Wednesday, 1 September 2004
Taking The Easy Way Out »
Much weirdness in the referrers this week. Take a look.
| web.ask.com/ | why do you need two points to make a line? |
| And then there’s that mad priest. | |
| www.google.com/ | father cornelius horan |
| www.google.ca/ | cornelius horan + book |
| www.google.com.ec/ | vanderlei de lima cornelius neil horan |
| uk.search.yahoo.com/ | cornelius horan marathon |
| www.google.co.jp/ | cornelius neil horan fuck |
| www.google.co.uk/ | "cornelius horan” wanker |
| www.google.com.br/ | cornelius horan gay |
| Gay isn’t a word I feel able to remove from my vocabulary; but its inclusion on any page does seem to raise the number of disturbing hits. | |
| aolsearch.aol.co.uk/ | kelly holmes gay |
| I don’t know. She was certainly happy. Is that good enough? As always with Google, the words just happened to be on the same page; they weren’t semantically connected. The other results from Google don’t help either — but if they have a common theme, it concerns ex-hurdler and TV pundit, Colin Jackson. | |
| szukaj.onet.pl/ | panties sex |
| uk.search.msn.com/ | pulled trousers and underpants |
| www.google.co.uk/ | jade johnson body |
| I can’t explain these. I can understand the last one, though I can’t help. The other two are just bizarre. Why me? I am both middle-aged and proudly prurient, but there’s no sex here. I am British. And fairly sad. | |
These 186 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:08pm GMT Permanent link.
He Served A Dark And A Vengeful God »
I went to Sweeney Todd on Monday (it’s reviewed here by Charles Spencer).
Sondheim writes in English, but, boy, he could use surtitles. If you follow the cleverness of the lyrics, you forget to attend to their meaning and vice-versa. So a lot of his work could be twice at least twice, and it wouldn’t hurt to have heard the score a few times before going. I wish I’d done that. I was worried that that would read like a confession of stupidity, but you’ve realised that already, right? And besides, it’s true of a lot of serious opera and all Shakespeare.
This production has a Fringe-like quality of only a few (nine) actors covering all the roles and playing the score as well. (The music didn’t seem to suffer, but then I haven’t heard the full orchestral version.)
In a word, splendid.
These 143 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 2 September 2004
D'ye Ken John Peel? »
Jamie seems to feel much the same way about John Peel as I do: though he has two advantages over me: he still reads the Indy, so he discovered this piece on the Maestro’s 65th brithday; and he read Sounds in the 70s — so he also read Peel’s thoughts on his 40th (I read the NME and Melody Maker back then). I remember Peel talking about it on his show, and how ancient it seemed.
The Indy ‘interview’ is by DJ Taylor, the most recent biographer of George Orwell. (That wouldn’t matter, but yesterday I wrote two posts about Star Trek; today I’ve posted on melodramatic musical theatre. People will talk, I tell you.) It’s OK in its way, if you care that Taylor smoked Marlboro Lights in the early 80s and that he thinks that “talking to John Peel is like talking to [his] uncle.” But only if his uncle hung out with Don Van Vliet.
Back in England, discovering that Beefheart and his Magic Band were booked for a provincial tour, Peel contrived to chauffeur them around the Midlands concert circuit. “One of the gigs was in Kidderminster at a venue called Frank Freeman’s Dancing School. This was in the days when groups were called things like Creedence Clearwater Revival or New Riders of the Purple Sage, and one of the band said to me: ‘Hey, that’s a really groovy name.’ ‘Not really,’ I told him. ‘It’s a dancing school run by a man named Frank Freeman’.”
Backstage, Mr and Mrs Freeman regaled the Captain, Zoot Horn Rollo, Winged Eel Fingerling and the rest of Peel’s entourage with tea and cucumber sandwiches. On the way back to London, Beefheart, who was already known for his eccentric behaviour ("It’s always irritated me that people label him as weird - it was a kind of super-reality"), announced: “Stop the car, John. I want to hug a tree.” Unsure whether this was Californian rhyming slang for “have a pee”, yet anxious to conciliate his hero, Peel stopped. “I thought: he’s a far greater man than I, so I’ll do whatever he wants me to.”
Yet it’s an uncurious piece while claiming that Peel isn’t forthcoming. Peel went to school with Richard Ingrams and many other Private Eye luminaries, and he was also often featured in “Pseud’s Corner” — not surprising when he used to write like this.
As God-like I strode the forecourt, a small voice hailed from a vehicle which lay mute and lifeless beneath the harsh lights. Drawing my noble sword, Renshaw, I was across the concrete in a trice to find that my friends, T Rex, were becalmed. Chuckling, I scooped them up in the palm of my hand and laid them gently on top of a soft pile of Green Stamps and bore them so to London town. As we sped straight and true to that fair city they told me of their concert tour and of the new record ‘Ride A White Swan’ on Fly Records. Doubtless you’ll own it before long — if you don’t by Christmas, my flock of highly trained hedgehogs will fan out through the land and retribution will be swift and terrible — indeed it will…
And then he mixed with some stars.
