Monday, 1 March 2004
Things Are So Different Now »
Oh, Lord, I’ve started reading Sully again. He’s being accused of hypocrisy because of his recent turning on Bush. I actually think that he’s consistent. If you read him over the last couple of years, gay marriage has been his big thing throughout. Bush is merely a president, and presidents come and go. (I was going to say that whatever happens, Bush will not be president in 2009, but, of course, he could lose the next election and win the one after that. Whatever, a time has to come when he won’t be president.) So if he has to make a choice, it makes sense for Sullivan to prefer the issue he has campaigned for over an individual. He’s always been clear that there are certain Republicans he likes, and others whom he has no time for.
Things were so different then. You know how different it was? Bush was president, the economy was tanking and we’d just finished a war with Iraq.
OK, I don’t like Bush, but let me pose what I’m going to call the ‘Dubya Paradox.’ If you think (as I do) that Clinton had a more effective approach to terrorism and the place of the US in the world, then what has Bush done? If you think, as many do, that Bush won the war on terrorism, he’s now nullified the threat from Iraq, and essentially beheaded al-Quaeda, then what is he for next time? (It’s a paradox because I think that he’ll still win.)
Sullivan has a similar thought, and compares Bush to Churchill.
And finally, a game. If you follow the link above, and get the advert for ‘Levitra’ at the top of the page, try to guess what it is. (Yes, embarrassing medical problem, but which one?) Give up? Mouse over the ‘Important safety information’ tab at the right. The sentence on what it doesn’t protect against is priceless. As for the one before, yeah, right.
These 300 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:19am GMT Comments.
Love Your Enemy »
Love your neighbour til
His wife gets home
Jim Morrison
I’ve had this before, but it’s worth repeating:
As for the message, you can love your enemy and see the need to kill him at the same time.
Adam Yoshida (in the comments).
Michael Brooke is convinced that young Adam is a brilliant left-wing satirist. Maybe. But others think the same thing — seriously:
I want to kill him. I want his intestines on a stick… I want to kill his dog.
The Sun manages spectacularly mealy-mouthed reporting of reactions to Gibson’s film. It ends with what seems like neutral journalism:
[Gibson’s] father, Hutton — also an ultra-conservative Catholic — made an anti-Semitic rant during an interview, claiming Jews invented the Holocaust. Mel refused to denounce the outburst.
The first time I read that, it seemed damning of Gibson. It’s not. “Refused to denounce” doesn’t mean much at all: he could have said, “He’s my Dad. He’s been good enough to come to my movie. What can you do?”
As Christopher Hitchens says, “It’s not fair to expect Mel to trash his father.” (Hitchens also turns Biblical scholar in I detest this film… with a passion.) Gibson’s remarks above were about “one US film critic [Frank Rich] who linked Gibson’s father’s (undoubtedly offensive) remarks on the Holocaust with The Passion’s alleged anti-semitism.”
That’s not a refusal to denounce.
(Sun and Mirror links found through Gert.)
These 162 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13pm GMT Comments.
Under The Eyes Of Unqualified Offerings »
Thanks to Jim Henley for the link to MotherJones.com’s A Legacy of Lies.
I still don’t know what to think. Bush still seems like the wrong guy to me, and I never claimed that Clinton was perfect, merely a lot better than the presidents who came before and after him.
In fact, since the mid-1990’s some inspectors privately argued that Iraq had been effectively disarmed. But they were subject to intense pressure from Washington not to give Iraq a clean bill of health. According to Ron Cleminson, a senior Canadian arms control expert who served on UNSCOM’s College of Commissioners throughout the 1990’s, the inspectors could have declared Iraq disarmed of nuclear, missile, and chemical weapons as early as 1992, but Washington’s hardline position prevented such a move.
There seems to be something missing. Why did Washington adopt this “hardline position"? Orneriness? I suspect the human rights record had something to do with it, as well as Saddam’s attempted assassination of George H.W. Bush.
Still, in the UK, we should have listened to the UN, and in the conference chamber, not over wire-taps (sorry). Shame on Blair for listening to the convenient truths for his allies over the evidence.
These 121 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:03pm GMT Comments.
A Mystery »
What is going on?
Big congratulations to Tony Page for deselecting the nutter MP for Reading, Jane Griffiths. Tony will make a fine addition to the Labour benches.
Stephen Pollard (emphasis added).
The de-selection of Ms Griffiths — who is regarded as a loyal Blairite — will be seen as a blow for the Labour leadership.
Femail, 22 Feb (emphasis added; I assume this is part of the Daily Mail).
The Labour Party’s own website entry for Jane Griffiths.
Every other story on this is incredibly bland: Scotsman for instance. Today’s Telegraph reports on her allegations of a culture of sexual infidelity and blind drunkenness at Westminster.
Tony Page, who, according to Pollard, “will make a fine addition to the Labour benches” has “two convictions for gross indecency in public lavatories.”
Defending him in Pollard’s comments is ‘Grey Skinned Boy’ (I suspect an alias) who says
TP’s never made a secret of his past, and it’s only a bunch of antiquated sex laws that made it an issue in the first place.
While cottaging may have been the only way for gays to meet in the 1950s, these days there are clubs and bars. If he wants to solicit in public like a common prostitute, he might expect the law to be against him. (In this, I am behind Miss Griffiths, who supports the legalisation of brothels. IMO, doing so protects prostitutes by keeping them off the streets, as well as protecting other women from kerb-crawlers, and so forth. Propositioning those who elect to be propositioned is fair enough; everything else is harassment. What would be wrong in a works canteen or a student refectory may be acceptable or tolerable or not worth making a fuss over in a night club. If Mr Page can’t tell a policeman from a decent, clean-living homosexual, well, I’d think twice about voting for him.) Miss Griffiths is by her and the party’s admission a “Member of the National Fancy Rat Society and a founding Trustee of the Ectopic Pregnancy Trust” as well as “Secretary, Far East Prisoners of War Group. Joint Chair, Parliamentary Male Cancers Group. Vice Chair, Parliamentary Beer Group. Vice Chair, Earth Sciences Parliamentary Group. Chair, Environment, Sustainable Waste and Re-cycling Group”. According to Top Fermentation the Parliamentary Beer Group ‘exists “to promote understanding amongst Parliamentarians of the United Kingdom beer and pub industries.” So even for an Iraq War supporter, she must be alright.
I couldn’t post this when I wrote the above because it was too soon after the previous post, and would be ignored (as updating too often by weblogs.com etc). So I went off to circuits (possibly a mistake as I gave blood this afternoon) and thought. I’ve realised that I consider deselection a very serious matter.
I think I think (and it has to be like this, I’m afraid) that when a candidate passes from their party selection to an actual parliamentary election, they become, as it were, the property of the electorate, not of the party. If Miss Griffiths were elected by Reading East in 1997 and 2001, it is up to the voters of that constituency to kick her out. (Her right to resign is not affected by this.) I’ve a vague idea for a deselection procedure whereby both sides would collect signatures (auditing to be paid by the appellate) with the side with the most claiming victory.
The problem is, as I see it, that voters vote for Prime Ministers, not forgettable local MPs. So the Tories were wrong to depose Margaret Thatcher in 1990. (Deposing losers like Neil Kinnock or William Hague is not a problem for me.) The only crime to make such action legitimate would be deviation from the manifesto. (Such as, for example, voting for, rather than as mandated against, top-up fees.)
Curiously, I find that this is part of my opposition to the war in Iraq. I don’t see what right we have to export such flawed examples of democracy. The choices we have are so limited that I’m not sure (beyond the obvious, that we’re freer, happier, and more prosperous than most of the world — though I’d put this down to mineral resources and technology — I do know that this is partly answered by the relative poverty of the old USSR) that the system works at all.
To come back to the original problem: why is she a nutter? The voters of Reading East don’t seem to think so, and I prefer their reasoning to Stephen Pollard’s.
These 664 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:55pm GMT Comments.
Qu’est Que Ce? »
Psychokiller
Qu’est que ce?
Byrne
I love America. I love the America Norman Geras loves.
Therefore I’m more than a little surprised by BritSpin’s Why do the Tories hate America? take.
George W. Bush does not stand for America. Not the sentimental America of Norm above, nor the America of anyone whoever hitched across the country, nor of anyone they ever bought drugs from. He may represent some stupid, introverted, pigshit-ignorant-of-anything-in-the-ouside-world-since-600BC, view of America, but that isn’t the people. Of course there are fools there who support him. There are the guys who kill Jack Nicholson and Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, there are frustrated Taxi Drivers who can’t date Cybil Shepard, there are guys called Frank with oxygen masks, and Nice Guy Eddies with razors and a fixation with ears.
We know we don’t hate the US. We give them Tim Roth and Sam Mendes. They give us Malkovich and Paltrow. We produced the Beatles, they found Dylan, we threw back the Stones, they replied with the Beach Boys, and so on. It’s always been a productive rivalry.
They now have John Ashcroft. They get upset over a nipple, a nipple! For God’s sake, it’s one of the first things every human sees.
We don’t hate America, but in the nicest possible way, “You’ve elected a half-wit. Get well soon.”
These 216 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:21pm GMT Comments.
Tuesday, 2 March 2004
When You Go, Will You Send Back… »
Take a look up the railtrack from Miami to Canada
The Proclaimers
No more ‘Letter from America’. Maybe the end is nigh, after all.
These 12 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:04pm GMT Comments.
Wednesday, 3 March 2004
Why Do Americans Hate America? »
Well, I rapped upon a house
With the U.S. flag upon display
I said, “Could you help me out
I got some friends down the way”
The man says, “Get out of here
I’ll tear you limb from limb”
I said, “You know they refused Jesus, too”
He said, “You’re not Him
Get out of here before I break your bones
I ain’t your pop”
I decided to have him arrested
And I went looking for a cop
Well, this is from the BBC, so zealots can safely ignore it.
In his victory speech in Washington, Mr Kerry attacked President Bush’s foreign policy as “the most inept, reckless, arrogant and ideological” in modern US history.
That man must really hate his country. I sure hope he doesn’t win. (< — irony)
These 26 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:39am GMT Comments.
With God On Our Side »
For you don’t count the dead when
God’s on your side
Norman Geras considers Chris Bertram’s post on religion. Like Norm, I think that Chris makes a decent case: I just happen to agree more with Ophelia Benson.
Chris Bertram:
One of the reasons I can’t bring myself to share the antipathy to religion that is expressed by someone like our esteemed regular commenter Ophelia Benson, is that, at its best, religion succeeds in a symbolic articulation of universal moral concern that secular morality finds it hard to match up to (motivationally, I mean). Secular morality is a thin gruel compared to the notion that, as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters.
(Emphasis added.) I think this is unequivocally an atheist’s formulation of what religion is good for, putting it somewhere between a fairy story and a social contract. I think Chris is wrong on several points. Religions don’t set out to articulate “universal moral concern” — they (attempt to) provide answers. And I think “secular morality” can provide “symbolic articulation” (see Belle Waring’s excellent CT post on Sesame Street), the problem being that as secular culture doesn’t have a universal set of symbols, we can’t point to them in the way we can to Bible stories. (Personal histories are quite different, and I’d claim that I learned my moral outlook mostly from ‘Star Trek’ and ‘Dr Seuss’, and my respect for the law from ‘Top Cat’.) Just because my local Indian shopkeeper and I grew up with different stories, doesn’t mean that we can’t have arrived at similar conclusions. Neither of us eat flesh, and we both think the government is too powerful.
Religions don’t seem to teach what I call “morality” anyway. Mel Gibson gas just sunk a significant amount of his fortune into a Biblical epic, so I think it’s fair to assume that he is religious, but apart from his rather intolerant remarks, his views on his wife’s eventual destination take some swallowing. Is this a moral code or a way of ensuring obedience?
I don’t see any correlation between professed faith and kindness to others in the people I know. Jesus explicitly taught religious tolerance. The parable of the Good Samaritan is about acting well (not, as Norman Tebbit chose it interpret it, about being rich being better than being poor). Churches can preach religious intolerance, which, to me, is the negation of the Scriptures.
I can’t reconcile Chris’s
He sent his only son, and we killed Him
in the first paragraph (my emphasis on ‘only’), with
as children of God, we are to think of ourselves as brothers and sisters
in the final one. It’s not Chris’s fault: it’s a problem with Christianity.
Like Norm, I’m happy with the brotherhood of man thing, I just don’t need to invent God to get there. If DNA didn’t do the job for me, I’d argue that we might as well assert brotherhood as assert God and derive brotherhood from Him.
And so back to Dylan song #2:
In a many dark hour
I’ve been thinkin’ about this
That Jesus Christ
Was betrayed by a kiss
But I can’t think for youYou’ll have to decide
Whether Judas Iscariot
Had God on his side.So now as I’m leavin’
I’m weary as Hell
The confusion I’m feelin’
Ain’t no tongue can tell
The words fill my head
And fall to the floor
If God’s on our side
He’ll stop the next war.
These 396 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:53pm GMT Comments.
Keeping It Short »
Well, I wake in the morning,
Fold my hands and pray for rain.
I got a head full of ideas
That are drivin’ me insane.
Maggie’s Farm, Dylan
Margo MacDonald gets it right about Clare Short.
She fouled-up her timing and political decorum. Clare’s decision to blurt it all out in a BBC interview in the wake of the decision not to prosecute Katharine Gun was a political misjudgement. Her status as a Privy Councillor enabled her to see the transcripts of Kofi Annan’s private conversations. If she found that distasteful, immoral or illegal she should have resigned from the Privy Council, written to Tony Blair demanding to have the practice stopped, and depending on his reply, could have made the matter public in a less chaotic fashion.
But she was still right to give backing to Katharine Gun’s whistle-blowing on GCHQ’s uncalled-for intrusions, just as Helena Kennedy is right to call for the publication of the Attorney General’s advice to Tony Blair on the legality of the UK’s war against Iraq.
I haven’t heard anything of Helena Kennedy for years, yet she was one of the most attractive legal minds of New Labour — before they actually got into power and did anything.
It’s the old Labour thing of being uncomfortable in power, but I have to force myself to recall how promising and talented the party looked at the beginning of 1997, and how leaden and easily-led it looks now.
Margo MacDonald know that the issue is more important than personalities. (We can’t say the same for most commentators.)
If the House of Commons was misled, or lied to, on the legality of war without the specific endorsement of the UN, it’s the perfect exit for the Tories from a murky business that was opposed by millions, and pursued against their wishes by a prime minister in the pocket of George Bush.
And of course, the same absolution might be obtained by those MSPs who voted to trust, and support Blair’s policy in Iraq… just as Westminster MPs were misled, so were MSPs assured of the legality of invading Iraq without a second UN resolution, and therefore duped by the Prime Minister.
I still haven’t heard any US reaction to this. If I believed in God, I’d be ardently praying for a Bush soundbite. Go on, George, please, please, say ‘bugger.’
These 126 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:41pm GMT Comments.
Thursday, 4 March 2004
Stuck »
Mona tried to tell me
To stay away from the train line,
She said that all the railwaymen
Just drink up your blood like wine.
Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again
This is an odd argument by Patrick Bishop in today’s Telegraph:
Omar, an acquaintance of mine, always seemed an easygoing sort, but the other day something snapped. On the morning of the Shia festival of Ashura, he was eating breakfast in his spacious Baghdad villa when the peace was shattered by the din of religious chanting coming from a tape machine in the room of his driver. He went in and asked him to turn it down. The fellow refused. He returned with a blunt instrument, smashed the sound system to pieces and threw the driver out…
In the bad old days, the driver would never have dared to identify his religious allegiance so boldly.
I can’t find a moral, or even a point, to this vignette, other than sectarian tension still runs high. Omar doesn’t seem so easygoing to me, and hasn’t yet learned that a little more tolerance is necessary in a pluralist society. He (a Sunni) is the boss, and the driver (a Shi’ite) is a worker. Would a post-apartheid South African white receive any sympathy if he treated his black driver like this?
Signs of Shia triumphalism are everywhere, from Omar’s driver’s religious rap music to the black and red banners inscribed with sacred texts that flutter over the streets of Mansour, to the horror of its middle-class residents.
Rap music? I somewhat doubt that Shi’a chanting is much influenced by Public Enemy, but let that stand. The only conclusion from “the horror of its middle-class residents” is that the class divide was solely a religious matter.
Despite the attitude on the Sunni side, the Shi’ites are being portrayed as tolerant.
The Shia authorities make no secret of the fact that their militias have assassinated former Ba’athist officials whom they hold responsible for crimes against their people, but Sunnis without sinister connections to the old regime have so far been left alone.
Well, so they say. What is the Telegraph for in Iraq — vigilante justice or the rule of law? These are mutually exclusive. Also the more Ba’athist officials are assassinated, the fewer we or the coming regime can attempt to try.
Those who accept the American view that al-Zarqawi was responsible emphasise that he is an outsider. Indeed, “foreigners” are often blamed for most of the major atrocities that have struck the country since the end of the war.
I take this as further evidence of the deep and often well concealed desire among all communities to live in peace with one another.
I support the conclusion — but not from those premises. Blaming “foreigners” sounds like denial. Anyway, “foreigners” coming to Iraq on terrorist missions was intentional according to Andrew Sullivan’s now-forgotten “flypaper” theory. Most people want to live in peace most of the time. During the Irish ‘Troubles’ most people didn’t support the bombings and the murders. That didn’t mean that the bombers came from outside. Holding a different passport doesn’t make someone an outsider in this sort of climate; the bonds of religion are much stronger than geography. Geography matters, however, when it comes to planting bombs. Whoever the bombers are, they have be inside Iraq.
Compare Juan Cole:
In a desperate attempt to redirect anger away from the Coalition Provisional Authority, one of its officials told the newspaper az-Zaman that he believed Iranians were behind the attacks. This allegation strikes me as completely implausible, and, indeed, as almost certainly a lie put out by a CPA ally of neocon fraudster Michael Ledeen, who helped the Khomeini regime via Iran-contra in the 1980s but has more recently advocated overthrowing it.
There may be a “deep… desire among all communities to live in peace with one another” but someone has to curb the Shi’a militias and teach the Sunnis some manners first.
It’s still a mess.
These 320 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:54pm GMT Comments.
The Son Also Rises »
Look out kid
You’re gonna get hit
But users, cheaters
Six-time losers
Hang around the theaters
Girl by the whirlpool
Lookin’ for a new fool
Don’t follow leaders
Watch the parkin’ meters
I feared that the story that Boris Johnson left the screening of that Mel Gibson film whistling “Always look on the bright side” would be an urban myth (or worse, intentional spin to make a politician seem human).
Fortunately ( — or not for the shreds of my street-cred, for I’ll vote Tory if they elect him leader), it’s true. Here’s Boris on The Passion.
I mention this because my mind has been much occupied with themes of terror and laughter, ever since a group of us went to see the first showing of The Passion of the Christ. I am afraid to say that I was late, and, as I entered the foyer of the Odeon West End, a man with an earring broke off from his mobile phone call and said: “It’s all right, Mr Johnson, you’re in time for the Crucifixion.”
I know there must be some flaw in my character, but this remark provoked instant laughter. It seemed straight out of Monty Python’s Life of Brian.
No whistling, there, you may object, but he goes on:
I keep whistling the magnificent Eric Idle soft-shoe number with which Life of Brian draws to a close. “Always look on the bright side of life!” sing Brian and Co on their crosses, and so do I. Then some demon made me look up the script of Life of Brian, and — forgive me, forgive me — those much-loved old jokes, juxtaposed in my head with the supercolossal seriousness of Mel Gibson, have sent me almost round the bend with amusement.
I started laughing so much that I had to sequester myself from my colleagues; and then, when I read again the bit where Mandy, Brian’s mum, rejects the gift of myrrh, “a valuable balm”, I am ashamed to say that I lost it completely.
I’ve alluded to this before, and I’m not a theologian, but I fail to understand how either Mel Gibson or Rev. Maurice Gordon can claim that they are Christians. Jesus himself is explicit: his message is not “do what I say”, it’s “do what I do” and it’s the doing — being charitable and forgiving — that counts, not nationality, nor denominational or temporal affiliation, nor who your parents are or what they did.
Like most others in the UK I haven’t seen the film. (I don’t have, and don’t much want, broadband, so there’s no chance of my downloading it.) From what I know, it focuses on the last twelve hours of Jesus’s life, and like the “Life of Brian” and “The Last Tempation of Christ” ends on the cross. I doubt that Rev. Gordon has enough latin to understand ‘habeus corpus’ so I may need to translate. How can the Jews have killed Jesus when there is no body? Or perhaps that element of Christian doctrine, like so many others, is not in his creed.
If the crowd did turn on Jesus, it was because his message was so difficult (not surprising, as so much of it runs contrary to human nature). That difficulty is emphasised by Mr Gibson and Rev. Gordon and the betrayal is repeated by them. Not that they’d question themselves for a second.
Some readers will no doubt say that a devil is inside me; and though my faith is a bit like Magic FM in the Chilterns, in that the signal comes and goes, I can only hope that isn’t so.
