure? It looks like something from Ikea.
A: Course I’m sure. I wouldn’t lie now would I? I’m an architect, it’s not like I’m a politician. [Laughs]
B: What’s special about it then?
A: Well, it’s security innit? If I told you, then I’d have to kill you, and I wouldn’t want to do that.
B: You wouldn’t?
A: Nah, I’d rather have the money for the screen. Then I can emigrate.
B: Hmm. How much?
A: Seeing as it’s you. Two million.
B: Two million pounds!
A: Nah. Two million Mars bars… I’m kidding. Two million pounds. Sterling. None of that Euro rubbish.
B: It’s rather a lot. It’s very like an Ikea screen.
A: Ooh, you drive a hard bargain, Mr Blair. Tell you what, 1.3, and I won’t put it on the books.
B: [punchline as above]
These 319 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:06am GMT Permanent link.
Biting Back »
INTERVIEWER: You’re a very silly man and I’m not going to interview you.
RAYMOND: Ah, anti-semitism!
INTERVIEWER: Not at all. It’s not even a proper nose. (takes it off) It’s polystyrene.
Richard likes the Private Eye covers. He has one reservation, however.
The only problem is that Private Eye still seems to be using the same jokes as years ago; the vampire joke about Michael Howard was originally used against Norman Tebbitt [sic]. It does rather beg the question of whether it is politics that has stood still or Private Eye itself.
So perhaps not everyone thinks that Vampires are a Hungarian stereotype. Poor Norman Tebbit. Think of all the abuse he suffered as an MP. Michael Foot called him a “semi house-trained polecat” which is clearly a code word for ‘Jewish’. He’s not jewish? He might be. In secret. Just hasn’t told anyone. People like you think it’s OK to insult gays. He’s not gay either? Are you sure about that?
These 82 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:49am GMT Permanent link.
I Call It Art »
All is not lost for Labour: Austin Mitchell understands how to get ahead (ahem!), though Mad Mel would call it morally bankruptcy.
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Thom Gunn Update »
I shouldn’t have the knocked Torygraph yesterday. It certainly delivered a fitting tribute to Thom Gunn today, the best obituary of those I’ve read so far. Unlike the NYT, it gets both the poetry and his relation to the Movement. Perhaps their obituarist read the poems rather than the critics.
In 1954 Gunn’s first collection appeared. Fighting Terms won immediate praise, particularly for the poem The Wound, which drew upon the Iliad and demonstrated a muscularity and rigour in its metre which was out of temper with the times…
The book has the formality of Marvell, but an updated attitude towards sexual politics. This was the age of “The Movement”, a loosely-bracketed bunch of poets centred around Philip Larkin and Kingsley Amis. “To my surprise,” Gunn said later, “I also learned that I was a member of it.”
This far closer to the Gunn I’ve read that the Times’ imagined latter-day confessional poet.
Not that the paper is alone in projection. Sully has to recruit Gunn to his crusade: “he met his husband, Mike Kitay, at Oxford in the early 1950s.” (My emphasis.) Oh, come on, Andy, Gay.com doesn’t use the term — there’s nothing in his writing to show that Gunn and Kitay regarded themselves as such: living in San Francisco, and knowing that death was approaching, they could easily have signed the paper if it had mattered to them. It’s one thing to fight for rights — and I support you in that; it’s another to co-opt the deceased into your fantasies. As the Telegraph says
The couple lived together there for the rest of his life, in spite of Gunn’s ceaseless clubbing and cruising.
Or is a fault in Bill Clinton acceptable between men? I know this seems to disagree with what I wrote yesterday, and even though I hold consistency in no regard whatever, I was talking about the euphemism — which I knew even the Torygraph had outgrown. (So really it was just a cheap crack.)
Mad Mel would doubtless censure Gunn’s hedonism as ‘moral turpitude’ or some such, especially as he “also came under the influence of mescaline, lysergic acid and Allen Ginsberg.” (Particularly pernicious. I once saw a documentary about William Burroughs where the great man, and wife-assassin, shared an orgone box with Ginsberg. It probably corrupted me for life.) He was a man of higher principles than she, however.
He remained a perfectionist in poetry, and stoutly defended the English language against abuse: “You’d be surprised at what the dictionaries say nowadays. Following new usage, they say ‘lack of interest’ is one of the word [disinterested]’s meanings. Good Lord! I’ll be dead soon. I don’t need to live in this new world.”
It’s called getting your priorities right. As the Telegraph does:
Thom Gunn is survived by Mike Kitay, and a cat, Rose.
These 301 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:35pm GMT Permanent link.
Truth Hurts »
From today’s Newnight email.
Today’s Quote For The Day comes from the entertainer Frank Skinner:
“If my career fails there is always alcoholism to fall back on.”
There are a lot of big news stories around today.
President George Bush is being grilled by the Commission of Inquiry…
Ouch!
These 5 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:45pm GMT Permanent link.