“The Faces, I have to say, came to our wedding, and in all the cine-footage Rod Stewart is talking to my aunt Ailsa. What in God’s name they could be saying to each other we’ve never known.”
He also appeared on “Top of the Pops” playing mandolin for the Faces. He doesn’t seem to have been close to any of the other bands he promoted. He was working in Dallas when JFK was assassinated, and I seem to remember he was present when Jack Ruby murdered Oswald (though I can’t find the right photo on Google).
But Taylor finds him boring because he doesn’t have views on the English Novel. Here’s someone who does have ideas about the English Novel (Torygraph, registration probably required.).
“The major white writers of our time never write about race,” he observes. “You wouldn’t think England had changed in 50 years if you read a book by Julian Barnes or Martin Amis or Jeanette Winterson. They don’t — can’t — engage with the subject of race. They don’t see it as central. There are many reasons: they’re afraid of being seen as fools, or racists. But I’d have thought you’d want to engage with the major issues of your day if you wanted to be a proper writer. What do they think they’re doing?”
Which somehow reminds me, as Jamie notes:
I keep getting plagued by visions of Garry Bushell as a left winger, the scribblings of a pretentious twit called Dave McCullough, the horrible earnestness of the first Two Tone tour …
I read, as I’ve said, the NME, and the only notable writers there weren’t Burchill and Parsons (who were as windy then as they are now, with the know-nothing arrogance of teenagers, something neither have since bothered to correct) but Paul Morley, who remains a pretentious twat, even as I often agree with him, and Danny Baker, probably one of the best journalists of the late C20, but unrecognised as such by editors because he wasn’t miserable enough.
These 380 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:12am GMT Permanent link.
To Speak Of The Woe That Is Marriage »
Gored by the climacteric of his want,
He stalls above me like an elephant.
Robert Lowell
Matthew Turner posted a few days ago on yet another weak argument against gay marriage. It’s not a subject which really interests me, but, as Matthew notes, the case against is so often risible. Somehow (and I’m really not clear how) the recognition of gay marriage will “destroy the family.” Funny how I came across two stories which reminded me of that in the papers this morning.
On the front page of the Western Mail, there was the case of the husband who strangled his wife of four weeks. (BBC link as the Mail site is less intuitive.)
He was arrested and told officers: “She got under my skin like only a wife can do”.
That’s supposed to be a good thing, not a rationale for murder.
He told police that Melanie’s last words were to tell him she loved him.
That makes me feel ill.
And in the Telegraph, Ex-wife’s plea spares jealous husband jail. (Free reg required, sorry. Also in the Mirror, though.)
An accountant whose wife lost a leg when he drove his car into her in a jealous rage has been spared prison after she asked a judge not to jail him for the sake of their children.
Thank Christ that “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”
These 146 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Another Try »
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
I don’t think that I was as clear as I’d like to have been in my last post. I don’t think that terrible acts within marriage invalidate the institution; but I do think that any reasonable person would be more troubled by husbands who murder wives (or vice-versa) than whether their own relationship is somehow compromised by the nuptials of two people they’ve never met.
I’ve also discovered that I’m more romantic than I thought I was. I intended to comment on Matthew’s post about how the anti-gay marriage crowd have this Platonic ideal of marriage — which works even when one partner works away (in the Gulf for example) most of the time, or, indeed, is dead. But I’ve found that I have a Platonic ideal of my own — that of ‘love’ or even love. (And I have read The Symposium several times; I even lectured a girlfriend’s boss on it for around an hour when I was very very drunk once.) And I have no problem with love outside marriage (I even regard it as essential; otherwise why marry?); nor between people of the same sex. I do, however, have an enormous problem with the idea that homosexual men are free to marry women. If marriage means anything, that idea is an enormous insult to it. (I hope I don’t need to explain why.)
However, I really meant to write this post about child abuse.
Haldane’s son Jack, known to posterity as J.B.S., was a remarkable prodigy who took an interest in his father’s work almost from infancy. At the age of three he was overheard demanding peevishly of his father, ‘But is it oxyhaemoglobin or carboxyhaemoglobin?’ Throughout his youth, the young Haldane helped his father with experiments. By the time he was a teenager, the two often tested gases and gas masks together, taking it in turns to see how long it would take them to pass out.”
A Short History of Nearly Everything, Bill Bryson, p300. Now what would your council social work department make of that? A father, who clearly knows the likely effect of certain gases, encourages his son to experiment until he passes out? It doesn’t seem like ideal fathering to me, but it’s how he treated himself (rule number 1 for my idea of symptoms of ‘love’) and his precocious son could have pursued other academic courses: playing an instrument, translating Greek, and so on.
There isn’t a right way to bring up children (of course there are wrong ways), and there isn’t a right way to be married. Why do some fools pretend that there are?