I find more conviction in Boris’s honest doubts than in Mel’s angry passion.
These 316 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:17pm GMT Comments.
The White Negro »
When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name
When you’re strange
The Doors
You’re Invisible Man! by Ralph Ellison
Most of your life, people have either ignored you or told you that you were wrong. You’ve been duped, mistreated, misled, and neglected. Maybe it was because of your race, or some other uniqueness that people were quick to condemn, but now you just want to crawl into a hole and disappear. After all, nobody knows your name. But you just might speak for everyone.
Then again, I might not.
Take the Book Quiz found through Norm.
It’s not a book I’ve read, so I can’t comment on the appositeness or otherwise of the result. I’ve read its near-namesake by H.G. Wells, but that isn’t much help.
As if I don’t have enough to read.
These 51 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:15pm GMT Comments.
Ah Yes, I Remember Him Well »
Peter “Truth Unvarnished” Cuthbertson has a warning of how awful Kerry would be. (Someone remind him of the Tory position.)
He may have a point. No wait!
It seems that George Bush spend more time at college than he did in the army. He went to classes even. He voiced opinions. Naturally these were eloquent:
At Harvard Business School, thirty years ago, George Bush was a student of mine. I still vividly remember him. In my class, he declared that “people are poor because they are lazy.” He was opposed to labor unions, social security, environmental protection, Medicare, and public schools. To him, the antitrust watch dog, the Federal Trade Commission, and the Securities Exchange Commission were unnecessary hindrances to “free market competition.” To him, Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal was “socialism.”
Trust me, the economy is tanking because there’s a world recession. Or maybe it’s the Arabs. Hey, maybe the elves stole it. Quit asking stupid questions.
These 81 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:45pm GMT Comments.
Friday, 5 March 2004
Quotation Of The Day »
There is no level I will not stoop to, so this could become a regular feature.
Those who live by the anthropomorphic god, die by the anthropomorphic god. Or something.
These 30 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:51am GMT Comments.
In Case You Missed It »
My top 5 Dylan songs. I’ll try not to drone on about the ones I left out, but it was hard.
These 21 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:52pm GMT Comments.
The Horror, The Horror »
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
September 1, 1939, Auden
Arthur Silber has declared another blogging hiatus after his Roots of Horror series (Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII) failed to stir as much interwebnet thing discussion as he felt it deserved, indeed as much as the most trivial Instahack fling.
I didn’t even read it until yesterday because I had only just realised that he’d come out of his last (very short-lived) hiatus. And keeping up with Arthur is hard: he writes in excess of 2000 furious, sarcastic, amusing, and original words a day.
It’s not the easiest piece, nor, I’m afraid to say, close to his best. I have to resort to the sort of glib paradox that third-rate commentators reach for and announce that he has thought too much and too little about his subject. He’s clearly been wrestling with this for years, possibly his whole adult life, and I don’t doubt his conviction or his sensitivity.
What he has produced, however, is more like seven condensed proposals for book chapters, the sort of thing a professor might throw together before taking a Sabbatical to compose his magnum opus: they aren’t the work itself. They are too heavy with quotations from hostile witnesses and too short on argument or exposition. It may be obvious to Arthur, but he’ll have to more than this to win converts.
I’m also not convinced by a lot of it. Arthur sounds like someone who has been in therapy: he sounds, in fact, like my Dad. I think he underestimates how resilient children largely are, there are quite a few studies which purport to show (child psychology was never my thing, so I didn’t read deeply) that anything over a minimal level of care (enough food to grow, freedom from fear, warmth, and so on) makes little difference to emotional development. And, anyway, I believe that most parents try their best, and that Arthur doesn’t recognise how much some agonise over how they treat their children. Like almost every argument, this one will not reach those Arthur believes it should — Mel Gibson’s father is unlikely to be swayed (and it would do no good even if he were).
Despite Arthur’s clear dislike of the man, George Bush seems like a decent father to me, if his daughters are anything to go by. The odd little scandals weren’t the attention-seeking of the affection-deprived but the confident and healthy experimentation. (And what else can a society which conditions nine-year-olds to dress like Britney Spears but denies anyone less that 21 anywhere to go out and flaunt it expect?)
Arthur is outraged in Part I by this story.
RICE, Texas — A fifth grader with a rare deformity says two teachers put him on display for a science lesson.
Robert Will Harris has Stahl’s ear, which causes points to form on the ears. He and family say two fourth-grade teachers at his school used his deformity to teach a lesson in genetics.
The boy says the teachers pulled him from his class twice in one day and took him to their classrooms to show his ears.
Officials with the Rice Independent School District acknowledge the incidents happened, but say the teachers meant no harm. They say the teachers were simply trying to teach genetics and family traits.
The family says the boy’s ears have nothing to do with genetics. His parents say they no longer want their son used for show and tell
Being me, I was more intrigued by the last paragraph than the rest. I decency or otherwise of teachers (which I am not sure is part of the job description) interests me less than whether they know their subject (which I know is). I looked up Stahl’s Ear:
This malformation may have a hereditary component, studies have not been conclusive.
The parents are right. (It took me all of 30 seconds to find that. How hard can it be?) Christ knows what the teachers thought they were doing. Perhaps they were confused by the term ‘congenital’ which is used with regard to symptoms present at birth, regardless of whether these are hereditary (as the word implies) or due to excessive drinking, drug use, accident, malicious attack, dietary deficiencies, and so forth. But teachers ought to know that. In addition to culpable insensitivity, they were also teaching bollocks.
And so it goes on. Arthur misses the sanity which most Americans possess (with a few idiosyncratic blindspots to be sure), and makes the world out to be worse than it in fact is.
I avoid the practice of ‘read the whole thing’ because I’m not interested in providing moral pointers or guidance. You might like to read Arthur’s articles, and, if you have a blog, to comment on them. Not for your own edification (though that might happen; you never know until you try it), but because it might cheer him up.
And that would be a good thing.
These 676 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:16pm GMT Comments.
I Suppose You Think You’re A Diplomat »
You know, just by conversing, you can really learn a lot about a person.
George Costanza (Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld)
You know, I actually feel a lot better that Jason Alexander, sworn enemy of soup nazis everywhere, has thrown his weight behind a new Middle East peace initiative.
These 28 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:10pm GMT Comments.
Saturday, 6 March 2004
In The Vanguard »
The government’s mercurial decision to kill off the UK film industry may set back my latest project.
In the time-honoured system of raising money (or, as it is known outside the blogosphere, begging), I’m asking for donations for my proposed movie about the last twelve hours of Roland Barthes. I won’t be scared off by threats that my film will lead to attacks on laundry van drivers. To suit the subject matter, the running time will be at least 12 hours (taking a cue from the radio recording of Ulysses, which needed 30 hours to get through one day from “Stately, plump” to “yes"), with commentary by various intellectuals, preferably in the original French, German, and Swahili.
It’ll take intensive lobbying of the hidebound cinema licensing system to allow patrons to bring their own drinks and cigarettes to cinemas, along with typewriters or laptops so they can critique as they watch.
This is for the preservation of our intellectual heritage and our true culture.
Join with me and save the things worth saving. Of course, I expect the result to be a flop.
These 183 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:51pm GMT Comments.
The Camera Never Lies »
Peter Cuthbertson presents the clinching argument for voting for Bush.
For a little balance, we present an equally presidential heir to Tony Blair, should he ever wish to step down. We feel confident that Peter will endorse our man. His qualifications are clear.
In the interests of balance, we present a telling photograph of the man we don’t want to be president.
Snopes, as always, has some theories about the Bush picture.
Well, they would, snarky, sarky, liberal cynics. The camera never lies.
These 85 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:25pm GMT Comments.
Sunday, 7 March 2004
He’s Not Selling Any Alibis »
He’s not selling any alibis
As you stare into the vacuum of his eyes
And ask him do you want to make a deal?
Years ago, in 2000, I had an actual ink-on-paper letter from a friend in the States which mentioned the bloodlines of recent presidents and posited the idea that the one with the bluest blood always won. I thought it was silly playing with statistics at the time (and patrilineage is always doubtful). Mmm, Kevin Drum.
Image stolen from here. His “people like me” is disconcertingly like mine. And that Richard Feynman (my own vote for greatest mind of the 20th century) did he really have long hair, and is that an iPod in his pocket, or… ?
On the long hair, Michael Brooke mentioned ponytails recently. I lost mine on the day after my 30th birthday (I couldn’t get an appointment on the big day). I was practically in tears as my hairdresser (silly, empty-headed girl) told me of her relief that the Tories really had got back in again. In reaction, I rejoined the People’s Party. The Tories have been in power ever since.
You know, speaking of heroes, one of these is a hero of mine, and one is Prime Minister. I can, like the animals on the farm, no longer tell which is which. We need AmEx adverts here, now!
As Norm says, the full text is here or, if you think any contact with those communists at the Beeb with convert you to the crack-smoking homosexual pleasures of degenerates like me, you can go here. I miss Ali.
The rather wonderful, and usually right, likes it. (That’s three years of blurr-blurrr-malapropisms for you.)
There’s the lucidity:
Their argument is one I understand totally. It is that Iraq posed no direct, immediate threat to Britain; and that Iraq’s WMD, even on our own case, was not serious enough to warrant war, certainly without a specific UN resolution mandating military action. And they argue: Saddam could, in any event, be contained.
And by extension (contra Jim Henley) was.
And the pod-people explanation:
So, for me, before September 11th, I was already reaching for a different philosophy in international relations from a traditional one that has held sway since the treaty of Westphalia in 1648; namely that a country’s internal affairs are for it and you don’t interfere unless it threatens you, or breaches a treaty, or triggers an obligation of alliance. I did not consider Iraq fitted into this philosophy, though I could see the horrible injustice done to its people by Saddam.
I think, pedantically as always, that Comrade Tony means “because” rather than “though": Iraq seems to be the root of his position rather than a counter-example.
Jim Kalb says somewhere (I’m not sure that I have the right page, but it is the right discussion) that conservatives reject ideology because the world is clearly too complex. I want to say “right on” or words to that effect. My anti-Marxism (brought about through Popper) rests mainly on the failure of any ideology to describe the world.
September 11th was for me a revelation. What had seemed inchoate came together. The point about September 11th was not its detailed planning; not its devilish execution; not even, simply, that it happened in America, on the streets of New York. All of this made it an astonishing, terrible and wicked tragedy, a barbaric murder of innocent people. But what galvanised me was that it was a declaration of war by religious fanatics who were prepared to wage that war without limit. They killed 3000. But if they could have killed 30,000 or 300,000 they would have rejoiced in it. The purpose was to cause such hatred between Moslems and the West that a religious jihad became reality; and the world engulfed by it.
I find the word ‘they’ slippery and disingenuous. When you’re alone, “faces come out of the rain”, etc. I don’t believe in a ‘them’. I’ve never seen the link between Saddam and bin Laden (Oh, they’re all wogs! why didn’t you just say? I’m like convinced now, I’ve got my Peter Hitchens/Melanie Phillips T-shirts ready, along with my Union flag, does the swastika turn the right way?)
Oh sorry where was I? Tony wasn’t galvanised (his word: I thought it referred to the processing of metals; that may be a confession, of course) by the IRA, who killed far more British people (you know, the ones who elected him, well, not the dead ones). I can’t think why not. Religious fanatics? Check. Skin colour? Don’t ask silly questions. I missed those books in the Bible where Jesus condones murder of those belonging to separate sects in countries not even heard of by his disciples.
For the record, I wasn’t keen on Gore either. I’d have preferred Powell, but — shock! — elect a a nig. a thing, a negr, a you-know, we only had a Mick because LBJ fiddled the 1960 election.
Let’s export democracy, it’s so wonderful. It’s the best of all possible worlds. The odd crucifixion, the odd auto-da-fe needn’t bother us, eh Dr Pangloss?
Since I’ve mentioned heroes, I may as well remember the one of them who answered the Gruauniad questionnaire question “Who do you most despise?” with “Margaret Thatcher”, and who opined that the only world which could afford such extravagances as an an empire could only be fascist.
So to end, “Make it so.”
These 629 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:03am GMT Comments.
The Poor On Both Sides Always Lose »
I saw this first hand living in Barnsley at the time. Many of my close friends suffered terribly and the town has never recovered. This was a high price to pay for what was a personal war between Arthur Scargill and Maggie. The country was the loser in the end.
It’s not often that objective correlatives intrude into our lives, but I remember the pertinent co-incidence of the ending of one of the sweeter relationships in my life and a national defeat. (I’m prone to a snickering pleasure in imagining how Harry’s Place et al would demonise the nasty people bringing the country to its knees.)
Now, I just think we should have played it better.
These 66 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:18am GMT Comments.
Monday, 8 March 2004
Dear Bill »
One of the guilty pleasures of the Torygraph is the Monday column by its former editor. I think Bill Deedes damns Clare Short by comparison with more principled rebels, though he is certainly defending her right to rebel.
Ever the correct journalist, he argues with examples, rather than from airy abstractions. Bill has some surprising opinions:
The most incurable rebel of all was Nye Bevan, whom Wales has just voted to be the greatest of its countrymen, above even Lloyd George. During the Second World War, Bevan perpetually harassed Churchill, who called him a “squalid nuisance”.
An outstanding health minister in Attlee’s 1945-51 administration, he resigned over his government’s decision to make a charge for spectacles and dental treatment, a step that effectively holed the Labour government below the water line.
If I read the last paragraph correctly, the ‘step’ was taken by the government, in other words, Bevan was right.
Bill doesn’t seem to like Kerry though.
Of the other surprises in the paper, none puzzle me as much as the space donated to Barbara Amiel, now that her husband no longer controls the Telegraph group. She seems to challenge herself to the intellectual defence of the indefensible.
Years ago there was a managerial revolution in business, much written about. In that revolution, owners gradually gave way in their businesses to a new managerial class whose own interests were not always the same as those of the company. In checking greed in the managerial class, America seems to be instituting a system that legitimises the greed of minority shareholders.
But shareholders are greedy, that’s why they buy shares rather than blowing their excess earnings on flashier cars or champagne, or sticking it in the post office. Shareholders hold shares to make money. It’s not rocket science.
[Michael] Eisner had a hunch that the Hollywood super-agent Michael Ovitz would be a great catch as president of Disney. He wasn’t. A year after his arrival at Disney he left with a pay-off close to $145 million, a colossal amount. This infuriated some institutional shareholders and they allied with Walt Disney’s nephew, who wanted to get rid of Eisner. They went to court to challenge the pay-off. Ovitz, they complained, was Eisner’s best friend and the Disney board who approved the deal weren’t told enough about it…
Still, the termination package was defensible, given Ovitz’s accomplishments and previous earnings.
But he wasn’t a “great catch as president” because he didn’t accomplish things. I — and I think most of us — don’t begrudge Madonna being rich: she makes records, people buy them, fair enough. It’s the rewards, and the jaw-dropping rewards in the boardroom for abject failure which shareholders object to. If owners don’t want ‘their’ companies decided by shareholders, they shouldn’t sell them to them; they should stay private.
Could this be coded sour grapes about the fate of Conrad?
These 243 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:04pm GMT Comments.
Tuesday, 9 March 2004
A Third Way »
I thought I’d try to consider Guantanamo Four are too dangerous to free, says US
before I blogged my response. No one is asking for their release, not even Amnesty:
“The bottom line for Amnesty is that all of those held must be charged with recognisable offences and tried in the courts,” said a spokesman.
So having bravely drawn a line in the sand in front of a straw man, the US continue:
The United States has disclosed its case against the Guantanamo Four, telling the Telegraph that the four imprisoned British Muslims were trained al-Qa’eda terrorists who would return to the fight if released.
You know what, I believe them. It’s those corrupt, communist lawyers and judges they have to convince. The sad thing is, the rule of law drags the West down, while in places like the old Iraq the government could decide what was right. No wait…
After reviewing US evidence, the British security services concluded that they were “more comfortable not having these people walking the streets in the UK”, US officials said. Tony Blair had agreed.
And, I ask again, did anyone demand that they could walk the streets?
President George W Bush designated Abbasi, a former worshipper at Finsbury Park mosque, and Begg, who worked in an Islamic bookshop in Sparkhill, to be among the first to stand trial before military tribunals.
President Bush himself! He found the time between vacations and afternoon naps to actually govern! No, I don’t believe that for a second. You can see it now “Were these coloring books?” “No, Mr President.” “The chair then, we can’t have this literature stuff in America. The last I heard about a literature case, it was some Russian wanting sex with a thirteen year old. Who did he think he was? Jerry Lee Lewis?”
Norman Geras finds that conditions in Guantanamo Bay may not be as bad as we feared. I don’t care if the prisoners get beer and bingo every night: I’m not consistent about everything, but there’s the William Blake line about a “robin redbreast in a cage.” If the US continues to crow about ‘rule of law’ (or whatever is so good about the West this week, hey we have Britney! and Paris Hilton but that doesn’t go down well in the mid-West, and so on), wouldn’t trials be a good thing? ("What are these courts?” “They’re what your daddy tried so hard to keep you out of Mr President.” “I don’t remember that.” “Enough said, Mr President.")
“If the British Government had captured Luftwaffe pilots bombing London during the middle of World War Two, they would not have given them lawyers to argue that they were innocent and ought to be released,” he said.
We had declared war on Germany, and if they were “bombing London” holding them captive would have been recognised in international law. (I’d like to think that things have moved on a little, and that everyone held was brought before a court first. Else you could see Sigmund Freud in jail, “We caught him speaking German on Hampstead Heath.” “Throw away the key, officer.") The Guantanamo suspects were in Afghanistan at the time. One was caught with hand grenades, so I suppose if he’d been from planet Krypton — and the defence has yet to prove that he isn’t, he could have thrown them all the way to the UK.
If Bush’s government had been more humble and accepted that the US knew very little about terrorism, and had handled their experiences badly (Timothy McVeigh, the Unabomber anyone?), and admitted that they could learn from the UK, Spain, and Germany, things might be different. But under Bush terrorism was new (never mind that anyone with a sense of history accepts that Israel was founded by terrorists, as was a certain world superpower), and they had to handle it their way. We had the First World War, which our idiotic leaders tried to fight as if it were some Napoleonic conflict, only with gas and tanks, so maybe, just maybe, Europeans (or those who read books the right way up) might have a clue how to adapt to the changing faces of combat. But Bush’s men had ICBMs and they looked good in their polished phallic glory, and that was all their arms manufacturing friends knew how to make, so they stuck with them.
Of course, in the UK (those of us with memories, and could remember US solidarity when their ally Argentina launched an unprovoked attack on us, or the cleverly named ‘Republicans’ in the IRA murdered 100s of British subjects) we view the US with, ah, cringing genuflection. After all, they have notoriously inaccurate missiles and we’re closer than Eastern Europe, or the Middle East, so you know…
Some of the British detainees had allegedly admitted to engaging in terrorist activities. Some allegations against them came from other detainees, who had trained alongside them in al-Qa’eda camps, the official said. Citing legal constraints, the British Government has said little about the crimes allegedly committed by the four.
Um, the fifth? It’s there for a reason, and it’s not to make detective novels spin out another fifty pages. It’s there to make torture by the police unproductive. And testimony from other suspects, ditto. Oh gawsh, another amendment…, the first amendment to an amendment.
Insisting he intended no criticism of Mr Blair, the senior US official said: “We are disappointed that the British Government has been unable to provide more information to the British people about the unsavoury backgrounds of some of the British detainees, and the threat they would pose to both the US and the UK.”
’Unable to provide’ can mean ‘has no’ or is ‘unwilling to’. Either they’re not telling (not very democratic) or they haven’t got a case. Someone really must address the crippling lawyer shortage in this country.
In private, the Bush administration feels that it has been left to become the world’s jailer, taking the flak for Guantanamo Bay while looking after terrorists other countries do not want to take back.
Well, I think most British people (apart from say the BNP) want the British prisoners back. Either the US can try them for crimes within its borders (as is its right) or it should deport them. Of course, I really trust the good faith of our intelligence services, who did so much to anticipate and prevent September 11. No wait…
I’m beginning to understand the ‘third way’.
These 784 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:39am GMT Comments.
Wednesday, 10 March 2004
Title »
Both Bobbie and Norm link to David Aaronovich on Jayson Blair Such is the power of blogs that I wrote approvingly aboutBlair myself, back in May last year.
I wonder what the point of Aaronovich is: he’s as bad as Martin Kettle. This is him, excoriating the errant journo:
But the Blair phrase that really stuck in my head was the one extracted from him by Younge. “I just don’t believe,” said Jayson about his book, “that because you’re ashamed about something, you don’t have the right to speak.”
So what the hell is shame, then? Wasn’t that the Hindley problem, that by constantly asking for her release, she convinced many of us that she wasn’t ashamed enough to be freed?
Well, Jayson Balir didn’t have a hand in the murders of any children. For two, isn’t there a problem in writing such sentenious stuff when your own paper is happy enough to publish an interview with Blair, which he gave now that he book is out, rather than at the time of his dismissal (when there was no commercial incentive).