One On Who Assurance Sits »
Mad Mel recently had a go at the Spectator, and the magazine seems to have fallen out of favour with the right. Indeed, their disaffection seems largely targeted at Boris Johnson, and for the life of me, I don’t see why. Sometimes I think the only thing that keeps the Tory party alive is continuing to write its suicide note. Can’t they see that Johnson offers exactly the wet Toryism, coupled with affability and that unshakeable Eton confidence, which centrist voters would flock to in order to get rid of Labour? Hague could seem pompous; IDS was uncomfortable or nervous; Howard is unctuous; Boris is one on whom assurance sits as a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire, as the cliché has it.
And he’s very funny in the Telegraph today on Tony Blair. He goes so far as to anatomise his (Boris’s) character.
Well, my friends, I am all for looking on the bright side of life. I have bet on the Grand National. I have put money into chocolate vending machines in Underground stations, even though this is a wholly academic exercise.
What’s not to like? He even gets in a dig on the West Lothian question, which as far as I can tell, New Labour still believe will spontaneously evaporate if ignored for long enough.
These 179 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 30 April 2004
The Profit And The Loss »
One of the arguments for the war in Iraq, possibly the most resonant reason among the hawkish left, is that the condition of ordinary people (or, as that is slanted and meaningless expression, ‘the greatest number’) would be improved. But if this improvement is measurable and hence tenable then so is the cost. (If we give a value of infinity to each human life, we can still use algebra to show that an action which results in 50 deaths is more expensive than one which results in 49.) And there has been a cost, not just in the ‘collateral damage’ (as the euphemism has it), but also to our own troops — I mean the Coalition, but especially the British. We can count the dead, so have some idea of the debit side.
How well are we doing? Well there is this (found through Nikolai), which is far from encouraging. And Henry Farrell has more. Atrios adds, “Rape rooms indeed.”
Atrios is on good form just now. This story, for example, from the L.A. Times (requires boring registration).
A senior Defense Department official is under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general for allegations that he attempted to alter a contract proposal in Iraq to benefit a mobile phone consortium that includes friends and colleagues, according to documents obtained by The Times and sources with direct knowledge of the process.
Good one, but it’s about the people, not about business, isn’t it? It’s to the credit of the Pentagon that they are investigating this. Though attempts like this to shut out competition could very likely result not in “the most advanced system that we possibly can [have]” but in an expensive and useless white elephant.
To come back to the dead, Arkhangel celebrates Nightline’s very honourable idea:
By now, you know that Nightline will devote tomorrow’s broadcast solely to reading the names of those brave souls killed in action in Iraq. Their pictures will be shown on screen while Ted Koppel reads their names. I’ve urged you to see, as I think it’s a great way to pay tribute on the night prior to the anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” speech — you know, the one that celebrated the end of “major” combat operations.
Atrios has this story too, but Arkhangel has more background. It is a nice concept, in fact, if you believe that the vigilance and gallantry of the troops is what keeps your country free, it’s a necessary gesture. Not everyone goes along with this:
But if you’re in a market where the ABC affiliate is owned by Sinclair Broadcasting, you’re out of luck, because those stations — save for one — won’t broadcast Nightline tomorrow night.
Sinclair regard the broadcast as politically motivated:
Before you judge our decision, however, we would ask that you first question Mr. Koppel as to why he chose to read the names of the 523 troops killed in combat in Iraq, rather than the names of the thousands of private citizens killed in terrorists attacks since and including the events of September 11, 2001. In his answer, you will find the real motivation behind his action scheduled for this Friday.
I hope I gave my reason above: we owe the troops something for voluntarily placing themselves in danger, and only by such actions can we hope to encourage future generations of servicemen to risk their lives for us. Of course, doing this is always political: it could serve to remind even the most addled viewer that the President was AWOL for most of his military service apart from availing himself of free dental treatment.
Christopher Hitches pointed out that the Royal Navy first bolstered the slave trade and a generation later fought to end it. This is true. He goes on to claim that the earlier action does not invalidate the later action: in fact, it demanded it. Again, I do not dissent. But what we mean by the British Empire in both these instances reminds me of the old philosophical saw about the ship that was repaired so frequently that not an original plank remained from the original. The England football team who will play in Europe are, in a sense, the same England team who played in 1966 (both are England football teams, and there is only one) — but a very weak sense. That the reconstruction of Iraq is being carried out by the same crooks — Rumsfeld, Cheney, and the Bush family — who supported Saddam and wouldn’t know a mass grave from a teaching hospital is — to use a word I normally avoid — disgusting.
I should write to the Labour leadership, but I doubt he’d listen.
These 550 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:42pm GMT Permanent link.
Tony, Tony, Tony! »
Out! Out! Out!
Bring on the Labour leadership contest.
Tony Blair: my part in his downfall.
[Editor’s note: this is an entirely gratuitous post, for reasons which I hope are clear enough.]
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:02pm GMT Permanent link.