I suspose Mr Aaronovich, like Mr Kettle writes for the love, the credits to his bank account are an accidental bonus.
The next time I’m appraoched in a pub by someone clearly selling stolen goods, I’ll do what I’ve always done: tell them to piss off. But now I’ll also kick myself that I don’t work for the Grauniad, if I did, I could have bought whatever it was and spun a column out of how awful the world is getting.
These 190 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:15am GMT Comments.
Free At Last »
Some people might think that two years of detention without trial and, — apparently — without evidence, might merit some compensation.
At least, I’m hope that I’m not alone. (Found through the redoubtable Matthew Turner.)
These 35 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:54pm GMT Comments.
Perfectly Fine »
Like Alastair Campbell I’m both tribal and Labour (ish, anyway — and to both of those). I also don’t hold New Labour in any degree of esteem (if you discount outright loathing), so I’m prepared to go along with the ‘stupid’ and ‘ignorant’ explanations (see comments in following link) for Ian McCartney calling Oliver Letwin a modern-day Fagin — in other words I didn’t mention it because I hoped that an apology or retraction would be made. It’s been a over a week, and the Tories have drawn attention to it again — to Labour silence (from what I can find through Google News; I’d love to be wrong).
I don’t take Stephen Pollard seriously, but his comment that
The reaction to Mr McCartney’s words betrayed the hidden truth: on the Left, attacking a Jew for being a Jew is perfectly fine.
No, it isn’t.
On a similar theme, I usually disagree with Peter Cuthbertson but he’s right (IMO) about “Bloggers against fascism.” Fascism is bad; everyone is against it (I’m pretty sure that the BNP are too, if I were prepared to read their literature). I thought about this this morning, and my reasoning got so complex that I decided just to publish my conclusions, but even these turned out like the Monty Python “Spanish Inquisition” sketch. This, therefore, may not be an exhaustive list.
- I’m not a joiner, and I hate all meetings, even those I chair, but at least those go faster.
- Even if I were a joiner, most good people (the best lacking all conviction) aren’t, and the running of these things isn’t left to the most competent: it’s either those who step back too slowly, or to the Gareths (as in the Office) of the world. It the end, all anti-fascist groups become subsidiaries of the SWP, and I’m not having my name on their mailing lists again.
- I’d rather be for things, than against them.
- There is no such thing as bad publicity. I’m not for ignoring the BNP; I believe that they are not a proper political party — they are a bunch of thugs, and should be treated as such by the courts when they actually break laws concerning affray, intimidation, assault, etc; the rest of the time, I’m pro-free speech, and will defend to the death … (well maybe not all the way). Writing about them is like that Gary Larson cartoon “What dogs hear” — it’ll come over to potential recruits as “Blah blah BNP blah BNP” and is merely preaching to the converted to everyone else.
- There is enough racist poison in the mainstream (mostly directed against ‘asylum seekers’ and/or the ‘destruction of our unique way of life’); it’s largely in the middle-market papers, but it crops up elsewhere. This is my tenuous link to the Ian McCartney story.
- Wearing badges is silly. I retain the right to (occasionally) display an AIDS ribbon, but that’s more in the hope of causing offence than doing any good.
- What Peter said.
These 480 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:07pm GMT Comments.
Thursday, 11 March 2004
The Art Of The Obvious »
The fascinating Downing Street Says is picking up equally fascinating comments.
What if there isn’t a conspiracy or secret new world order and the world is just run by a bunch of incompetent people who haven’t got a clue how to solve any of the problems?
Screw the ‘what if’, otherwise I agree with every word. I consider it obvious that the principled and talented on the left go into academia, while those on the right make money. The dregs on both sides fall into politics.
Michael Brooke suggests that “John Prescott, for instance, could job-share with a lemur or a Thompson’s gazelle” following the Monster Raving Loony party’s election of a cat as deputy leader. A fine idea. But where will the Tories get a semi-house trained polecat?
These 94 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:32am GMT Comments.
Why I Buy The Torygraph, Part 593 »
Joshua Rosenberg praises Lord Woolf.
Faced with that outcome, the Lord Chief Justice [Woolf] exercised his right to free speech [the Telegraph link requires registration; this is a link to the same story in the Scotsman] and warned ministers that their proposals, if enacted, “could bring the judiciary, the executive and the legislature into conflict"…
Some of the Government’s supporters seem to believe that, as asylum seekers are not citizens or “residents” here, they are not entitled to complain to our courts. This is a specious argument. Some of these applicants may well be entitled to stay here. Without access to the courts, how can they prove it?
And there is a much broader issue at stake. As Lord Woolf said, if the asylum proposals go through, “what areas of government decision-making would be next to be removed from the scrutiny of the courts?”
And he ends:
The rule of law does not mean the rule of lawyers, such as Lord Falconer, or anti-lawyers, such as Mr Blunkett. Our judges have led the way in demonstrating that a Government with a large majority does not have a monopoly on wisdom. Far from attacking Parliamentary democracy, the judiciary have strengthened it.
Is Blair a lawyer or anti-lawyer?
Who said “puppet"?
Finally, the rule of law works.
News from the war on terrorism. Will we hear anything from Bush? I can offer generous odds for the gamblers out there.
These 45 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:39am GMT Comments.
Friday, 12 March 2004
Miscellanea »
Not a great deal to say today. I’ll suspend speculation on the Madrid bombings, as I’ve seen good arguments for both ETA and al-Queda. Can’t someone recruit Gerry Adams into counter-terrorism? — I imagine that he’s as disgusted by this as the rest of us, and he knows more about escalating terrorist tactics as all the academics and spooks in Europe put together.
Kieran Healy identifies the five stages of blogging. He should see Arthur Silber who has the fourth stage pretty bad:
My average daily visitors are now less than 400. Unique visitors are probably less than 200. So, I ask you: is there any point to continuing this?
200 visitors a day yet! I should be so lucky or, indeed, popular. Nietzsche complained somewhere, “I am not read, I will not be read.” Maybe he should have written about diet instead. Joyce thought that Finnegans Wake would have 11 readers at most. (This may have been an overestimate.) Emily Dickinson and Kafka weren’t read at all in their lifetimes. D.H. Lawrence had a story (’Odour of Chrysanthemums’) submitted by a colleague to Ford Madox Ford, and greatly resented it. The point has nothing to do with the number of readers.
I’ve also taken to borrowing from the library and ripping onto iTunes music I’m too cautious to buy, such as John Tavener, after Chris Brooke wondered if he were any good. Verdict so far: a lot better than I expected.
Ditto for Arvo Part as Michael Brooke enthused. Verdict so far: hmmm.
Just to show that I’m not an out-and-out criminal ripper, I did buy this month’s Classic FM magazine on the recommendation of
Gert. The CD is indeed a bargain at £3:99; the magazine will probably join this week’s Big Issue in being thrown out unread.
Kevin Drum has landed a professional blogging gig, and could move urls soon.
Andrew Northrup has decided to become anonymous.
Felix the kitten seems to be seriously considering moving in, though he can’t work out the cat flap (every other moggie within a mile can; I don’t know what his problem is). This presents me with a moral problem. I’ve discovered that he is an intact cat. He is whole, entire, the way nature so thoughtlessly intended. Within a few months, he will develop an interest in the future of his species, and act to ensure its survival. He will go forth and multiply, in short. All the cats in my life have been neutered, but none of them by me. I think it is a horrible, cruel thing to do. It may be better than the alternative, as the poet almost had it
Cat hands on misery to cat.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any cats yourself.
These 420 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:30pm GMT Comments.
Saturday, 13 March 2004
Not A Good Day »
If, and it is a big if still, the Madrid attack was al-Quaeda, I must confess to a moment of smirking satisfaction. Anyone remember a “very good day” to bury bad news?
Some of us have the naive idea that civil servants are impartial (non-political) servants of the civis, as the name implies.
Not Jo Moore:
who work[ed] for Stephen Byers, the Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, was widely condemned for showing spin at its worst when her news management memo was leaked.
Miss Moore’s memo, written at 2.55pm on September 11, when millions of people were transfixed by the terrible television images of the terrorist attack, said: “It is now a very good day to get out anything we want to bury. Councillors expenses?”
The announcement she referred to related to a minor U-turn on pension rights for councillors.
Let’s review that again, her civil servants were responsible for transport policy in the UK. I don’t think anyone (outside the inner party, who being Borg, don’t really count) could think straight that day or concentrate on their work. I may be old-fashioned here, but I’ve always considered that gathering a few facts — preferably as many as possible — before deciding on a course of action was the best thing to do. In other words, Ms Moore’s colleagues who were gawping at the TVs in horror were doing their jobs. We didn’t know what would happen next, but many of us thought an attack on the UK would follow. It didn’t penetrate my brain for a few days how cunning the hijackings had been, taking over near-empty long distance flights, and using the fuel in the planes as explosive, but I suspected anyway that it might not work here (long flights are usually full; our airports are far more secure), so train stations seemed a logical target. That might just have been a little more important than the utterly quotidian vacillation of an insignificant minister.
I must have a strange view of government, because I never realised that we paid taxes for the privilege of being lied to by the transistorised apparatchiks of the People’s Party.
“I have devoted most of my adult life to working for the Labour Party because I am committed to achieving a fair and just society.”
That “fair and just society” is one where the terrorists can kill whom they like as long as the little people don’t get to hear about reversals on “pension rights for councillors.”
And 2 + 2 = 5.
These 312 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:59pm GMT Comments.
Darkness At Noon »
He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark moustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell
I was thrown by Norm’s post on Guantanamo which cites James Astill, because it made no sense to me. Why would the US effectively kidnap all these people and take them to a place outside the jurisdiction of any courts just to be nice to them? It seemed an expensive and ridiculous exercise. But challenges to one’s beliefs are healthy, so I’m almost disappointed to have my suspicions confirmed by Ken Coates in the Guardian.
But, forbidden or not, the 3,000 captives accused of sustaining al-Qaida have commonly been fitted with hoods and gags, tied up in positions calculated to cause pain and distress and systematically deprived of sleep.
Jamal al-Harith said: “The whole point of Guantánamo was to get to you psychologically. The beatings were not nearly as bad as the psychological torture — bruises heal after a week, but the other stuff stays with you.”
Which explains a lot.
With every passing day, I support regime change a little more. Ralph at PolitiX seems to do so, too.
These 98 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:18pm GMT Comments.
Not Your Average Blogger »
I haven’t seen the Economist this week (my local shop doesn’t sell it; local people here read the Sun) but Matthew thinks that
there’s a really funny picture of what the magazine clearly thinks bloggers look like (p.14 of the technology review).
I wonder if it’s either Adam Yoshida or Peter Cuthbertson. Then it could be Green Fairy’s ideal:
pointed chin… and Roman nose… hazel eyes…Medium length, deep black hair… glasses… scientifically called an ‘Ectomorph’, which is a fancy way of saying … ‘skinny’…
Could be worse. Could be me. (A lot like the above, but different colour hair and eyes, and a lot older: I’m 42 next month, and as it’s answer to life, the universe and everything, I’ll intend to stay that age until 2010 at least.) I think Cardiff Uni finally dropped me from their post-grad prospectus. Took them long enough.
These 100 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:13pm GMT Comments.
Sunday, 14 March 2004
Perspective »
These 3 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:27am GMT Comments.
Presenting Corrections »
Yes, it’s Jayson Blair again, or not, really. It’s his former employers, the ones who need no fewer than seven journalists writing about their own organisation to conclude
Mr. Blair did not have a company credit card — the reasons are unclear — and had been forced to rely on Mr. Roberts’s credit card to pay bills from his first weeks on the sniper story.
Fearless reporting from the front line, I’m sure you’ll agree. When not trying to drag their more enterprising employees down, they’re running around hysterically in response to a harmless and quite funny parody.
The Times does not welcome information about errors that call for correction in columns written by Times’ Op-Ed columnists. Since The New York Times refuses to hold their columnists to any standard of accuracy, The National Debate has taken upon itself to offer this Supplemental Corrections Page for New York Times readers. Messages may be posted on The National Debate web site by click on the (Comment) link at the end of each correction.
To reach the real public editor, Daniel Okrent, and ask him to press Times Publisher Arthur Sulzberger to make good on his promise to change The New York Times “columnist correction policy” which currently leaves the decision on whether to issue a correction up to the columnist, e-mail public@nytimes.com or telephone (212) 556-7652.
Kevin Drum was originally careful to note
Parody is a well known fair use exception to the copyright rules, but whether Cox [who wrote the original parody; now taken down] exceeded fair use or not is something I can’t judge.
He updated with a furious jibe at the DMCA:
I never liked DMCA much in the first place, but is this really true? All you have to do is make a complaint and a website is shut down for 10-14 days?
NYTimes: old media good, prints retractions at own discretion (provided columnists don’t look too bad); new media bad, and must be silenced. Someone prints a quite fair criticism of the lacunae in your much-vaunted correction policy, and all you can manage is a Bill O’Reilly-ish “Shut up, shut up, shut up.” Gentlemen, I salute your proud upholding of the finer ideals of Western culture. You get the employees you deserve.
These 147 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:02am GMT Comments.
Talking Heads »
I’ve probably linked to this before, but it’s still very, very funny. A few days ago, I tried to explain why I won’t bother with “bloggers against fascism” badge on this site. I agreed with Peter Cuthbertson, a move I now consider foolish. The BNP are, IMO, a trivial, fringe party, unlikely to come to anything. The only factor which bothers me is that sometimes they seem to have the popular, mainstream press behind them. Richard Littlejohn for instance, and Peter, having, for once, made sense, spoils it by citing said Sun columnist in his post on the Guantanamo Five.
Like the stereotypical Guardian/Independent reader I am, I can’t see much difference between Littlejohn’s views and the BNP’s. Peter clearly sees a more nuanced picture. Which is another reason we shouldn’t be wearing the same badges.
Peter may be right: I’m not a habitual Sun or Mail reader, and, unlike Will Self, I haven’t read any pages of Littlejohn’s book.
These 160 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:44am GMT Comments.
Only Light »
So, the Madrid bombs seem to have been al-Quaeda after all. I assume that we will hear from Bush in due course, though I’d love to know if he’s have bothered if it had been ETA. (In other words, is he sincere about terrorism, or only what Christopher Hitchens is pleased to call Islamofascism? [I’ve been looking for a link that explains why that term is offensive, but I can’t find it.]) Commentary is spurious. There has been some talk of strategies, but one of the horrors of terrorism is that there are no tactics. In conventional warfare, you can take the next hill, and call it a success, but I can’t see how 200 deaths move al-Quaeda further on. It just seems to be wanton killing.
As with the IRA, ETA, and the Palestinians, there may be a legitimate grievance behind al-Quaeda, but that doesn’t mean that their tactics do anything to move them closer to their goals. In all these cases, it seems to move them further away. (This may even be intentional, the impossibility of success giving careers to the military-minded for life in the glamourous ‘struggle.) Those who resort to violence saying that they have considered every other option are liars: they have neither considered all the options, nor the consequences of what they start.
Edward at Obsidian Wings is Numb and Reflective.
Nick Barlow, in an excellent post, finds the line I should have been looking for, from Martin Luther King.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
These 246 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:04pm GMT Comments.
Second Thoughts »
I was too quick to publish my last post. I meant to add that even if the police had arrested five suspects very quickly, the police have been wrong before when faced with an atrocity.
Thinking about it now, it surprises me that so many people went for the al-Quaeda theory when attribution remained uncertain.
Kevin Drum rightly calls the theory that Osama bin Laden has been captured already wingnut territory. (Though I’m seeing it everywhere: Bitter Girl; and it’s suggested in today’s Sunday Torygraph, but I can’t find the article on the web).
I thought Osama bin Laden was supposed to be cornered somewhere in Pakistan, his network destroyed. This attack might mean that the whole ‘war on terror’ thing was window-dressing, mere spin. We’ve had two old-fashioned wars where we’ve gone in, guns blazing, lost several of our own troops, killed and maimed harmless children, and totally taken our eye off the ball.
That the military here and in the US are governed by ‘Defence’ departments might lead you to think they were interested in the defence of our countries and our citizens, but it’s merely an Orwellian apellation, there only to mislead. What else can you expect from a president who regarded military service as a junket with free dental treatment, something he cuts the taxes of the rich (but not the poor) specifically tp deny to others? If you pointed out to him that fighting expeditionary wars isn’t what his troops signed up for, he probably say, “Look son, if they’re dim enough to show up for parade and not have rich and influential daddies, what am I supposed to do for them?”
The solution which ought to have been obvious from September 2001, but clearly was anathema to the ‘war is peace’ crowd, is the reversal of Napoleon’s dictum, “attack is the best form of defence.” There is nothing to attack. Like the Pope, the enemy has no divisions. It’s defend, defend, defend all the way. Not sexy, not vote-catching, but nothing else will work. Create martyrs, and we sow dragon’s teeth.
Perpetual war suits Bush just as much as it suits bin Laden. He has a bunker he can run to, unlike the rest of us.
These 372 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:04pm GMT Comments.
The Woe That Is Marriage »
See what happens when they allow gay marriage?
These 8 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:11pm GMT Comments.
Charge And Trial »
All sorts of good stuff in today’s Sunday Torygraph, and I can’t find any of it on the web.
Michael White “introduces a new musical about the war on terror”, ‘Follow my leader.’ Composer Richard Blackford:
“When [satirist] Alistair [Beaton] rang me with the idea of a piece about the War on Terror, I was amazed because I’d been thinking along the same lines, and was about to ring him. And we were both deeply offended by the way Bush and Blair has hijacked religion to support what they were doing. That’s why God appears in the piece.”
Max Hastings (I don’t care what anyone says, he’s my sort of tory) reviews “Stalin and his Hangmen”, which he describes as “better than its lurid title” by Donald Rayfield. The piece has two marvellous spot the difference photos, one of Stalin with three henchmen, one with only two, and the caption “Purger purged. Nikolai Ezhov, the brutal head of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD, was himself executed in 1940, and as these photographs show, swiftly airbrushed from Soviet history.” (I’m not sure how the pictures illustrate the ‘swiftly’ part.) The terrors started before Stalin, as Hastings reminds us:
In February 1918, just two months after the they gained power, the Bolsheviks gave the Cheka (the secret police) powers to shoot anyone it saw fit without charges or trial.
Joshua Rozenberg (whom I mentioned on Thursday) reviews Lady Kennedy’s new book so well as to make extracting paragraphs tortuously diffficult.
Ever since [she] was ennobled at the instigation of Tony Blair in 1997, no doubt as the prelude to some long-forgotten plan to offer her ministerial office, she has watched helplessly as the New Labour project turned sour. At first, Lady Kennedy persuaded herself that it was just for show: “as with the economy, the Government was anxious to show that it could play hardball”. Now she has come to realise that, far from reversing Thatcherism, the Labour Party has accelerated its pace.
The book, I should have mentioned, is called Just Law. Rozenberg explains why:
Since she joined the Lords, Lady Kennedy has been involved in “depressing and wretched disagreements” with the Government over its retreat from civil liberties. Summoned by her Whip to explain why she had voted against her party, she was told she was completely out of touch with the voters. To them, the issue over which she had rebelled was of little importance: it was “just law”.
The review tears through the relentless trend-spotting of Tony B. The idea for policemen to march yobs to cash machines for instant fines (without charges or trial) — dropped because the police didn’t like it. Night courts? Only 40 times as expensive as waiting until the following day.
Over at Conservative Commentary, Peter Cuthbertson bemoans falling university standards: going by the Prime Minister’s understanding of his own subject, it seems you didn’t need to study much to get an Oxford Degree even in the 70s.
I’ve just heard John Prescott on the news telling the Labour’s spring conference to start fighting the next election for the Labour party. But the party is like the present pope; still technically alive, but the spirit has all but flown.
These 295 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:36pm GMT Comments.
Monday, 15 March 2004
Into Your Ken Noo »
We’ve been here before: Astronomers have detected what could be the Solar System’s 10th planet.
Journalistic barrel-scraping to meet word-count:
Observations show it is about 2,000 km across and it may even be larger than Pluto, which is 2,250 km across.
Followed shortly by:
Sedna is the largest object found circling the Sun since the discovery of Pluto in 1930. Its size is uncertain.
One astronomer told BBC News Online that it may even be larger than Pluto itself.
Hegel argued that there could only be seven planets because there are seven holes in the head (though you’d need an extra one to believe that). But let’s get this clear, after Neptune there are no more planets, or
One group of astronomers believe that Pluto is not a true planet but merely one of the largest of a vast number of minor objects in the outer Solar System.
Yup.
These 64 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:16pm GMT Comments.
We’ve Been Expecting U-turns »
Jim Henley is a libertarian, not a socialist of any stripe, and his reaction to the Spanish Election result is This Should Be Grimly Interesting:
How many of those who were falling all over themselves with solidarity and compassion yesterday will suddenly discover, and unburden themselves on, deep weaknesses in the national character of our Spanish brethren?
I think Jim was the first, but pre-emptive strikes on u-turns by Instahack and the Neocon crowd were also fired from Atrios (nice and pithy), Nick Barlow, and Kevin Drum. Best in-depth summation so far, John Quiggin, though I expect good stuff from Tacitus, Daniel Drezner, Matthew Yglesias, and Obsidian Wings.
Someone mentioned yesterday that Little Green Footballs got an early right-wing blow in by attacking the first (anti-terrorist) Spanish protest, because a member of the crowd wore a wooly hat, so at least he’ll have the merit of wingnut consistency.
Did you hear the one about the Spanish navigator? He tried to reach China by sailing West! Oh, these Europeans, they crack me up.
These 140 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:34pm GMT Comments.
Post Hoc Ergo Propter Hoc »
It’s tedious to explain jokes, especially by adding explanations which weren’t there in the first place, but let me be tedious for a moment. Kieran Healy describes himself as a person suggests that persons
inclined to make sweeping judgments about the nature of the natural and social sciences based on a glancing acquaintance with the idea of falsification and a collection of popular books about quantum mechanics
[.]
He then links to read [update: I’ve corrected this post because I misread Kieran’s; I assumed that as he linked to one of his own posts, he was being self-referential and ironic: he wasn’t. My bad.) Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass:
Banking on my hopes that whoever grades this will just look at the pictures, I drew an exponential through my noise. I believe the apparent legitimacy is enhanced by the fact that I used a complicated computer program to make the fit. I understand this is the same process by which the top quark was discovered.
Now that’s funny, but not as funny as the Introduction:
Electrons in germanium are confined to well-defined energy bands that are separated by “forbidden regions” of zero charge-carrier density. You can read about it yourself if you want to, although I don’t recommend it. You’ll have to wade through an obtuse, convoluted discussion about considering an arbitrary number of non-coupled harmonic-oscillator potentials and taking limits and so on. The upshot is that if you heat up a sample of germanium, electrons will jump from a non-conductive energy band to a conductive one, thereby creating a measurable change in resistivity.
OK, you probably haven’t studied physics, and I have, and messing around producing noisy results with dodgy equipment and testing theories I didn’t understand in the first place is why I now have a psychology degree. Kieran refers to “falsification”, but an anecdote about Karl Popper might be more useful. Popper is supposed to have started a lecture with the instruction “Observe!” General silence ensues until one student tentatively asked, “Observe what?”
There’s no point in running an experiment to measure “exponential dependence of resistivity on temperature in germanium” unless you have a reason to suppose that it’s there. And if your reasoning feels sound to you, experimental evidence won’t shift it in the naive way we’re all taught it will. Anyone who’s ever given blood should automatically doubt Galen’s theory that blood ebbs and flows like the tide, and yet for centuries surgeons didn’t notice this. In Steven Weinberg, in his excellent Dreams of a Final Theory, recounts how Albert Abraham Michelson of the Michelson-Morley experiment gave lectures on the ether until the end of his life, after most physics departments accepted General Relativity instead.
Finally we come to more usual blog-worthy stuff. Take the following two observations:
- Bombs go off on a Madrid train on Thursday;
- The right-wing People’s Party (PP) performs much worse than expected in the General Election on Sunday.
You may wish to call on extra facts to explain the effect (or non-effect) of the first on the second. And some techniques are more legitimate than others. Take
One can’t blame the media for doing their work but perhaps commentators might have made the point that Spain has always had people opposed to the war just as most other countries have — including America.
Barbara Amiel in the Telegraph today. (Why do I read her? Why? Why?) Compare it to
Neverthless, it’s worth remembering why journalists are asking those questions of the Spanish government. It’s because, unlike in Britain or America, where public opinion was split, around 80-90% of Spaniards disagreed with Spain’s involvement in Iraq (falling to a low of 70% just after Baghdad’s fall, but now back at 85%) and in an opinion poll taken just two weeks’ ago, 85% of Spaniards said that the war had increased their risk of being attacked by terrorists.
Matthew Turner. What Miss Amiel says is loosely correct, but fudges the numbers, which are actually very important in an election.
Matthew Yglesias is nothing less than wonderful on this.
As a trained social scientist, I’m saying the only way to find out what the hell al-Quaeda intended is to ask them. Not that they’re talking.
But since, as I mentioned myself (I looked up the quote on Google and found my own post, to my surprise) Bush’s officials tried to draw a comparison between al-Quaeda suspects caught in Afghanistan and Luftwaffe pilots, I’d like to suggest two more observations:
- The Luftwaffe bombed Britain, and especially London, nightly for most of WWII;
- Churchill was defeated in the post-war general election.
These 445 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:39pm GMT Comments.
Swaying In The Wind »
Not reading the Observer, for reasons explained in my previous post, I’ve been missing Nick Cohen.
Ahmed Omar Sheikh, who masterminded the kidnap and ritual murder of the American journalist Daniel Pearl in Pakistan, was another British public schoolboy who went to the LSE. Osama bin Laden was a child of the Saudi Arabian plutocracy whose family moved with ease through the American elite and went into business ventures with George Bush senior. Al-Qaeda was financed by other members of the Saudi plutocracy in the 1990s, and probably still is today.
These are poor little rich boys to a man. If Europe remembered its history of furious middle-class boys embracing the security of totalitarianism in its fascists or communist guises it would better understand what it was up against. As it is, you can’t expect ordinary British citizens to feel a great deal of sympathy for a product of, say, Harrow and Cambridge who decides to strike a blow against the Zionists and Crusaders by blowing up British civilians.
I can’t deny that this is beautifully put, nor that it is essentially right. I have issue with only two points. The ‘Crusaders’ were the bad guys in a way that ‘Zionists’ are not: they intentionally and forcibly invaded another land for the purpose of evangelism — never mind their cruelties.
I have my usual conflicting beliefs with the ‘poor little rich boys’ part. I said the other day that the Will Self/Richard Littlejohn confrontation was hilarious (which it was), but I didn’t mention that I enjoyed the cuts both ways. Regular readers will know that I’ve never forgiven whichever review Self slighted Irvine Welsh as a doubtful heroin addict (while being offended by Littlejohn’s jibe); oh poor poor Will: Irvine only had crumbling 60s housing (he grew up less than a mile from me — I will explain some day), idiots chucking TV sets, sofas, bairns, from the 18th floor of useless, ugly, unworking tower blocks, the constant growling hatred of “which team de ye support [Are you a ‘Proddy’ or a ‘Mick’]?” from knife-armed squads on Silverknowes pitches, and Self had prep! Poor darling.
But to come back to ‘poor little rich boys’ I don’t have a DVD player, if you don’t count my Mac. But I’ve started collecting DVD films and Virgin had 2 for 10 quid the other week. Kubrick’s “The Killing” was easy, scraping around I picked their last copy of Lawrence Olivier in that play where his uncle poisons his dad, marries his mother, kills his best friends, and he has to pretend to be mad and contemplates suicide, his girlfriend drowns herself, and almost everyone ends up dead. It’s got a ‘U’ certificate! It’s one of the most violent stories ever told! I feel, a little too much, for ‘poor little rich boys’.
Nick Cohen has many interesting things to say. I agree with the facts, but, as I’ve been trying to make clear, I think we did a pretty good job against the IRA. There can’t be police at every station (though I hope to cover this too in some future post); the public will have to act in lieu. (My only problem with this comes from Soham, when Holly and Jessica were spotted everywhere from Brecon to Inverness, after subsequent forensic studies proved that they would have been dead.) Nick Cohen reminds us
To take the most obvious example, Abu Hamza used to preach sermons heavy with the threat of violence at the Finsbury Park mosque in north London. ‘We have to push our children to the front line,’ he cried. ‘Everybody wants his son to be killed like a lion.’
Abu Hamza (or ‘Hook’ as he is called by his opposite numbers in stirring up pointless racial prejudice in the press) misses two things here. ‘Children’ is not the same as ‘sons’. Abdul, whom I also mentioned in my last post, has daughters of around three and five, and is soppily in love with both of them; I can’t believe he wants them to be killed in any way. As for the second sentence, Yul Brynner said it all in “The Magnificent Seven” — “We want the man who gave him those scars.” And I think it was MacArthur who said something about “it’s not our guys dying, it’s the guys they kill that counts.”
What intrigues me now is why the “far-right campaigns of the media have had so little effect” as Cohen puts it. The public seem to be (to my surprise and his) well to the left of the media. Liberal media, nothing, in other words.
The reaction of the Government is easier to predict. There will be another crackdown on civil liberties. It’s guaranteed, even though we’re running out of civil liberties for the Government to crackdown on. The 2000 Terrorism Act was sweeping. In theory, hairy Greenpeace activists plotting to pull up genetically modified maize could be treated as terrorists under its terms. After 11 September, the Government gave itself the power to intern foreigners. On a trip to India earlier this year, David Blunkett made it clear where he would like to go next: ‘pre-emptive’ trials of terrorist suspects with the presumption of innocence removed so that potential suicide bombers could be convicted before they committed a crime. He’s had to back down for the time being, but my guess is that an attack on Britain would remove the obstacles in his path.
This is the scary bit. Howard Brenton had it right in last year’s “Spooks.” One of the defining tactics of al-Qaeda since the first WTC attack has been over-preparation (and that is their weakness). They don’t use single suicide bombers. You won’t beat them by removing foot soldiers. There will always be more. It’s those who decide who goes where.
I’m a convinced physicalist and I think that it’s very, very hard to decide to end your own life whatever the cause. The suicide bombers are weak roots — poor, unhappy, confused, youths. We can sway them by better means than Blunkett’s.
These 668 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:12pm GMT Comments.
Tuesday, 16 March 2004
You’re Not Alone »
From Matthew Yglesias’s comments:
I still don’t understand why the U.S. military pullout from Saudi Arabia didn’t spawn more talk that the terrorists won. That was one of Al Qaeda’s few concrete pre-9/11 objectives.
It may be sensible to have withdrawn on the merits, but if the right wing Likud-like logic is that you never let terrorists get what they want… haven’t we already done that?
All I can say is that you’re not alone.
These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:27am GMT Comments.
Him With His Foot In His Mouth »
One of the more obvious rules of blogging is, when linking, actually read the stuff you’re linking to, and if another link clarifies that post, check that too. Hence, I earlier assumed that because Kieran Healy linked to himself, he was talking about himself: he wasn’t; he was reminded of a flawed set of assumptions by Megan McCardle.
I expect to be wrong quite a lot here; I don’t demand of my blogging anything like the rigour appropriate to print publication.
Being wrong I can take. Being stupid, I’ve learned to live with, but my heart flipped when I thought that Andrew Ian Dodge accused me (and others) of not believing in free speech in the comments to Chris Brooke’s post on Mark Steyn’s particularly fat-headed article. Happily for me, my reading of my comment (and Chris seems to agree) is nothing like calling for the suppression of Mr Steyn’s right to say what he likes. We just question why the Telegraph chooses to pay him for his thoughts.
Anyway, I’ve blogged before about not reading Mark Steyn and there are reams of Crooked Timber comments on Mark Steyn.
I hoped that my post We’ve Been Expecting U-turns and the posts I linked to would, by calling the right “predictable”, have the effect of at least toning down the “shocked-angered-and-betrayed” responses of the right-wing of the blogosphere to the Spanish election. As Chris Brooke notes, not a bit of it.
These 240 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:08pm GMT Comments.
Wednesday, 17 March 2004
Fiendish »
I can reveal the true horror of a-Qaeda’s plans. They do, indeed, intend to bring down Western civilisation. As with 9/11, they plan to use our own technology, our trusting nature, and our culture against us. The plan is simple: with only a few attacks (they probably only have a few handfuls of men) they generate news, this news in turn generates comment, the comment stirs up the blogosphere. Bloggers write posts. Other people comment, then write their own. In a matter of days, civilisation grinds to a halt while nobody does any work at all, being too busy arguing with each other.
Not with a bang, but a whimper.
Utterly, utterly fiendish.
These 113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:36am GMT Comments.
Being A Cheapskate »
I use Boots own brand filters. Am I doomed? (Found through Moe. BTW, I think the Roman Empire thing is a myth.)
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:04pm GMT Comments.
Doing The Shuffle »
Just for kicks, the first 10 (11 because the Ligeti was the first song onyway, because it starts with a ‘(’, so I’m not sure it counts) songs off the shuffle off my iPod.
- (Lo stesso tempo) Dotted Quarter=40; Jean-Guihen Queyras; Ligeti — Concertos for Piano, Cello & Violin
- Puccini Le Villi — Se Come Voi; Various Artists; Classic FM April 2004
- Killing Floor; Howlin’ Wolf; The Complete Recordings 1951-1969, CD 6
- Boots Of Spanish Leather; Bob Dylan; The Times They Are A-Changin’ (UK Import)
- Io de’sopiri; Giacomo Puccini; Tosca In Barcelona
- Plastic Factory; Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band; Safe As Milk
- Satellite Of Love; Lou Reed; Transformer
- Was muss ich hören! Richard Wagner; Der Fliegende Holländer (disc 2/2)
- Where I End And You Begin (The Sky Is Falling In); Radiohead; Hail To The Thief
- 1. Allegro Non Troppo — Poco Sostenuto — Tempo 1; Curzon/Merrett/Amadeus Qrt; Brahms — Piano Quintet — Amadeus String Quartet — Curzon
- The Black Rider; Tom Waits; Beautiful Maladies: The Island Years.
Not worth a separate post: I’m No1, No1 in Google. Yeah! For this.
These 183 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:21pm GMT Comments.
Doing The Shuffle Again »
That was such fun, I’m going to list the next 10. Fingers crossed that the system can tell two nearly identically named posts apart, and that it starts counting from 1, like a person (rather than from 0, like a computer).
- What Shall I Say; Billie Holiday; Best Of Vol 3
- Konzert No. 4 Es-dur KV 495:Romanza. Andante; Karajan & Berlin Philhamonic w/Gerd Seifert; Mozart 4 Hornkonzerte
- I Married Her Just Because She Looks Like You; Lyle Lovett; Lyle Lovett and his Large Band
- Aria, Hoquetus, Choral: Andante con moto — attacca; Saschko Gawriloff; Ligeti—Concertos for Piano, Cello & Violin
- Act 2, Scene 1: Dance 1; Philip Glass & Robert Wilson; Einstein On the Beach (Disc 2)
- Lazy Music; Captain Beefheart; Unconditionally Guaranteed
- The Song Is Over; The Who; Who’s Next
- Go Home Girl; Ry Cooder; Bop Till You Drop
- Nr. 1 Introduktion: Zu Hilfe! Zu Hilfe!; John Eliot Gardiner; Mozart : Magic Flute (Disc 1)
- How Do You?; Radiohead; Pablo Honey
These 166 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:25pm GMT Comments.
Not Enough »
I bought the “Literary Review” (no website) yesterday. I suppose it was the question “Is A C Grayling Human?” on the cover which did it. (He thinks he is, by the way.) Although the promise of Alan Massie (a reviewer I miss, not getting the Scotsman regularly) on Isaiah Berlin, and a book on the Fischer-Spassky chess match might have helped.
The awfulness of the puns in the captions made me giggle. Fischer playing Spassky are caption “Pawn stars” while a woodcut illustration in a review of a book on Dick Turpin has “It’s Turpin time”.
Oleg Gordievsky considers “Stalin and his Hangmen” (I mentioned the Max Hastings appraisal in the Sunday Telegraph earlier), and produces a line of Hitler’s which is new to me (not that I know much about the man):
My socialism is not class struggle, but order.
IMO, Hitler wasn’t a socialist, and I’ve never considered order to be a socialist virtue. Most lefties I know live in moderate chaos. Fairness and justice are principles, but orders are for giving to bar staff, and then politely, while orderliness is for another day. One of the funnier parts of “Homage to Catalonia” is Orwell’s moaning about the unpredictablity of timetables; trains are either hours late or unexpectedly leave early. He still loved the place.
But I was in Smith’s in the first place to check the photo of a blogger which Matthew noticed in the Economist. And, damn, I bought that too. (The Economist, not the photo — or the blogger.) I haven’t read as much of that, but the leader is “Labour’s constitutional mess.”
Getting rid of judges’ wigs and tights, and the flummery and confusion surrounding the Lord Chancellor’s role, appeals to the party’s modernising instincts. Yet deep in Labour’s soul lies the belief that the elected government expresses the will of the people, and that attempts to check its power are therefore attacks on democracy. That is especially so when the principal checks are judges and lords, who are, by and large, old, white, male and conservative.
I’d say that that’s familiar to me as pretty much my own way of thinking around 1997. Now, I’d say that the cabinet is also “by and large, old, white, male and conservative.”
Clearly I’m a-gettin’ old — I remember that the Moderator of the Church of Scotland addressed my school once, dressed in full rig, and I, along with everyone else, was trying too hard not to laugh to take in anything he said — but I no longer find old-style legal garb that ridiculous. If I ever end up in court, I’d like it to look like a court, and not like a colloquy of social workers. The get-up dates from the 18th century (I think) which had the advantage of being one of the more rational periods in our history. Mozart and George Washington wore wigs, there are stupider ways to dress (and I should know).
I have a problem with
Yet deep in Labour’s soul lies the belief that the elected government expresses the will of the people
I both agree and don’t agree. The elected government expresses the will of the people, but only so far. (Bill Deedes — sorry, registration required — tries to argue that the Lords is more democratic than the Commons. I think he’s wrong, but he gets the faults of the elected chamber right. And if I knew what a “crypto-toff” was, the word would enter my vocabulary.) We didn’t delegate to the party the right to u-turn on top-up fees which they expressly promised to oppose in the manifesto. Blair, Hain, and Blunkett (the three main villains until I think of some more) seem to think that political parties are trusted to use their their discretion upon election; they’re not, they’re expected to oversee a set of laws, and that’s pretty much all. One take-it-or-leave-it vote every five years isn’t that good an expression of the will of the people as Oliver Kamm puts very well:
Since starting this blog last summer I have endeavoured to be a fair-minded commentator on British politics, among other subjects. While I cannot claim necessarily always to have fulfilled this aim, I was till today confident that I had succeeded in it at least so far as one party, the Liberal Democrats, was concerned. While my own view of that party is that consistent liberals ought wherever possible to vote tactically to defeat it…
We should send that man to Iraq to explains the joys of democracy to doubtful locals.
Doubting local: You mean we actually get a choice in election? There’s more than one name on the ballot?
Oliver Kamm: Yes indeed, but remember, whatever you do, the most important task is keeping the Liberal Democrats out.
Cue dancing in the streets, firing of automatic weapons in the air, slaughtering of goats, etc.
Oliver elsewhere admits that he knows some very competent Lib Dem MPs, so his position is a little odd, as in the UK we vote for individuals — the ballot form does all it can to confuse you about the candidate’s allegiance, and I’m certain that it’s computationally impossible to unravel all the possible motivations of voters into separate bundles of personality (good MP, helped me when I need her), economic competence, popular policy, and unpopular policy (and there is something to disagree with in every manifesto, even if you’re not as argumentative as me).
Nick Barlow offers several suggestions for David Blunkett’s latest loopy idea. (See also Jim Henley and Kieran Healy of Crooked Timber.) As if it’s not outrageous enough that the wrongly imprisoned aren’t given their compensation on release, the Home Office makes a loan against the payment and charges 23% interest — that alone ought to be criminal. I do think that however the sum was calculated, all relevant factors were taken into account. Blunkett is merely undermining his own department. Compensation for say, the Birmingham 6, isn’t just to recompense them, it’s supposed to express our disapproval of their conviction in the way that a civil case would punish a negligent surgeon. The public interest was harmed by the locking up of six random Paddies, closing the case, and leaving the real murderers at large. This should hurt the chances of sitting or prospective Labour MPs facing constituencies with an Irish (especially Catholic) electorate.
I didn’t join the Labour Party for policies like this. I don’t recognise anything Labour about it. Although I expect them to be discreet, I can’t see this pleasing either Alistair Campbell or Cherie Booth, from what I know of their views.
I wish that I could say of my disaffection with the Party, “It’s not you, it’s me” — but it’s not. I don’t even recognise the Labour Party today. John Prescott’s only rallying cry is “We’re not the Tories” and that’s not enough. At least in Wales I have the option of Plaid Cymru.
These 987 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:51pm GMT Comments.
Thursday, 18 March 2004
Breakfast At Champion’s »
Chris Bertram at Crooked Timber tells us of the outing of (or should that be ‘de’?) Belle de Jour. The Times sez:
Don Foster, America’s foremost literary sleuth, identified quirks in Belle’s text, such as the way she uses brackets, dashes, compound verbs and italics. He entered this information into Google, the internet search engine, and within 20 minutes found that Miss Champion was the only person who matched the linguistic fingerprint.
Next week, I’m revealed to be Stephen Pollard.
Isn’t that a brilliant, pseud-literary title though? I’m so witty, darling. I’ve never been a call-girl (oh, miaow! I’ll claw your eyes out for that). I have been a male model. I was paid a tenner for a photo used in Cardiff’s post-grad prospectus.
If you want a ghost-writer, look no further. I don’t get out of bed for less than a grand though. I get into bed if you ask nicely.
These 103 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:56am GMT Comments.
Microsoft On Terrorism »
He was a long way from Osama bin Laden, apart from being a “poor little rich boy” with a “pleasant estate in Carmarthenshire from where he became Wales’ leading exponent of paramilitary chic”, but Julian Cayo Evans leader of the Free Welsh Army (which still has followers) may have altered government policy.
“Cayo was a giant of a man, a genuinely magnetic personality, the kind which you don’t often find readily in today’s bland, consumerist Wales.”
Which is why there’s a pub named after him.
His legacy lives on through Janet Street-Porter and Microsoft. The last is pretty tame when you compare it to Google’s efforts. Since M$ are only offering a “start menu and some commands”, I’d have thought that it would have been cheaper to allow existing users to download some kind of plug-in. How hard can that be?
These 119 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:32pm GMT Comments.
Friday, 19 March 2004
In The Future, Everyone Will Be Able To Get A PhD In 15 Minutes »
Gavin Sheridan, an Irish blogger, has been threatened with legal action by lawyers acting for John Gray.
I don’t understand the California libel laws and I don’t know whether they can be applied outside the US, or even outside California. I did look up Mr Gray in Google, and found the about page on his marsvenus.com site. This page repeatedly referrers to the author as “Dr” but, intriguingly, doesn’t mention his education (pretty standard for an academic, I’d have thought), there is a link to a more detailed biography which is much the same, only longer. It mentions two things (which I present in reverse order) —
An internationally recognized expert in the fields of communication and relationships, John Gray’s unique focus is assisting men and women in understanding, respecting and appreciating their differences. For more than 30 years, he has conducted public and private seminars for thousands of participants. In his highly acclaimed books, audiotapes and videotapes, as well as in his seminars, Dr. Gray entertains and inspires audiences with his practical insights and easy to use communication techniques that can be immediately applied to enrich relationships and the quality of life.
No mention of research, note. And,
Dr. Gray is a Certified Family Therapist, Consulting Editor of the Family Journal, and a member of the Distinguished Advisory Board of the International Association of Marriage and Family Counselors. He received his doctorate in Psychology and Human Sexuality from Columbia Pacific University in 1982. For more information about this degree, click here.
So I clicked here. BTW, do you sense a teensy bit of reluctance to discuss his qualifications by now? Compare this published author and Dr with anyone at Crooked Timber or Norm for whom you can easily find background on degrees, where awarded, areas of interest, scholarly publishing, and so forth.
John Gray received his degree in 1982 from Columbia Pacific University. The school closed their doors in 2001. Prior to that date according to the California Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education…
There is a link (sigh) to California Supreme Court Upholds Denial of Columbia Pacific University’s Approval to Operate which mentions, but does not itself link to Timeline of Events: Columbia Pacific University.
After a comprehensive review and assessment, the Council [for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education] denied CPU’s application [for approved status] from the Council on numerous grounds on December 15, 1996.
I take the latter to mean that Columbia Pacific University (CPU) never received approval having been audited. At no time does it seem to have been
a highly respected school in its field
as Gray claims. He could set all our minds at rest by giving the period of study which gained him his PhD, and as a psychologist myself, I’d like to read his doctoral thesis, which I’m confident was written in more technical language than his best-selling books.
Oh, the new-look Kevin Drum on John Gray, Kieran Healy also on John Gray.
These 287 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:12pm GMT Comments.
We Are All Spanish Today »
There isn’t much to do but praise Spain (whether it was the outgoing government, which follows from “last week”, or the new one, which had time to think) for granting citizenship to the bomb victims. It’s a commendable twist on “You’re either with us or against us": “If our enemies target you, you must be for us”.
Spain announced last week that it would give citizenship or residency to the parents, children, husbands and wives of the dead and injured in Madrid’s bomb attacks. Hundreds of wounded and bereaved illegal immigrants are taking up the offer.
At least 50 of the 200 killed in the train attacks were foreign nationals on their way to clean the flats of middle-class Madrid or build its new roads and shopping centres.
What an excellent gesture. Found through Michael Brooke who clearly thinks so too.
These 70 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:15pm GMT Comments.
Asteroid Prophet »
Since the last post was inspired by Michael Brooke, in the interests of balance, it seems only fair to record a disagreement with him.
It’s good to know that asteroid prophet Lembit Öpik MP isn’t the only man with his finger firmly on the pulse of the issues that truly matter.
He said, in Prophets of doom. Lembit looks less nutty now, doesn’t he? It could happen, you know. Who’ll be laughing then, eh?
Perhaps Adam Yoshida will call on the US to send Bruce Willis to 2004FH, when they finish invading Sedna.
Disclaimer: I’ve never met Mr Öpik, but there are fewer than six degrees of separation between us, as he’s engaged to my best friend’s sister. I’ve tried not to let this influence me in any way.
These 103 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:42pm GMT Comments.
We Could Be Heroes »
Gert pointed me to Sacred Cows, and this is my choice
- Anthony H Wilson
- Andrew Loog Oldham
- Adam Ant (bloody awful actor though)
- Arthur Ashe
- Bill Bailey
- Boris Johnson
- Breasts (not really a person, though)
- Bill Oddie
- Bill Murray
- CSI (NOT Miami) scriptwriters (totally the best show in TV. William Petersen rocked in the Michael Mann ‘Manhunter’ — the good one. David Caruso gets up my nose though, can’t say why.)
- Danny Baker — for his old NME brilliance
- DHLawrence
- Debbie Harry
- Elvis Costello
- Garry Shandling
- Hunter S Thompson
- Helena Bonham Carter
- Jane Austen
- Janeane Garofalo
- Jon Snow
- John Peel — I introduced him to a girl I fancied once. I’d never met him before, and I got her name wrong. He took it very well.
- Ken Campbell
- Kurt Cobain
- Lemmy
- Larry David
- Morrissey
- Mick Jones
- Martin Luther King
- Muhammad Ali
- Nelson Mandela
- Oscar Wilde
- Peri Gilpin
- P. J. O’Rourke
- Paul Whitehouse
- Stephen Fry
- Spike Milligan
- Tony Benn
- Tara Palmer Tomkinson
- X Ray Spex
If that tells you anything you needed to know about me, pray tell.
On the same site, The Shoeless Gynaecologist tells it like it is:
Gone are the days when most men thought an itchy fanny was a new motorbike from Japan.
These 191 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:04pm GMT Comments.
A Doll’s House »
I meant to write yesterday about both the Spanish election and the discovery of Sedna, with the (I think anyway) arresting first line, “A little research can ruin some posts…” but I went to the theatre instead.
(Quick recap of what I didn’t write: I meant to say that Sedna is the first ‘planet’ discovered by observational means alone; Pluto’s existence was predicted by anomalies in Neptune’s orbit — but these were mistaken — so Pluto was found fortuitously. As for the election, even if the polls had put the PSOE ahead, results from the 2001 UK election show that seats, and hence majority are not linearly related to brute electoral percentages, but I got bogged down in the stats.)
Back to the theatre. I went to “A Doll’s House” last night. There were two intervals, so I ordered drinks for both, because DL had wandered off, then CJ announced that she was driving so wouldn’t be drinking, so oops! CJ declared that she couldn’t see what everyone was supposed to see in Nora (Tara Fitzgerald), “is it because she’s got a sexy, gravelly voice?” and I was trying not to say, “Well, duh.” I mean, I’ve always liked Tara so much, I tried to write a script just for her. (Not that it didn’t suck; words, I can sort of do, people, maybe, and plots, absolutely not.) CJ, incidentally is looking for new office space because her current place is being kicked out by the BBC, so they can give it over to the “Dr Who” production. “Oh, go on and squat,” I told her, “my contacts say they won’t even consider freelance scripts, so give ‘em hell.”
However, Tara wasn’t the best thing — by a country mile. That was Torvald (Tom Goodman-Hill) whose credits included The Office, and DL speculated that he must have been “Jasper Carrot’s daughter’s husband” — he wasn’t, though The Office’s site doesn’t even list Lee (who was Dawn’s brutish husband). He turns out to have been ‘Ray’ who I can’t place at all.
“A Doll’s House” isn’t a play I knew. I was surprised at how influential it was: we could have compared notes all night on how many later plays it resembled. I find Ibsen, despite his reputatiom for writing women’s parts (which is true) overly-didactic and idealistic compared to the roles Katherine Hepburn used to play. The play dissolves these days when Ibsen abandons “show” for “tell” but it’s clear why it had so much impact originally. I’ve no idea why it couldn’t resolve itself dramatically, with the promised financial disaster.
The Barbican production is apparently modern-dress, and Dr Rank is supposed to have AIDS (a clear reference to ‘Ghosts’). The Dr Rank here reminded me powerfully of The Hood. There may be something with Dr Rank’s spinal problem, but AIDS seems to be a poor analogy: this is now history, after all. Most of what Ibsen wanted has come to pass.
I was also taken with Jane Gurnett (Mrs Linde) who has too many TV credits to list, although the “Basil Brush Show” is good enough for both DL and myself. Boom boom!
These 525 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:49pm GMT Comments.
Saturday, 20 March 2004
Eau Dear »
Lovely:
Judith Snyder, brand PR manager for Dasani, confirmed “municipal” water supplies were used but said the source was “irrelevant” because it “doesn’t affect the end result”.
She said: “We would never say tap water isn’t drinkable.
“It’s just that Dasani is as pure as water can get — there are different levels of purity.”
I’m not sure I understand what she meant, but that was then, this is now:
First, Coca-Cola’s new brand of “pure” bottled water, Dasani, was revealed earlier this month to be tap water taken from the mains. Then it emerged that what the firm described as its “highly sophisticated purification process”, based on Nasa spacecraft technology, was in fact reverse osmosis used in many modest domestic water purification units.
Yesterday, just when executives in charge of a £7m marketing push for the product must have felt it could get no worse, it did precisely that.
But how pray? Isn’t it “as pure as water can get"? Just because they lied about the NASA technology bit, doesn’t mean that we can’t trust them. Surely they add some value for the 3000% mark-up.
Indeed they do.
So now the full scale of Coke’s PR disaster is clear. It goes something like this: take Thames Water from the tap in your factory in Sidcup, Kent; put it through a purification process, call it “pure” and give it a mark-up from 0.03p to 95p per half litre; in the process, add a batch of calcium chloride, containing bromide, for “taste profile"; then pump ozone through it, oxidising the bromide — which is not a problem — into bromate — which is. Finally, dispatch to the shops bottles of water containing up to twice the legal limit for bromate (10 micrograms per litre).
I bet Ms Snyder and her colleagues have never heard of Buzzword Bingo and think scientists are just dorks (and it sounds like the ones they pay are). Can’t they get those nice fellows at Tech Central Station to debunk the poisonous bromate myth, and get the media to file it with other junk science — hole in the ozone layer, smoking causing cancer, all these statist lies made up just to hold back enterprising captains of industry.
They’ll be saying next that Coke is just fizzy tap water with lots of sugar, colours, and caffeine and a very little lime, and that it rots your teeth.
These 163 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:11pm GMT Comments.
Con But Not Trite »
The lead story in the Guardian this morning is Blunkett aide in row over race, though I’m with Chris Bertram in the comments to the CT post
I hadn’t appreciated when I followed the link from John’s post that the Guardian are running this as their lead story today… This is really poor coming from the Guardian, really poor.
When I saw the headline, I thought “Oh good, another kicking for Blunkett,” but I doubt there is anything of substance here. It’s not front page news. It’s not news.
The disclosure of the Whitehall aide’s controversial views, outlined in a book entitled Against Equality of Opportunity published two years ago, triggered disbelief as senior Labour figures questioned the former Oxford academic’s suitability for a post in a government committed to expanding opportunities.
The book is two years old, and “Mr Cavanagh was taken on by Mr Blunkett last October.”
John Quiggin of CT gives a link to the Amazon page of Against Equality of Opportunity. I like the “better together” suggestion: “Buy this book with Equality of Opportunity by John E. Roemer today!”
I accept that Amazon reviews aren’t perfect and nor are press reviews, but John Dunn, Professor of Political Theory, Cambridge University, apparently said in the TLS
Assured, punchy and tenacious… An object lesson in thinking about the goals of defensible public policy
I want politicians to think and question things.
David Winnick, a member of the Commons home affairs select committee, said only somebody who was “psychotic” would question anti-discrimination laws.
This sounds like a knee-jerk reaction, and I can’t say Mr Winnick’s contribution is helpful.
Mr Cavanagh also criticised what he termed “trite pronouncements” by prominent Labour politicians promising that “every child should have the best possible start in life”.
He’s right: it is trite.
These 164 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:42pm GMT Comments.
Great Minds Thinking Alike »
Ignore for the moment the fact that you can’t make war on an abstract noun (or an emotion); obviously the term is intended to be parsed as `war against terrorists’. But `war’ is a funny term to use here, because a war has two sides. If we’re in a war with the terrorists, then actions we take against them are `acts of war’ — but so are the actions that they take against us. That’s the difference between fighting a war and prosecuting crime. Describing anti-terrorism measures as `war’ legitimises the terrorist acts we are trying to prevent.
Von of Obsidian Wings
If you must have a binary choice, though, here’s one to ponder: our _____ against terror is really either (a) a war that, on many occasions, is functionally identical to a law enforcement action, or (b) a law enforcement action that, on many occasions, is functionally identical to a war. Take your pick. But don’t say that it’s either a “war” or a “law enforcement” action. Quite clearly, it’s both — and neither.
While the two don’t seem so similar now I put them side by side, they’re both clearly unhappy with the phrase, “war on terror” — and neither am I, originally for Chris’s first reason, but his second is pretty good too. These people are criminals, maybe highly cunning, and well-organised ones, but still criminals. We’ll never defeat criminality by suspending justice.
There are some nice lines in von’s comments too:
I also noted that he does *not* want to fight all forms of terrorism, but only the kind that wants to control the Middle East.
Yep; I finally saw a blog or an op-ed column refer to Islamic terror as if other kinds, Timothy McVeigh, for example, were less bad. (I can’t remember where it was now though.) The irony of the Spanish bomb is that Aznar blamed it on ETA, for what seem to be cynical reasons.
Von also has this to say to a commenter, Thorley Winston,
You’re attempting the logical equivalent of attempting to prove the existence of the UFOs based on the existence of cats. But one does not establish the other.
A put-down to treasure.
Mind you, I have a cat (he’s on my lap as I write), and this is a UFO.
These 163 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:47pm GMT Comments.
Sunday, 21 March 2004
One And A Halfwit »
Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads has photoshopped some brilliantly witty posters for the demo. As I didn’t go, this is my contribution.
Speaking of demos, Tim was pretty active over the Bush visit. We heard a lot at the time that protestors were “anti-American”. Ronald Bailey in Reason argues that Bush squelched free speech, and in so doing, is anti-American himself. I think that makes me anti-anti-American, so perhaps I’m back with the good guys. And I looked cool in a black hat too.
[American Civil Liberties Union] staff lawyer Chris Hansen says, “The Secret Service and local police violate the rights of protesters by moving people expressing views critical of President Bush away from him while those with pro-Bush views are allowed to remain close. It is unconstitutional for the Secret Service to restrict access on the basis of viewpoint.”
In the Land of the Free, they care about such things. Bush tried it here, and got away with it. I hope he gets a boot up the backside at home.
Jim Henley likes to alert his readers to a possibly doubtful story from our side of the Atlantic with “Warning: British Press.” Very droll, Jim. I await our press to roll out the usual journalism-ain’t-what-it-was-in-the-old days stuff now that American hack, Jack Kelley, has been exposed as another story-maker-upper.
The paper said that “significant parts” of a purported eyewitness account of a suicide bombing, that made him a finalist for the 2001 Pulitzer Prize, “are untrue…”
Kelley’s lies have attracted fewer column inches (and, from what I’ve read, seem to be illustrated with a photo less often; I can’t think what that’s about). Still, the valiant defenders of truth and freedom will surely condemn him. Kevin Drum and Atrios appear to think the critics of Jayson Blair will be quieter this time round. I’ll have to monitor David Aaronovich, who had plenty to say about Jayson Blair, just as the rest of the world had forgotten about him.
These 246 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:44am GMT Comments.
Donald Rumsfeld »
There are some stories that I wish I’d linked to earlier. Chris Brooke beat me to the Rumsfeld Filmed Telling Untruths video, but Oliver Willis had a similar Donald Rumsfeld story, from 60 Minutes, Donald Rumsfeld was pushing for retaliatory strikes on Iraq, even though al Qaeda was based in Afghanistan.
He’s an unusual bloke, Donald. He has his own Fighting Technique and No-Holds-Barred Martial Arts Tournament At Remote Island Fortress.
These 71 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:17am GMT Comments.
Why Do Americans Hate Free Speech? »
So this is what the cutting edge of free speech looks like.
The event is a celebration of a local comedian called Sandra Tsing Loh, who has become the latest cause célèbre in America’s increasingly bizarre broadcasting decency wars…
For several years she has been a regular fixture on an LA affiliate of National Public Radio known for its dispassionate news coverage.
Then, a few weeks ago, disaster struck. Ms Tsing Loh was in the middle of “a subtle but luminous five-part series on the joys of knitting” when a four-letter word she meant to have bleeped out went on air unchecked.
I heard this on Broadcasting House this morning. They were coy about what the word actually was, but so, disappointingly, is the article.
Ms Tsing Loh was fired. The listeners “flooded the station with threats to cancel their subscriptions” if she was not given her job back.
The listeners had principles, and so did Ms Tsing Loh, making this an all-round defeat for the station.
These brave hunters-out of obscenity, looking under the beds for reds (in the larder for al-Qaeda?), and hearing bias in everything not scripted by disgusted of Tunbridge Wells, do they represent anyone? This prissy censorship-mania reminds me of the Kenny Everett character (who may have been called “disgusted of Tunbridge Wells") who ranted at the camera in his pin-stripe suit and turned to walk away with the backless suit showing lingerie and suspenders.
Special guest star, the unprudish Ros Doyle, the American who just wanted to have fun. And why the fuck not?
These 171 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:59pm GMT Comments.
Positive Side-effects »
One of the positive side-effects of the Madrid attack (and one which I’m sure was unforeseen and unintended by the bombers) was that the turnout in the election rose. See the figures given here.
The Interior Ministry reports that turnout was 68.7% in 2000 and 77.2% [in 2004]
Turnout here in 2001 was only 59.38%, which strikes me as pretty poor. BTW, This is what democracy sounds like, best thing I’ve read on Madrid so far.
Chris Lightfoot crunched some numbers last week and concluded that the correlation between turnout and voting intention is pretty lousy. This is contrary to Chris Brooke’s intuition that
when turnout rates rise in the context of a general democratic mobilisation, Left parties are more likely to benefit, given that it’s the poor, the unemployed, the working class, the less well educated and so on who are, other things being equal, those who are less likely to cast a ballot?
This is another case where a little careful reading upsets the logic of the post I planned to write. I had hoped that Chris B was right, and this being so, Labour could use its cynical self-interest and desperate grip on power to benefit the nation. I’d really like to see an initiative which raises voting numbers — though not for the first time, I’ve no idea how this would work. My own sampling of friends voting records is flawed as I’ve got a reputation for being a little didactic over this matter, as I am on giving blood, so it seems to be that I know an unrepresentative set of keen ballot-casters.
(I did see quite a good advert on TV last night which encouraged registration to vote, but I’ve forgotten the URL already. I found it now — If you don’t do politics, there’s not much you do do, but I got to it looking for a transcript of the radio PPB by Plaid Cymru I just heard on Radio 4, which seemed to claim that Labour were to the right of Michael Howard’s Tories now.)
Is Labour doing anything about voter apathy?
The Telegraph on Friday claimed that Blair ‘honoured soccer louts to win popular vote’ (the louts are players, not fans).
In a strong attack on Downing Street’s obsession with football, [Kate Hoey] also claimed that the honours system was biased against sports not deemed “politically correct”.
Kate Hoey writes for the Telegraph on a regular basis, and she’s clearly a backbencher the paper is very fond of. She also used to be my MP when I lived in South London, and I share their estimation.
“But sometimes these particular people are very popular themselves, and they may well be added to the list by Downing Street because they would appeal to what Downing Street would feel were young voters who might be attracted to vote Labour.”
At first Miss Hoey refused to name any of the unsuitable candidates she had in mind. But then, under pressure from Tony Wright, the committee chairman, she singled out Ian Wright, the former England and Arsenal striker who received an MBE in 2000.
(Ms Hoey is an Arsenal fan herself.) I don’t know what to make of this, who thinks this will attract voters to Labour, or even change their votes? Does anyone think like that? Ms Hoey has an idea.
Asked who was responsible for No 10’s bias towards football, Miss Hoey implied it was Alastair Campbell.
She did not name him, but said the obsession with popularising the honours list came from “nearer the press office than the Prime Minister”.
I don’t think this is important because it’s some kind of corruption of the constitution, I think it’s just weird.
Also in the Telegraph — and I mentioned Plaid’s claim that Labour were the right-wing party earlier — Blair bans Labour Party delegation from flying to John Kerry’s coronation. I can see the logic for this — the party should be impartial regarding the electoral processes of friendly nations, but Labour, and especially Gordon Brown, has a history of close dealings with the Democratic Party. The good thing is that if Kerry wins, he won’t be in a hurry to help Blair. That’s what I call a positive side-effect. 2005 looks rosy already.
These 497 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:14pm GMT Comments.
Spam »
I don’t normally read spam, and Mail is pretty good at filtering it out. But when you see a familiar name in your inbox, you think twice. This is spam, and the given name is spelled wrongly too — just to rub it in. It’s pure chance that whatever programme came up with this sent it to me. There is no, I repeat no, connection to the biographer of David Blunkett and Times columnist and forswearer of the Grauniad.
From: “Steven M. Pollard”
Date: 21 March 2004 20:56:28 GMT
To: xxxxxxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com, xxxxxxxxxxx@ntlworld.com
Subject: Hello
Buy Viagra and Cialas Aka “Super Viagra”. .The Viagra that last all weekend!.. and other good prescriptions….Save big on this site check it out.. Next-Day Fedex … here at.. http://blah Her Responses become impact bodies Responses economy, can Minister or
I’ve disguised the recipients, and, as I really loathe spam, the url given. Bombard the sender, who is not the journalist, as you see fit.
These 104 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:12pm GMT Comments.
Just To Watch Him Die »
I shot a man in Reno
Just to watch him die
Johnny Cash
Kevin Drum continues the jolly Jack Kelley saga. I eagerly await David Aaronovich (who compared Jayson Blair to Myra Hindley) finding new depths of simile for Mr Kelley. Fred West? Joseph Stalin? Tony Blair?
My breath is baited.
These 38 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:32pm GMT Comments.
Monday, 22 March 2004
Worst Man »
If I said that Chris Brooke was to the left of Peter Cuthbertson who was to the left of Adam Yoshida who was to the left of me, you’d be confused until I said that we were sitting round a table. (Not that we ever have, or are likely to.)
Logic is a fine thing, but it needs something else, usually something empirical. Or, at least, the realisation that the terms given are not adequate for any conclusion.
I went to two weddings last year. Both were happy affairs, where all agreed that the both parties were happy together, and the ceremony — or the public declaration — could only make things better.
Yet I can think of other weddings where — I suppose — the same logic was applied, this time I consider wrongly. What makes a very good thing better does not have to make a not-very-good-thing OK. It could, for instance, merely magnify the ‘goodness’.
One of these other weddings I refused to attend. I told the groom that his best option was not to turn up. If the situation changed, he could get married another time. If it didn’t, he was better off out of it. The husband concerned has bent a lot of ears since about his misfortunes. They also now have a daughter, and I know no-one, of any reigious persuasion, who thinks their ‘family’ is suitable for a child.
The other, I regret to say, I was best man at. Or ‘a’ best man. There were two of us, and the ceremony was recognised by the church if not by the laws of the State. As the ceremony was in Austin, Texas, that should not surprise you. I had counselled my friend N that he should not get married, as had everyone else he knew. He seemed so sincere. By sincere, I mean that he met R, liked him, and discovered that he was a burglar when he (R) was arrested. R spent seven years in prison. At some point, he contracted AIDS. I advised N with everything I had (as you can tell very little) not to be honourable, this person was a criminal, he had a fatal disease, he was faithful, not out of opportunity, but out of confinement. It all bounced back. (BTW, N is ‘black’ and from a very homophobic family; he came out to me when we met in Spain in 1985; R is ‘white’.) It seemed so decent and so romantic that I flew to Austin to the ceremony. R struck me as a nice person (less so his family, whom I considered in my patronising way “white trash”, and his best man, now back in the jug, — a a nasty, spoiled, little rich kid murderer). He still is, in my memory.
As a best man, I feel guilty. N is a teacher, before that, he served in the US Navy. He is, as you should be able to guess, a person of high moral and social principles. His partner was a burglar. Maybe he could have been something else (there have been many smart people who dabbled in criminal careers), but he spent most of his 20s in prison. N spent his either in education or in exploring the world.
(This reminds me of Matthew Yglesias who likes talking of the now-ridiculous arguments against women’s university attendance. Could it be true, that because women now have education and experience comparable to men, that marriages are happier?)
I should explain my understanding of one-to-one relationships. I don’t believe that we are born for each other. In fact, many of the happiest relationships I know are second marriages. (DL cautions me that there are no kids to screw things up.) I rather prefer a sort of jigsaw metaphor where we fit together, but, prior to fitting we can change shape, and even then, we can fit on our other sides.
Right now, I think I have N acknowledging that his relationship doesn’t work. I think he wants to run away. As he was the breadwinner, I advise against that.
I know that N has tried very hard, but they seem like very different people — to me, they have nothing in common (besides being gay). I like, I envy, N’s potential for charity.
I have no advice to give (and, barring a miracle, comments still don’t work — I have no idea why not at this moment).
These 741 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:16am GMT Comments.
Just Like Everybody Else Does »
I am human and I need to be loved.
How soon is Now?
This is rather sweet.
These 4 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:54am GMT Comments.
Dudie Dudie Doo »
Journalists can make a difference, though I generally despise them. The Watergate thing for example, Woodward and Bernstein — they were journalists!
So with the man they call the dude. Not for nothing did Bruce Willis play him in the movie! That’s right, he was the lush. The Dude — that is Christopher Hitchens — kicked up this whole fuss about the anti-semitic nature of the BBC pronouncal of ‘Wolfowitz’ with an initial ‘V’. The Nazis! Through The Poor Man I’ve learned that noted anti-Semite Josh Marshall spread this calumny
One chilling note in this passage is that Paul Wolfowitz, the prime architect and idea man of the second Iraq war, spent the early months of the Bush administration focused on “Iraqi terrorism against the United States”, something that demonstrably did not even exist. A rather bad sign.
The hater of civilisation! I hope Hitchens denounces this traitor (to whatever is held dear today) as a traitor (to whatever is held dear today) or whatever it is he says. You know, those well-known anti-semites Noam Chomshy and Harold Pinter should become un-persons. Faith not thought is the creed of the 21st century, and doubters shall be burnt at the whatsit as our moral leader so rightly says.
These 159 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:32am GMT Comments.
Poor Man Update »
I really have to read blogs more;
Five days before the war began in Iraq, as President Bush prepared to raise the terrorism threat level to orange, a top White House counterterrorism adviser unlocked the steel door to his office, an intelligence vault secured by an electronic keypad, a combination lock and an alarm. He sat down and turned to his inbox.
“Things were dicey,” said Rand Beers, recalling the stack of classified reports about plots to shoot, bomb, burn and poison Americans. He stared at the color-coded threats for five minutes. Then he called his wife: I’m quitting.
Beers’s resignation surprised Washington, but what he did next was even more astounding. Eight weeks after leaving the Bush White House, he volunteered as national security adviser for Sen. John F. Kerry (Mass.), a Democratic candidate for president, in a campaign to oust his former boss. All of which points to a question: What does this intelligence insider know?
“The administration wasn’t matching its deeds to its words in the war on terrorism. They’re making us less secure, not more secure,” said Beers, who until now has remained largely silent about leaving his National Security Council job as special assistant to the president for combating terrorism. “As an insider, I saw the things that weren’t being done. And the longer I sat and watched, the more concerned I became, until I got up and walked out.”
It’s perfectly clear what this man knows: he’s prepared to help the Mysterons invade Planet Earth. I mean, of course, debunk Bush’s cynical incompetent crew as liars, greedy opportunists, who wouldn’t know a priniciple if you abandoned them in Guantanamo Bay for two years of back-rubs, counselling, and pay-TV or whatever it is the US taxpayer so selflessly provides there. No that can’t be right. That just slipped out. George is a friend of Tony, and Tony keeps telling us how honest he is, so he must be telling the truth. Only last week I bought a car from “Honest Arthur Daley”. This morning I found grass growing on the bodywork. I took it back to him. He stubbed out his Havana and called his colleague, Terry, I think his name was, into the office. “Look,” he said, “that’s clearly al-Qaeda’s work. Would I sell a car in that condition?” Terry nodded his head, doubtfully I thought — how kind of Mr Daley to employ someone with a mental problem as a partner in his business! Mr Daley nicely asked for a pony (this means 500 quid, I learned) to fix the problem. How lucky I was to go to a car dealer who calls himself honest! Why doesn’t everyone?
These 217 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:58am GMT Comments.
Money Quote »
Kevin Drum says:
Bush has done no such thing. In fact, he has been entirely unwilling to try and shape public opinion. Not only has he convinced no one, he actually seems to lose support every time he opens his mouth or announces a new policy. And he really doesn’t seem to care.
This is clearly rubbish. Who has not seen the love-light in Tony Blair’s eyes when they meet, when they pray together? So one of them is a moron. What better vessel for the invisible guy in the sky?
These 41 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:40am GMT Comments.
Dear Bill, Yet Again »
I invite you to compare:
Even here, it appears, on the thin blue line that stands between ourselves and terror, there is not only incompetence but crass stupidity and an astonishing moral blindness. But if we can’t depend on the police, what hope is there?
Melanie Phillips, as if you couldn’t guess, with
Ah, they say, but we don’t have Churchill. That is a false argument. Churchill, who saw his gifts realistically, always insisted that he only gave voice to the spirit of the people, and that is close to the truth.
There are other reasons for being optimistic. The bigger the accident, the better our emergency services seem to perform.
Dear Bill Deedes. Both are writing about the British public and the terrorist threat. Some wag commented last week that the warbloggers were calling for the election of a new Spanish people, and old Mel thinks much the same about the citizenry of Blighty.
It’s a surprising discovery to make, but Bill Deedes’ entire column this week almost amounts to “If there is hope, it lies in the proles” while Mad Mel asserts than any male whose hair so much as touches his ears or any female not wearing sensible shoes and a modest skirt are dangerous subversives who need a spell in the salt mines.
Perhaps in David Blunkett’s Utopia telescreens everywhere will beam Mel’s scowling morning face, her voice as mellifluous as a corncrake with throat cancer, barking out the shortcomings of the public. “Smith, Wendy, adjust that burka this instant, and stand up straight girl!”
Bill again, mining his considerable hinterland:
The last thing I did for this newspaper before the Second World War broke out was to produce a booklet on how to survive when the bombers came. It received a pessimistic reception in some quarters. “Nobody’s going to follow such guidance,” they insisted. “There’ll be panic.” When the blow came, there was no panic.
Democracy means “people power” or “rule by the people"; it should also entail love of the people. “Vox populi, vox dei.” The people are always right. We don’t need to depend on the police, we have the masses, and they are more than enough.
I’ve decided that every Barbara Amiel column I read cuts my life expectancy by around 12 hours, so in the hope of remaining on this planet as long as it will have me, I’m not even glancing at what she’s written.
Some columnists have a sense of proportion.
It would take a significant leap of imagination to suggest that reviewing films constitutes a tough way to make a living. Up there with the sales and marketing of old rope, maybe…
Last week, though, I was obliged to sit through a double bill that, for quite a lengthy period of the combined running total, made me think that, if I was down a mine or out on a trawler in a North Sea squall, I wouldn’t be quite so remorselessly confronted with misery.
Jim White who sat through The Passion of the Christ and Monster in one day. Despite calling the latter film
the story of Aileen Wuornos , America’s most notorious female serial killer, for which Charlize Theron rightly won both the best actress Oscar and the undying respect of her countryman Nelson Mandela
I’m not sure that he actually liked it. Nick Broomfield has made two films about Wuornos.
[Broomfield was] granted an interview with her the day before she is executed.
An interview, incidentally, that concludes with his producer saying to Wuornos as she leaves the room, ankles in chains, heading back to her cell for the last time, “Nice to meet you, Aileen, take care,” for all the world as if they have just been introduced at a cocktail party.
Does Wuornos’s story need dramatised? And is the film honest?
Even though [Wuornos] came from the sort of background that could provide subject matter for an entire series of the Jerry Springer Show, she was never far from a home movie camera. Video footage exists of her as a child, as an adolescent, as a young streetwalker.
In most of [these recordings] you can quickly see what Theron’s film is surprisingly reluctant to accept: that she was madder than a snake in a bucket.
I might pass on Monster, I’d like to see the Broomfield documentaries though.
These 321 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:32pm GMT Comments.
Insignificance »
The Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem seems to have undergone some kind of shakeout, as a result of which this blog has fewer inbound links, but nonetheless, has moved up to Slithering Reptiles from Crawly Amphibians, a couple of categories higher and the names become almost attractive.
The scary thing is the number of blogs out there. This one was ranked near #3000, and has jumped to around #2200. I haven’t heard of most of the popular blogs — the ones among the top 50 . At times like this, it all feels very insignificant.
These 94 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:40pm GMT Comments.
Tuesday, 23 March 2004
You’ve Got Good Taste »
Democrats took offense over of the use of 9/11 images in President Bush’s re-election campaign adverts.
I fail to see why. Bring it on.
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:30pm GMT Comments.
Am I Missing Something Here? »
Atrios notes
Consider that the Bush administration wants to increase FCC fines for indecency up to $500,000 per violation per station, yet at the same time, it wants to restrict noneconomic damages in tort cases to $250,000 or $350,000.
So if a DJ says a four-letter word on the radio, the harm is so appalling that a fine of $500,000 per word, per station is justified. But if someone is paralyzed, killed or otherwise catastrophically injured, the most the family could get for the (noneconomic) loss would be up to $350,000.
I don’t pretend to understand US law, so the value of one against the other isn’t something I’m prepared to comment on. But what’s so bad about swearing on the radio? And am I alone in finding Bush (if he has anything to do with policy) a little inconsistent here?
These 52 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:54pm GMT Comments.
Wednesday, 24 March 2004
Interesting Interests »
Some things make you proud to be British, and this is one of them.
The Project … is a non-profit educational organization dedicated to a few fundamental propositions… that too few political leaders today are making the case for American interests being the most interesting interests there are.
Readding between the lines, the happy few can only mean Tony Blair. More’s the pity that, as Jim Henley notes, this website does not exist.
These 39 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42am GMT Comments.
Discriminating »
I’ve posted before about Matt Cavanagh. Since then, Chris Bertram has written to, and been published by, the Guardian.
Chris Brooke is particularly trenchant:
I’m going back and forth on what I think about this case. I still think the broadsheet news reporting [mostly the Guardian, but the Sunday Telegraph also joined in] has been pretty crappy. Journalists keep writing about Cavanagh’s suggestion that unfair discrimination might in certain circumstances be “rational”, without pointing out that the word “rational” as it is habitually used in economics and, often enough, in philosophy can just refer to whatever it is that appears to me the best thing to do in order to realise whatever goals I might happen to have.
But enough people have emailed me to point out that Cavanagh’s views — both philosophically and politically — really are pretty right-wing, which raises the question of why, given that Mr. Blunkett clearly likes to be surrounded by free-thinking young men, he chooses particularly right-wing free-thinking young men by whom to be surrounded… I mean, if you want political theorists, this is a pretty left-leaning crowd.
(Sorry for excerpting at length, editing at all seemed to destroy the point.) Blunkett could say that, leaning left himself, he needed to find some balance. But I think no one would buy that these days. I think Blunkett should be free to hire whomever he pleases. He is answerable to his employers, and they have a straightforward vote of confidence every few years. However, I also dislike the word “surrounded” — how many does he employ, and what’s wrong with career civil servants (who are rarely stupid) or his constituency party as sources of ideas? If Blunkett has a fault, it’s that he seems not to trust his own colleagues, which is not a good sign.
The problem with Matt Cavanagh, is that no one seems to have read his book, so most attacks on him concentrate on what the Guardian chooses to imply. David Winnick, for example, appears to think that thinking should be “top-down” — we tell you the conclusions, you find the reasons, rather than starting from what facts we know, and seeing where they take us. Winnicks’s reasoning encapsulates my objections to the Iraq war. (Before I go any further, as David Blunkett is disabled himself, we should take it as read that he knows something about discrimination.)
LORD ANTHONY Lester is right to call for David Blunkett’s race advisor Matt Cavanagh to be sacked. It should never be acceptable to call for companies to racially discriminate against black staff if they believe their customers are racist.
(Emphasis mine.) I’ve only read the Guardian piece, but even there he didn’t call for anything. As I understood it, he said that companies are prosecuteable when they discriminate this much, and that the barrier to prosecution should be raised.
You cannot design diversity strategies around what is good for private business. It is business, and their customers, which must adapt.
I think that if you asked David Blunkett, or any New Labour true believer, which came first “what is good for private business” or some principle, the answer would be, “what is good for private business, is good for everyone; the rising tide raises all.”
The argument in defence of Cavanagh, that Blunkett will not accept his advisors’ views, does not hold weight. If the Home Secretary is going to employ advisors he has no intention of listening to he might as well hire Louis Farrakhan from the Nation of Islam. However as we know Farrakhan is still banned from entering the country, let alone the Home Office.
Since Farrakhan is a racist, so what? Blunkett has two defences to this charge: Cavanagh could act as “Devil’s advocate”, at the least spelling out what Tory policy in this area is likely to be (and since in the end governments are judged against their opponents’ policies, anticipating them can only be useful, though I can’t see why they need to employ someone for this: the Adam Smith Institute and the Tory party are up to the task); Cavanagh might also be a better critical thinker than he is an advocate, he might spot flaws in others’ idea more quickly than he can in his own. In both cases, he might be useful without actually writing policy himself.
If Kilroy Silk, who is not a race advisor but a simple TV presenter, loses his job over his comments about Arabs, Mr. Cavanagh who is advocating a derogation from the law on discrimination should be sacked and I guess he won’t find it hard to find a job even though in my book he’s very bad for any business that regards itself as having integrity, quality, and decency.
This is where the argument should have started: “integrity, quality, and decency” are not only core Labour values, they are (IMO) the foundation of good business.
Stronger not weaker legislation needed. Far from being the right time to question whether it makes good business sense to allow employers to discriminate, we should be asking whether we need stronger legislation to insist on more Black employment.
I believe this is the line that Trevor Philips of the CRE and the GLA are taking, because after all these years — nearly 30 years since the 1976 Race Relations Act which allowed positive action but outlawed positive discrimination — many employers are nowhere near a representative staff picture.
I agree with “nearly 30 years since the 1976 Race Relations Act… many employers are nowhere near a representative staff picture.” Is there any evidence that legislation will have a positive effect? Asians seem to employ or work for other Asians; I suspect the picture given is a little too simple. Black unemployment is more important than the composition of individual companies — these are nearly two sides of the same thing, but not quite. Since the story was reported in the Guardian, and the Cabinet is being indirectly attacked, can we see some more Black faces in both? Apart from Gary Younge, I can’t recall a black face next to a Guardian byline. (My own dnoc, the Torygraph, has a few.) While I’m at it, not only are there no Blacks in the government, but there are fewer women than there used to be. New Labour, heal thyself.
Over the pond, Kevin Drum asks:
Do Americans hate welfare because they think all the money goes to blacks? Alberto Alesina and Edward Glaeser don’t put it quite that baldly, but that’s their basic thesis.
It’s not an unreasonable question. Americans seem to have this Pavlovian aversion to “communism” yet the American Communist party were practically alone in agitating for racial equality. I’ve seen Martin Luther King derided for talking to “Communists” but who else would listen? and I’ve seen Paul Robeson (something of a cultural hero in South Wales) attacked for supporting Stalin, which maybe he did. I don’t know how aware of Stalin’s crimes he was. I can easily guess how aware he was of the problems of the deep South.
These 711 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:50pm GMT Comments.
Scrambled Eggs »
While not supposed to be funny, this had me in fits:
Our cook had the most interesting reaction. “How many young men did this @#%$ [Sheikh Yassin] send to death by brainwashing and fooling them into carrying out suicide attacks? How many innocent people had he killed?” he shouted to the doctor, “And how many thousands of dollars did he get in his Swiss bank accounts by pimping on the Palestinian cause?”. “If he was truly such a hero and a believer in Jihad how come he didn’t rig his wheelchair with explosives and blow himself up at some Israeli checkpoint? I say f* him”. We advised the cook to stay out of politics, at least for the moment, and stick to his task of scrambling eggs for us.
Of course, the cook is right — but so are the others, scrambled eggs are more important than politics. Shame that the brainwashed young men didn’t learn that.
The post immediately below that one is disturbingly graphic.
These 49 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:46pm GMT Comments.
My Sweet Lord »
I was in the pub quiz on Sunday when Dave C asked who Christopher Eccleston was. I tried to explain that he’d been in lots of good British films, only to be met with blank looks.
Roughly, my sort of socialism requires that the state intervene in the important stuff: money for food, the NHS, and so forth. Art is vital to me, but not so the Sun reader on the Clapham Omnibus.
State funding in film (one of the most commercial mediums conceivable) has produced wonders such as The Sex Lives of the Potato Men. Hollywood is philistine, and second in philistinism only to British quangos.
Michael Brooke reminds me of the courage of capitalism, and incidentally of the good British films the state failed to back.
The [Life of Brian] could not be completed until former Beatle George Harrison stepped in to finance it after EMI Films withdrew, fearing it was too controversial.
Harrison received his reward on earth, the only place it is really appreciated.
These 141 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:29pm GMT Comments.
Thursday, 25 March 2004
Ay, Caramba! »
Is this and end to one of my guilty pleasures?
This article, of course, is about Canadian politics. Those here for my insanity on other issues will have to wait a few hours. AY
Possible explanations.
- He’s been a very clever parodist all along;
- His site’s been hacked by Democrats, using secret technologies picked up from Jennifer Garner;
- He’s developing a sense of humour.
Can’t be the last one, can it?
These 50 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:36am GMT Comments.
Aw, I’m Shocked »
I shook my head. I rubbed my eyes. I read with my glasses on. I read with them off. I pinched myself. I lay down. I got up. I turned round three times. It was still true. As I’m presently incapable of articulate expression, here’s Boris Johnson
What sticks in my craw is the continual suggestion that the Iraq operation was something to do with the “war on terror”. He was a bad man; it is good he is gone. But he was not a terrorist in the way that Gaddafi was; and I am fed up with the constant elision in government propaganda between the Iraq operation and the terrorists of the al-Qa’eda network.
The whole column is that good. Every time I read Boris I feel the urge to vote Tory just a little. Here, at least, is a man who knows what truth is, and can spot elision, fudge, and mendacity. Leave it to the New Labour androids to intone “Libya is our friend, Libya has always been our friend.” Any newspaper stories or websites which claim anything different will be denounced as the work of Robin Cook and his agents.
Forgive me for quoting again, but the world today is too crazy to comment on properly. I mentioned Mad Mel on Monday, and her reaction to the Greenpeace protesters on Big Ben contrasts nicely with Sarah Sands in the Torygraph (can’t find a Google News link for this one, so registration required, sorry).
“So,” said an outraged radio commentator, “it is all right for a middle-class man in a rucksack to climb Big Ben but not all right for al-Qa’eda.” I see no contradiction. Greenpeace are environmental protesters; al-Qa’eda are insane murderers.
There was the same over-reaction when a man in a dress, Aaron Barschak, gatecrashed Prince William’s 21st party. “What if?” asked the hand-wringers. All it means is that our police can tell the difference between a suicide bomber and a drag artist. One clue is that suicide bombers are notoriously humourless.
Both Boris Johnson and Sarah Sands call attention to scaremongering by the government, as the Right Honourable Member for Henley puts it:
The other day a group of schoolchildren came to see me here in Westminster, and a 10-year-old girl stuck up her hand and said, please, she was worried about being blown up in the House of Commons…
But, afterwards, I must confess that I felt slightly angry that this child should be so troubled, and I blame the grown-ups, and in particular Tony Blair. He made a speech in Sedgefield recently that was quite absurd from a public figure who is meant to be providing reassurance, and encouraging people to go about their businesses as normal.
He said that we were all in “mortal peril” and painted an apocalyptic picture of the threat. Even as I write, his scaremongering is being acted upon by the architects at Westminster. A great pontoon is apparently to be constructed in the river, so that we may not be attacked by al-Qa’eda speedboats.
The alarmists have a reason to be alarmed:
America is in danger of someday not being at war.
Blair, as Commander of Air Strip One, must keep all of us in a state of readiness. War is Peace. Sarah Sands suggests (this is a bad day for alliteration) that common sense will tell us who is a terrorist and who not. For those in doubt, you can recognise those on our side by their catch-phrases.
Tony Blair: Don’t panic! Don’t panic! Don’t panic!
Melanie Philips: We’re doomed. Doomed. We’re a’ doomed.
These 282 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:13am GMT Comments.
Revolution Rocks »
Through British Spin we discover Revolts.co.uk.
Generally, it’s pretty fascinating. There’s something comforting looking at lots of numbers you’re not actually required to do anything about, which is why men get obsessed with cricket or train-spotting, I suppose. Not that everyone seems to think so — there’s a link to this disenchanted review of Philip Cowley’s ‘Revolts and Rebellions’: Parliamentary Voting Under Blair, winner of the “W. J. M. MacKenzie Prize for the Best Book Published in Political Science in 2002.”
I’m not altogether convinced by the case for studying revolts within the Labour party. With such a large majority, a rebel can vote against the party with a clear conscience both ways; he hasn’t actually damaged the government and he’s gone with his principles. It reminds me of Henry Kissinger on “notoriously vicious” student politics because “the stakes are so low.” (Hat tip: Johann Hari.) Rebellion with a small majority (such as the one John Major had) is far more interesting.
Still, it’s one to file alongside Downing Street Says and Public Whip.
Political Science, like most of the social sciences, does suffer from the “Really, I did not know that, how very interesting” effect, and it strikes here on the entry about women Labour MP (I’m not 100% sure about permalinks, but this may work):
This paper (399k), by Sarah Childs and Julie Withey, forthcoming in Political Studies, finds that there is a clear gendered dimension to the behaviour of women MPs when it comes to Early Day Motions (EDMs). Based on analysis of all the EDMs in the 1997 Parliament, some 5000 motions, they find that Labour’s women are more likely than its men to sign ‘women’s’ and especially feminist ‘women’s’ EDMs.
Women are more likely to support feminism than men. Who would, as they say, a thunk it? A bit like:
A separate study, published in the same journal, highlighted the benefits of exercise in all age groups, finding that martial arts promote fitness in middle age.
If the BBC hadn’t told me, I’d never have thought that exercise might make you fit.
These 254 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:15pm GMT Comments.
Read The Whole Thing »
Found through Arthur Silber, Gail Sheehy in the New York Observer:
In the predawn hours of Tuesday, March 23, Kristen Breitweiser, Lorie Van Auken, Mindy Kleinberg and Patty Casazza dropped off their collective seven fatherless children with grandmothers and climbed into Ms. Breitweiser’s S.U.V. for the race down Garden State Parkway to the Hart Senate Office Building on Capitol Hill. It’s a journey that they could now make blindfolded — but this one was different. On March 23, testimony was to be heard by the commission investigating intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, among others.
These four moms from New Jersey are the World Trade Center widows whose tireless advocacy produced the broad investigation into the failures around the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks that now has top officials from both the Clinton and Bush administrations duking it out in conflicting testimonies at this week’s high-drama hearings in the Hart Office Building before the 9/11 commission…
An unnamed spokesman for the Bush campaign was quoted as saying of Sept. 11, “We own it.” That comment particularly disturbed the Four Moms.
“They can have it,” said Ms. Van Auken. “Can I have my husband back now?”
The upshot was that George “Dubya” Bush could look so cute in his sailor suit, and Tony Blair who I campaigned for prays with this man. At times like this, I want to tear my teeth out.
These 48 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:35pm GMT Comments.
Friday, 26 March 2004
Real Science »
Norm says science is the best and only way and quotes Lewis Wolpert. I agree with the title and, indeed, part of the thesis.
Science is the best and only way to understand how the world works, but there is no simple way of describing the scientific method.
Check. There are no other ways to understand how the world works, and science is itself an art, not a science.
For any set of observations there is only one correct explanation.
Oh Lord, no. The universe isn’t reducible to understanding; it just is. (I’m thinking of a number, the square of which is 4.) In the postscript to Steven Weinberg’s Dreams of a Final Theory : The Scientist’s Search for the Ultimate Laws of Nature, the author describes his journey to the Nobel (for the “Electroweak theory") from publication, through the logarithmic rise in citations (one the first year, two the next…). The second or third year after publication a paper compared Weinberg’s algebra with Feynman’s — successfully, but with the disapproval of Weinberg. Feynman being perhaps the hero of modern physics, Weinberg’s description took flight after that. Richard Feynman was an instrumentalist who described his work as “drawing arrows on pieces of paper” and refused to believe that quantum mechanics was ‘real’ outside its formidable predictive prowess. Weinberg disagreed. Their methodologies worked together, but they disputed the substance of their mathematics. Professor Wolpert continues:
There are many types of scientists, from theory-makers to experimenters to close observers. The quality they share is the need to find an explanation that fits with the evidence and does not contradict itself or other accepted scientific ideas.
Ah well, you may have heard of Edwin Hubble. If you haven’t, he was famous enough for them to name a big, expensive telescope (the one in space that wouldn’t focus at first) after him. In the 1920s, when he was a big shot, he and other astronomers tried to estimate the age of the universe. They came up with a ‘ball-park’ figure of 1 billion years. A lot more than Bishop Ussher’s guesstimate. You shrug, what’s wrong with that? Geologists at the same time had their own figure, 2 billion years. Each guess was outside the margin of error of the other. The astronomers believed their version; the geologists theirs. Life went on.
Science, children should be taught, is special and only one society discovered it — the ancient Greeks. This may not sound politically correct, but it is true. They were the first to understand logic and contradiction, and to stand back from the world in order to try and understand how things worked. Just consider my hero Archimedes, the greatest of all scientists, for he had few shoulders to stand on. I am pretty sure that in physics no one teaches his elegant proof of why using a simple balance, that has a heavy weight on one side and a light one on the other, the distances of the weights from the centre, the fulcrum, must be in proportion to how heavy they are. This was the beginning of real science.
I’m not particularly happy with this, though I learned the balance thing at primary school with a rule as the balance with pegs to hang weights on. (This may have been a toy; it may even have been intended to teach multiplication.) As Professor Wolpert says later:
Science is a communal activity, unlike the arts, and ultimately the individual scientist is irrelevant, for if X does not make the discovery, Q will.
Societies do not make discoveries, but the naive reader might deduce that they do. And if the Greeks had failed, society Q might have. The Chinese invented gunpowder with the mental aids of their own science. We erased as much of this stuff as we could for a thousand years, and it’s happening again. The President of the United States of America and the Prime Minister of Britain still believe in blind faith, following precedent, and a big invisible guy in the sky who preaches peace but always sides with those who have the biggest weapons. I hope it can be discovered more than once.
I quoted Boris Johnson on elision yesterday, and Professor Wolpert makes one of his own, without the malicious mendacity of New Labour at his back:
Reliable scientific knowledge has no ethical content, it is the way the world is.
Reliable science can be wholly wrong, ontologically. Aristotle argued that there was an attractive force in the heavens which pulled smoke up, and that dirt bred wee beasties. Neither is true by modern science, but both predict things well enough. The moon launches worked, but they used Newtonian mathematics (extremely complex as that is), not the Einsteinian and post-Einsteinian models of the universe. Einstein went through a phase of being regarded as a nutter when he tried to recast relativity in first five, then six, dimensions with graduate students. (The current superstring model has eleven dimensions.) Knowledge is manifestly not the world; it is knowledge. As Wittgenstein says, the answers to questions about time and space lie outside time and space.
I considered becoming a philosopher of science, but it’s a step down from being piano player in a brothel without the musical feeling or the dexterity. Science should be taught, but the nature of science itself is immanent, emergent, transcendental, or one of those damn things. After a PhD, you either get it, having done it for a bit, or you don’t. It’s like riding a bike, if a little harder. There’s not much demand for a philosophy of bike-riding from academics, if you want that you need a cyclist. OK, nothing is harder than riding a bike.
I linked to Electron Band Structure In Germanium, My Ass the other week, and the biography of its author includes
Having discovered that real-life physics tends to be more about fiddling with algebra than designing warp drive engines…
And I went to Cardiff and graduated in 1994, the year Miguel Alcubierre published “The warp drive: hyper-fast travel within general relativity”, In Classical and Quantum Gravity, Vol 11, p. L73-L77, (1994).
Letter to the editor (5 pg); Quoting from the abstract: “It is shown how, within the framework of general relativity and without the introduction of wormholes, it is possible to modify space-time in a way that allows a spaceship to travel with an arbitrarily large speed. By a purely local expansion of space-time behind the spaceship and an opposite contraction in front of it, motion faster than the speed of light as seen by observers outside the disturbed region is possible. The resulting distortion is reminiscent of the “warp drive"; of science fiction. However, just as happens with wormholes, exotic matter will be needed in order to generate a distortion of space-time like the one discussed here."; It is unknown in physics whether such “exotic matter"; having a negative mass or negative energy density can exist. Classical physics tends toward a “no,” while quantum physics leans to a “maybe, yes."; Equal amounts of positive energy density matter will also be required. There is presently no known way to induce or control such effects. It is also uncertain whether this whole “warp"; would indeed move faster than the speed of light. Even though light-speed is a limit within spacetime, the rate at which spacetime itself can expand or contract is an open issue. Back during the early moments of the Big Bang, spacetime is assumed to have been able to expand faster than the speed of light. This is known as the “inflationary universe” perspective.
Quoted from the bibliography to NASA’s own page on — ahem — warp drives. I like the ‘Classical physics tends toward a “no,” while quantum physics leans to a “maybe, yes"’ bit. This is, incredibly to me, real science.
These 804 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:04am GMT Comments.
Don’t Stop Eating »
I passed a poster today for (What would happen) If… we don’t stop eating? It doesn’t take much imagination. If you can’t solve a problem, try turning it round, so a fair alternative question would be, ‘What would happen if we did stop eating?’
We’d all die. Stopping eating therefore looks like a bad thing, so I would recommend that we don’t stop.
This has been an Easy Answer to an Unnecessarily Complicated Question, for which we are all indebted to The Poor Man.
These 84 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:34pm GMT Comments.
Appeasing The Action »
Not everyone agrees with me about Libya, the Scotsman reports:
Pamela Dix, secretary of UK Families Flight 103, said she hoped the Prime Minister’s visit would help those who lost loved ones in the atrocity get closer to the truth.
“Some of us have always said that we think it is much more productive to have dialogue with a country such as Libya rather than keeping them out in the cold,” she said.
That makes sense to me, but then again, wasn’t it true of Hitler, Ghengis Khan, Stalin, or whoever? Isn’t that the appeasement route the right keeps accusing the anti-war crowd of?
Why Libya? Why not?
These 45 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:24pm GMT Comments.
Passsion Ate »
I’ve still no intention of seeing the thing, or even of catching bits when it finally makes terrestrial TV, but at least I’ve found a review muscular enough to take on The Passion of the Christ.
Excerpting, deliberately unfairly (the link is from Google, so should work, whether you are registered or not):
It is the New Testament rendered as a snuff film…
Jesus, as Gibson envisages him, is far from being a tousle-haired, Nick Drake-listening, teepee-residing hippy. He’s not much of a theologian either. Rather, as played by James Caviezel, he’s a wandering, lonesome guy. Buff, toned, unsmiling…
Centurions grunt and sweat as they etch whip marks into his back, like the grooves on a piece of vinyl. A crown of thorns is stapled to his scalp. Blood oozes out. One eye is closed. This being Hollywood, though, his pearly-white teeth are undamaged…
I’m not sure if Sukhdev Sandhu is a brilliant film critic (as in perceptive and knowledgeable) or just a very good writer (which will always do, especially if you want to substitute reading the review to seeing the actual film), but he’s the best I know of.
Elsewhere in the Torygraph’s really strong arts section is Must-have movies: Rio Bravo (1959). Again, this might pass for an exercise in style, and since I last saw the film as a teenager (having developed a passion for John Wayne, which was eventually purged by Kung Fu films), I can’t comment on any depth it may have. I am persuaded to, at least, set the video next time it comes the way of BBC2.
These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:08pm GMT Comments.
The Lion And The Lamb »
I once travelled across the USA by train. This wasn’t my original intention: I intended to explore by thumb (at the time, like Anthony Burgess and Normas Geras, I couldn’t drive: I finally learned after being effectively called a wimp by a girlfriend — I extracted an accidental revenge by parking her car in a ditch outside Dolgellau), but warnings from Houston’s finest persuaded me otherwise. The whys and wherefores need not concern the gentle reader here, what matters is that I was once accosted in a place with no escape by a Jehovah’s Witness. The moral of this tale, or of this rambling introduction at least, is that I was presented with a booklet whose cover illustrations featured, among other things, lions eating grass. I said I wasn’t interested. There a Jean Genet line somewhere (not that I’m versed in Genet, but it’s the epigraph to a Bukowski novel — and if I knew which one, I’d spare you this) about the novelist not wanting the lion to lie down with the lamb: the artist is interested in how things are. I may not be a good novelist (which is why you’ve never heard of me), but I want things to be as they are.
The Jehovah’s have many fine ideals, as has Christianity. Forgiveness, turning the other cheek, are, for me, signs of strength. Mostly. Magnanimity and compassion are my favourite virtues, but realism is close behind. Lions and tigers are all very well — they are beautiful and majestic, but you do not play with them. Colonel Gadaffi has the conscience of a viper; there are those whom you forgive and embrace, and those you always keep at a distance.
I was against the invasion of Iraq for three reasons: one, we leave expeditionary, invasive, wars to the Mussolinis, the Hitlers, the Saddams of the world; two, no matter how bad Saddam was, our soldiers are not chess pieces, they enlisted to defend their country, not to expand its ideals — if they die, it should be in defence, not offence; three, I neither like nor trust Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and friends: they’re as slippery as eels in a chip pan. I reserve the right, however, to equally despise Gaddafi. We might speak to him, behind closed doors using unknown diplomats, but since he murdered over 300 of our people on flight 103, we should make it clear that our leaders will never talk to him: our basic condition of that is regime change.
My horribly naive, worse-than-sophomoric, teenage ideal is that we have a foreign policy where our sanctions of course allow food and medical aid through to enemy states, but we stand firm on weapons. Our condition of selling what the leaders want (and we should never hope that we can starve the proletariat into revolt) is the satisfaction of Amnesty. If any country invades us or our allies, it should expect the Scuds and the Cruises, but we do not invade. We know that we are like Dick Turpin, armed with a single shot pistol. While loaded, we can intimidate perhaps half a dozen people. When discharged, as the Iraq invasion did to our arsenal, we are less imposing than a drunk armed with a crushed straw.
Of course Jaw-jaw is better than war-war: never go to them, let them come to you.
We have recently fought a war where we bombed children and now we have an ally who has besieged children. There is a certain justice there.
If Libya isn’t a declared enemy of ours, who is? We cannot negotiate with Gaddafi: he has never meant us anything but harm. Drop him into gentle exile in some benighted African state, if that’s the practical way out. Our leaders should not talk to him. He is a torturer, an enemy of freedom. Let them start again, and maybe there is hope. If Tony Blair is photographed in earnest conversation with Gaddafi, the terrorists have won. Too late.
These 666 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36pm GMT Comments.
Saturday, 27 March 2004
This Page Is Secret »
You may not have noticed but several US blogs are raising money for the Democrats, Atrios, Kevin Drum, Pandagon all spring to mind, but of course, no one has ever heard of them. As this site is secret, you haven’t heard it here either. I wasted my time when I linked to Stephanie Herseth.
See, the left is obsessed with secrecy, according to Idiot Republicans.
Republicans have accused Democratic U.S. House candidate Stephanie Herseth of maintaining a secret Web page to receive campaign donations raised from ads on liberal groups’ Internet sites…
“There’s a reason she’s got that secret site. She doesn’t want to advertise the fact she’s doing this,” Glodt said Thursday.
This smear rather irritated The Daily Kos who’ve had a pretty prominent (but stil secret) link to Stephanie Herseth’s secret blog up for at least a month.
Found through Atrios.
These 95 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:05pm GMT Comments.
Meme Of The Week »
A new irregular feature starts today, which like calling everybody “Comrade” will probably last one post before I give it up as too much hassle.
I’ve used the image to the left before (from Tim Ireland of Bloggerheads), and the idea behind it is everywhere.
It’s on the cover of the current Private Eye: another photo of Blair, Bush, and Anzar, each with a speech bubble which read, in turn, “Going…” “Going…” “Gone!”.
Alister has a photo of a marcher in Madrid with a sign with a similar message.
And if anyone’s organising a protest against rebuilding links with Libya without the conditions of regime change and compliance with human rights, I’m up for it. I haven’t been on a march for ages (too ambivalent about the Iraq war, and anyway, I’m not keen on the Trots — they’re a pain in the neck when they’re young, and when they hit middle age they write for the Grauniad or start sucking up to creeps like Bush, abandoning the name-dropping Marxist methadone of religion for the hard stuff, or at least the comforts of a well-padded bank balance). But I don’t want to be see as soft on terror, so I’m happy to take to the streets to decry Tony Blair the appeaser.
Radio 4’s “The Now Show” was pleasingly scathing about this just now.
These 227 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:33pm GMT Comments.
Pass The Prozac »
Into every newspaper, some inanity must fall, but the Grauniad on Saturdays has a high strike rate for grabbing the vacuous and giving it voice on the Comment page.
Carl Elliott’s The identity clinic is a particularly dispiriting example.
If Nietzsche were alive today, he could be pitching anti-depressants for Pfizer.
I really doubt that, you know, even if he hadn’t been nearly 150.
The more East Asians who get plastic surgery to make their eyes look more European, for instance, the more entrenched the social norm that says East Asian eyes are something to be ashamed of. The same goes for light skin, large breasts, Gentile noses or a sparkling personality.
Given that East Asians form the largest racial group on the planet, I don’t think they’re about to die out from low-self esteem just yet. Light skin as something to be ashamed of? I suppose it does give away that you can’t afford two or three holidays a year. Large breasts? I thought the problem with large breasts was that they hurt, I didn’t know anyone who was actually ashamed of them. Not having a Gentile nose myself, I do feel a little pity for those afflicted, but I’m too politically correct to let it show, and I’ve never heard any complaints from sufferers.
But the anti-depressants are not used simply to treat severe clinical depression. They are also widely used to treat social anxiety disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder, generalised anxiety disorder, obsessive compulsive disorder, eating disorders, sexual compulsions and premenstrual dysphoric disorder. Many of these disorders were once thought to be rare or even non-existent.
There was a time when black swans were thought to be non-existent. The Royal Society was convinced that the duck-billed platypus was a hoax. You won’t find any of the pathologies described by Oliver Sacks in the 19th century literature. You won’t find the Big Bang theory in the Bible or in ancient Mayan texts. I suppose the point is that modern science really is rubbish.
This may mean transforming what was once seen as ordinary human variation — being shy, uptight or melancholy — into a psychiatric problem.
Freud never had a patient like Dr Hannibal Lecter: all those he treated suffered from one of the symptoms above. He was a psychiatrist; that’s what he attempted to cure. It wasn’t drug companies who pushed patients onto his couch: it was usually their families.
The results have not always been benign… Gynaecologist Robert Wilson’s argument for the benefits of oestrogen, Feminine Forever, sold 100,000 copies in its first six months, and within a year it was available in 17 countries… Women on HRT had more coronary artery disease, more strokes, more pulmonary blood clots and more breast cancer.
The first three are easily preventable with regular exercise and aspirin, the last is treatable if caught early. And anyway:
There is substantial evidence that short term use of HRT is effective for the relief of menopausal symptoms and these can have a substantial effect on quality of life.
Hormone replacement therapy — risks and benefits. Women eh? God or nature tells them to go and get lost as soon as their kids are grown-up and some of them want to go on working and even enjoying themselves. They’ll want to be happy next, you have to watch them.
We are now seeing a similar turnabout of opinion with anti-depressants… Recently, however, regulators in Britain, Canada and the US have taken steps to warn clinicians and patients that in some cases these anti-depressants may be linked with an increased risk of suicide.
Numbers, laddie, numbers matter here. A doubling of a small risk for a few people does not invalidate a technique which improves the lives of the majority of users. Surgery increases the risk of dying in hospital; that’s not a reason to discontinue it. And one possible explanation is that some of the suicides were people who were too depressed to do anything before. This only says that drugs alone ain’t enough.
Perhaps we could design a world in which we all have equal access to mood-brightening drugs and cosmetic surgery… Yet many of us would resist such a world. And the reason we would resist is not because such a world would be unjust, or even because it would lead to a world with more pain and suffering, but because of the extent to which it has been planned and engineered. We would resist the idea that the whole world is there to be manipulated for human ends.
I know the page is titled “Comment” but I did expect some form of argument, not the empty asseveration of prejudice. We would, who says? People resisted the idea of the earth going round the sun. If you live in a city, as I do, everything you see in every direction is the product of human engineering, design, or manipulation. All of this was rather better said in “Brave New World” which is the most over-rated novel of the last century for me. It’s not well-written, the characters are ciphers, the names are stupid ("Bernard Marx”, he looked a long way along the bookshelves to come up with that, and the others are even more banal), the plot trite, and the ideas second-hand and second-rate.
Look, I only buy it for the book reviews.
Johann Hari has many intelligent things to say In defence of Seroxat.
These 556 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:34pm GMT Comments.
Nobody Tells Me Anything »
This needs more coverage. Found through Journalfen, found through Mr Happy, found through Nick Barlow.
Just so that this seems like a vaguely political post, Nick was pleased that his MP signed this letter. As a supporter of Michael Grade, I’m more ambivalent. I think he was right to kill off the series when he did. (It had been rubbish since Patrick Troughton disbanded Jamie and Zoe and turned into Jon Pertwee, though that didn’t stop me watching it.) I’m upset that no Welsh MPs have signed, since if Dr Who creates work, it’ll be in Broadcasting House in Llandaff, so they ought to be concerned, regardless of the merits of the programme.
I doubt that I’ll watch it if it ever comes on our screens, but T will find that I buy her lunch at work a lot more often in the hope of catching a Dalek in search of victuals.
These 154 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:26pm GMT Comments.
Sunday, 28 March 2004
Not In The Mood »
Not really in the blogging groove today. I was going to post on Archbishop Williams on Footballers’ Wives and Archbishop Carey on Muslims: how footballers wives “have contributed little to world culture for hundreds of years” and could be more active in condemning ‘dogging’ before I realised that the Archbishops were different people. Drat!
I’m busy reading Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure and he’s finally met someone he doesn’t like, and he’s being terribly apologetic and British and sporting about not liking him, but the man is a creationist, so Gorman’s prejudices line up with my own.
On that note, found, yet again, through Kevin Drum who also has “no sympathy for the ID [Intelligent Design] jihadists” on the Harvard law Review — The Panda’s Thumb (named, no doubt after the book).
As Brian Leiter puts it:
Kudos to these scientists and educators for pooling their talents and providing what will likely prove to be a crucial forum and resource for those resisting the incursions into our schools of the ignorant yahoos, the ID scam artists, and the Discovery [sic] Institute conmen.
I like that phrase “ID jihadists”.
Finally, welcome to new blogger Noam Chomsky, who was, briefly, #1 in Blogdex (I suspect this was while the little green feyadeen thought they could snark and flame in the comments). There’s an astringency and clarity in Chomsky which I find very admirable. However, while I’m glad he’s there, I’m not greatly motivated to soldier through his prose. In short, I find him a little humourless and dull. There is a good bluffer’s guide to his faults and virtues on Crooked Timber: Chomsky Blog for other lightweights.
These 230 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:04pm GMT Comments.
Monday, 29 March 2004
At Last, An Excuse For Fart Jokes »
Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us.
H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds
They almost write themselves:
Methane has been found in the Martian atmosphere which scientists say could be a sign of present-day life on Mars.
Also on hot air, does anyone believe in Nasa’s Mach 7 technology?
The US space’s experimental hypersonic research aircraft, the X-43A, could one day revolutionise long-distance travel.
When I was a tot, well about eight, Tomorrow’s World ran a piece on increasing commuting distances. How, a few hundred years ago, a two-hour journey to work would take you less than 10 miles. (Did anyone in the 15th century really spend four hours a day legging it back and forth to the plough?) Now we have the M25, and it takes far longer… The purpose of this preamble was a revoutionary new kind of jet, which could fly to Sydney in two hours!
Oh yawn. For NASA’s X-43A to fly at all, it needs to be taken up by a B-52 (and you don’t see many of those at Heathrow), which then fires a modified rocket which, in turn accelerates to 3,500mph (I calculate that to be Mach 5), before it releases its payload. The scramjet flew for 15 miles. It only took a few seconds, true, but that’s still halfway round the earth short of Australia. The second stage seems to pack a mighty G-force, and I don’t believe that the average tourist is made of The Right Stuff.
These 198 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:00pm GMT Comments.
Punk Journalism »
These 2 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:45pm GMT Comments.
What A Question »
And so to what seems to have become a regular Monday goodie, What I Liked In The Torygraph Today. (And I couldn’t find these links through Google News, so they require registration.) Jim White, with his usual skill, spins a whole column out of what he did the other night. In this case, it was go to see Alistair Campbell’s live show, which, as it didn’t impress the critics at first, now comes with John Sergeant as MC, interviewer, and stand-up comedian.
“Like a torturer and a torturer’s victim, Alastair and I are very close,” is how Sergeant opened proceedings, before spinning a cracking anecdote about his own recent appearance on stage, when the first question was from a woman who wanted to know what he thought of Mark Lamarr. This had thrown the normally unflappable political reporter, who waffled something about never having watched Never Mind the Buzzcocks, but being sure Lamarr was a funny bloke. After the show, the woman approached him and confessed that she had asked the Lamarr question. “Ah, interesting,” said a baffled Sergeant.
“But it wasn’t the question I meant to ask,” came back the woman. “I meant to say Andrew Marr.”
Sergeant and Campbell seem like a double act Johns Bird and Fortune should pinch a few ideas from.
“But you manipulated the media,” he said when Campbell had finished his sermon.
“No I didn’t,” came back Campbell. “I tried to get ideas into the public domain.”
Which, if nothing else, suggests he is a fan of Craig Brown’s comedy trios: I try to get ideas into the public domain; you manipulate the media; he’s a spin doctor.
Others call ‘comedy trios’ Irregular Verbs, of course.
“What about Jo Moore burying bad news on September 11?” a man in the stalls wanted to know.
“She made a mistake,” said Campbell.
“What — getting caught?” came back the man, to vigorous applause.
Campbell didn’t like that.
Well, he wouldn’t.
Bill Deedes — well I have to include him by now — also writes about the erstwhile spin doctor, opining “There’s some useful political history to be written round the entry and exit of Mr Campbell.” Which I think no one would deny. If you want to know more, you’ll just have to read the article.
To my surprise, dear old Bill doesn’t know quite everyone.
All I know about Mr Blair’s new friend, Col Muammar Gaddafi, comes from what Imelda Marcos of the Philippines once told me over her dinner table. She had, she declared, found him very macho; but when alone with him she had told him, “You are a good man, a religious man,” and that had kept him at bay.
He had begged her to embrace the Muslim faith, given her a marked copy of the Koran and sent on a dozen copies. She had reported all this to the American vice-president, who thought the CIA should debrief her. At the end of a four-hour session, the inevitable question was put: “Did you sleep with Col Gaddafi?” “What a question to ask a girl!” Imelda exclaimed to us gaily.
These 177 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:12pm GMT Comments.
These Fools Demand Not Pardon »
His existentialists declare
That they are in complete despair,
Yet go on writing.
Sarah reassures me that I’m not (quite) the Steven Den Beste of South Wales, although I’m not sure that my own rant was that much better than the one I was picking apart. I wrote it in some heat, and I now feel that I could have expressed myself more clearly, but that’s usually the case.
The whole article was vacuous, not stirring a single example, and finishing with a rant around “Yet many of us would resist such a world” when the point seemed to be to deride the many who are welcoming such a world, and not even pausing to ask if the many of the first part had any right to decide how the many of the second part should live. The one sentence which lit the blue touch paper, was “Many of these disorders were once thought to be rare or even non-existent” which implies that they are fictional, but DSM-IV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders — Fourth Edition) is hardly a sock puppet for the pharmaceutical industry. (There is also a simplified version of the complete set of DSM-IV criteria.) I was too sarcastic and glib in pointing out that many things in modern science were once thought non-existent.
I suspect that the charge also extends to the named disorders being variants of one another, and the classification system being mere glory hunting by psychiatrists or simply Pretentious Diction.
It’s actually not like that. As Einstein said, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.” The nineteenth century term for most of these was “nerves”, which wasn’t much help in diagnosis. The problem with prescription drug treatments is, as Sarah says, doctors who “operate on checklists which their patients know better than they do.” Even then, GPs — good ones anyway — check on their patients’ recoveries; they do learn something about the efficacy of their prescriptions: they’re not the simple tools of drug companies.
One of the many unspoken assumptions in the Guardian piece was that depression and so on are the product of our non-authentic modern society, yet I can think of lots of unhappy people in Shakespeare and early novels. Andrew Marvell, Samuel Johnson, John Keats all seem to have suffered from periods of melancholic withdrawal. Treatment of them might have been literature’s loss, but Johnson might have fitted in some more research on that dictionary and come up with a definition of ‘horse’ than “a common animal” and learned the meaning of a few naval terms before he added them to his opus.
I’ve been luckier than Sarah — when I saw a GP for depression, he had a student with him. Depression is hard enough to talk about at any time, and of course they gave the option of sending the student outside — but morals is morals, and you can’t go around saying you support education only to undermine it for a little thing like embarrassment. The doctor didn’t go through a checklist, perhaps because of the student, perhaps because I told him exactly what was the matter with me. He prescribed Prozac (under another name — Fluoxetine), and it worked, more or less. When I phoned for an appointment to report on my progress, I was told by the receptionist that since my new address was outside their catchment area, I’d been taken off their books, and had ceased to exist in their eyes, but that’s another story.
The Gruaniad piece brought to mind Alexander Pope’s Imitations of Horace, lines 115-119:
I lose my patience, and I own it too
When works are censur’d, not as bad, but new;
While if our elders break all reason’s laws,
These fools demand not pardon, but applause.
I’ve always thought that was brilliant — its only flaw being that no-one ever censured anything as new.
Clearly, I was wrong.
These 611 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:29pm GMT Comments.
Some Thoughts »
Norm just posted a few links, including fisherblog (new to me) on the falling circulation of the Guardian (Norm’s dnoc — Daily Newspaper of Choice). I emailed him three suggestions viz: a) newspapers bundle stuff together, there must be several Guardian readers out there who haven’t read an article in common for a month; the web is easier and cheaper [and the Guardian online is now alone is being non-subscription]; b) it has a real problem with editing — you and I have both complained about very stupid articles in recent months — and there is some shocking proofreading; c) you [Norm] mentioned a friend who had switched to the Telegraph on account of [Guardian] anti-Semitism. I grew up with the Guardian — my dad was an inveterate reader because he went to the largely Jewish Manchester Grammar, and if they read it, and took in a Salford lad like him, it was his paper: if the Guardian has turned in the eyes of intelligent Jews (and I can’t comment on this) then I’m not surprised that it has lost sales.
I opposed the invasion of Iraq — I’m a stereotypical left-wing trendy Guardian reader — but the Telegraph serves me very well these days, because it offers facts before argument (though there is some horrible crap from Barbara Amiel and Mark Steyn) and still believes in research and subediting. Way back when I went on my first CND marches I refused to but the SWP inkies because at least the Guardian was written by journalists who derived arguments from facts rather than the reverse — I’m less certain this is the case nowadays. I’m still prejudiced toward the left: I’ve been thinking of a newspaper that takes the best of what’s going at present, and Nicholas Lezard and Nancy Banks-Smith would be first in the queue, and they’re both Guardian writers, but after that the Telegraph takes the whole sports section, along with arts criticism, with some Indy and Times reportage left over.
Anyway, fisherblog argues that “The Guardian is the only serious left-of-centre national newspaper in the UK” — I think the Independent is all three — and I’m not sure that it matters; most UK papers have been poisonously right-wing — the Sun, the Star, the Express, the Mail, the Times, but voting has remained fairly central. I’ve also known Labour Telegraph readers and Tory Guardian readers. The Guardian is going through a bad phase. Maybe the drop in circulation will bring it to its senses. (Though I doubt this; its instincts seem to be to move lower-brow, and that is the problem for me: low-brow is offensive, and the Sun does it so much better that the Guardian cannot compete.)
Just before I post this, I’ve just realised that the broadsheets are aimed at the ABC1s — ie those with education, and, it is supposed, disposable income, so even if the circulation is small, the interests of advertisers should be high. Given the Guardian’s loss of status, this isn’t the case. So what is going on? Are we becoming more classless? The separation between the rich and poor seems to be growing wider, so it can’t be that. At present I suspect that it’ something to do with income coming from job advertising (very lucrative) — and that that implies that readers don’t even glance at the columnists, so some teenage sub-ed treats them as ballast — and that is how they write.
I’m not the only leftist to doubt the Guardian group:
Fair enough, courageous isn’t the first word that would normally come to mind to describe a vain, pompous autocrat with about as much flair for the written word as an Observer hack.
Lenin’s Tomb on Colonel Gaddafi.
These 594 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38pm GMT Comments.
Tuesday, 30 March 2004
Wherever He Has Gone, I Have Gone »
A Bush administration representative has said that it was "beyond the bounds of acceptable political discourse" for Kerry to mention Scripture in his rebuke of Republican policies. (Hat tip Jesse.)
IRONY ALERT… The New York Daily News explains today why the conservative counterattack on Dick Clarke has been a bit, um, scattershot:
One aide said the White House was further blindsided because they never expected 9/11 to be politicized.
Well, how could anyone do anything so cynical as turn 9/11 into an advert? If anyone could do a thing like that, then the terrorists have won!
These 109 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:23am GMT Comments.
Felix And The Amazing Underpants »
Some titles need to be let out. Gordon’s friend Felix comes round once a day now. I still can’t figure out where he lives.
Anyway, living alone, I’m not the tidiest of people. And the other day, I’d left a pile of washing in front of the machine because I wanted to wash something else. Felix has this thing for boxer shorts. Cats do seem to like the smellier zones of the body. I’ve had one who definitely had an interest in feet, and Mr Black used to sleep tucked up in my armpit. With Felix, it seems to be used underwear. He just rolls around on it until he gets wrapped up, and then he just waggles his hind legs in the air.
Of course, as soon as I got near him with a camera, he was out the door again.
These 143 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:50am GMT Comments.
I Told You I Was Ill »
Alistair Cooke pegs it. It seems that his doctors may have been onto something. His retirement was bad enough.
He’ll be missed.
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:18pm GMT Comments.
Spoiler Alert »
Ah rats. Oliver Willis rounds up Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind thusly:
A truly unique plot (which is an oddity in Hollywood) and Jim Carrey carries the film without resorting to his usual antics (although I am a fan of his antics). My only problem was that I found the last 20 minutes or so kind of predictable.
I, too, like Jim Carrey, and as this is Charlie Kaufman film, the original plot is no surprise. Nor, after Adaptation, is the poor ending.
Useless movie trivia, Michael “The Player” Tolkin’s wife was in ‘Adaptation.’ Just one of the many useless facts I picked up from Dave Gorman’s Googlewhack! Adventure.
These 64 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:15pm GMT Comments.
Unrelated »
This is just too weird. (Found through my refererrs.)
This is just too funny. (Found through Tim Ireland and going on from there.)
These 23 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:43pm GMT Comments.
What’s The World Coming To? »
I can sort of understand the smoking ban in Ireland. Smoking does harm other people, although a ban wouldn’t be my solution.
I can sort of understand the French headscarf ban — France is an aggressively secular country. (Though this will come as a surprise to Melanie Phillips. Found, perhaps inevitably, through Chris Brooke.)
But forbidding a girl to wear a headscarf in Libya?
Abu Aardvark offers a shorter Christopher Hitchens.
These 71 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:23pm GMT Comments.
Wednesday, 31 March 2004
Thugs? »
Philosoraptor has a couple of posts — original and follow-up — on the The Margolis Incident: newspaper coverage by the Boston Herald. I think Philosoraptor is right about all this, and I don’t have anything useful to add.
I don’t consider this demo to be violent at all. I know that a couple of kids were scared, and that’s not good, but that didn’t seem to be intentional, and the fact that they protested where they protested is a protest in itself. If politicians allowed demonstrations outside their offices, the demonstrators wouldn’t have to go to their houses. However, I found this through Blogdex, and most linkers seem to glory in the ‘hard-line’ taken by the left. Fah.
These 118 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:09pm GMT Comments.
Given Taken »
“Nuisance? Suits me, sir!” may not have been what David M Given, of Phillips, Erlewine & Given, Attourneys at Law of San Fransisco, California said to John Gray when he agreed to write to Gavin Sheridan, on behalf of the author of “Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.” Still he got a nice legally-worded letter back in return. Mr Given’s Demand for Correction (in pdf format which Gavin helpfully uploaded) cited Section 48a of the California Civil Code, although it seems that California Law has no jurisdiction outside the state boundaries.
These 93 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:07pm GMT Comments.
John Gray »
These 76 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:28pm GMT Comments.
Where I Intended To Be »
I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be.
Following my reaction to Carl Elliott’s The identity clinic, I think I ought to post something about happiness — but, at the moment, I’m not sure I can, beyond suggesting that “happiness” like “mind” may be more usefully thought of as a verb.
So I’ll spare you the lecture, but let you have the references anyway. I found both John Kay on Obliquy (found through Matthew Turner) and Friedrich von Blowhard’s Visit to the Land of the Optimists is a pretty smart take-down of Greg Easterbrook’s “The Progress Paradox: How Life Gets Better While People Feel Worse” (print, not web, so no link) serendipitously. FvB’s quote from Easterbrook “[Nobel Prize Winning professor] Kahneman sums up his research in the simple phrase, ‘Life circumstances don’t seem to have much effect on happiness’” seemed a little glib for Kahneman to me, so I Googled it, and found nothing. Happiness often is little more than finding a quarter is the best I could come up with, though I think Daniel Kahneman is more serious that the sobriquet “happiness guru” makes him sound. (Anyway, he’s a “cognitive heuristics” guru to me.) Like FvB, I’m a pessimist — the glass is half full, if that, for me, and I expect things to go wrong, but I think that for most people in the West life is better than it was for their grandparents. I don’t understand why so many moralists fall back to the position that the world is going to hell, but as far as I can tell they always have done. So far, no one’s listened, and so far, it hasn’t.
These 268 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:59pm GMT Comments.