These 352 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Don't Bet On Science »
Damian has, as is his wont, a post criticising the media, titled Hello? I get his point, and in my touchy-feely way, I feel criticised because I don’t blog such things. If you come here looking for headlines, you’re well lost. I try to blog about things I know a little about, or am, at least, able to make some feeble jokes about. Today is dependent on reporters, and if they can’t get there, there’s little point in a report.
Damian is right, and wrong. Since the conception of the internet, censorship hasn’t been possible. Reports (which are different from ‘truth’) will get out. I don’t doubt that there are many foul things in the world. But I can’t address them all.
So the rest of this post is trivial.
I think Gary Farber started this for me today. And somehow it went wild.
Gary linked to the New York Times: 3 Planets Are Found Close in Size to Earth, Making Scientists Think ‘Life’. The last part is, to use the scientific notation, “bollocks.” The planets are at least the size of Neptune and closer to their suns than Mercury. Life? Uh-uh. But it is further data, and of a new sort, which suggests that rocky planets (like Earth) may be out there.
Planetary.org: Two Neptune-Size Extrasolar Planets Found. “Earths” May Not Be Far Behind.
The race to find distant new “Earths” heated up considerably yesterday with the detection of two of the smallest planets ever detected outside the Solar System. Whereas previous extrasolar planets discovered were almost exclusively gas giants, similar in Jupiter and Saturn and between 100 and 300 times the mass of the Earth, the newly found planets are much smaller – only 15 to 20 Earth masses. This places them in the mass range of Uranus and Neptune, somewhere between the gas giants and the small rocky planets ofthe inner Solar System. “We can’t see the Earth-like planets yet,” summed up Paul Butler of the Department of Terrestrial Magnetism at the Carnegie Institute, who was involved in both discoveries; “but we can see their big brothers”
One of the planets was found by the veteran planet-hunting team led by Butler and Geoff Marcy of U.C. Berkeley, the group responsible for detecting the majority of the 135 or so planets discovered to date beyond our Solar System. The planet orbits the M class red dwarf star Gliese 436, located only 33 light years away, in our own galactic neighborhood. Like many of the known extrasolar planets, Gliese 436’s companion remains very close to its star, completing each revolution in a mere two and a half days at a distance of 4.1 million miles. Most significantly, the planet’s minimum mass is only 21 Earth masses, equal to 1.2 “Neptunes.”
New Scientist thinks they may be ‘rocky’ (as opposed to Gas Giantism, like Jupiter and Saturn).
And then, via Bloggerheads, is this. Tim Ireland, apart from his masochistic support for Tom Watson, MP, has this thing about porn. He doesn’t like it, but he can’t leave it alone. He doesn’t like the Sun’s “News in Briefs” (Page 3 girls opine; and why shouldn’t they? they can vote), yet he can’t resist copying it to his (perma-link free) site.
Being the Sun, it’s total shite. The paper thinks it came from 31 million light years away (around 10 MegaParsecs); you couldn’t see the sun with the naked eye from 30 light years. I can’t imagine an artificial source which could broadcast a signal so strong. The Torygraph is better, but not much.
It might scare the bookies.
The big outsider in this game is the possibility of life being found on the Saturnian satellite Titan. Those odds remain at 10,000/1.
But the odds of detecting gravitational waves — ripples in space-time caused by the movement of truly massive objects in the Universe such as black holes orbiting each other — proved to be over-generous.
According to Ladbrokes, the original odds were set at 500/1. But these were then cut to 10/1 following huge interest from punters.
Spokesman Warren Lush told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme: “We had to shorten odds to 10/1 but when I was asking physicists about this they were very, very divided; and 80% of those I spoke to thought it had no chance of being discovered by 2010.”
One interesting thing here is that life on Titan would be very very alien. It might be made from silicon (actually far more prevalent on Earth than carbon). Whatever, any life’s hardware would be radically different from ours, as would their predator-prey cycles. We think our Earthly religions exhaust the possibilities. We’re in for a shock.
New Scientist thinks, more sensibly, that these signals are from 1000 light years away. It seems we have no way of knowing.
And this comes just as Alien probe ‘best way to find ET’: US researchers decide that probes would be a better way of finding aliens. Except, we know which of our neighbouring stars have planets, and we know their orbital planes; if we sent them, they could find Earth-like worlds and orbit them: what we don’t have is the propulsion. And we haven’t found any such probes yet.
But why these stories now? Why today? (I left and lost interest in SETI when it uploaded but refused to download any new data; anyway I was buying a Mac without the need for a screensaver.) The one thing I’ve learned is — don’t bet on science.
These 556 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 3 September 2004
Give The Libertarian A Cigarette »
He’s six feet tall, he smokes (?!?), and he looks like a clean-living hobbit on his site photo. And, boy, is he a grouch.
Do not follow that link while eating or drinking. Asphyxiation or embarrassment may result.
These 38 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:55am GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 4 September 2004
Rejoice, Rejoice »
He’s an ignorant git.
But he’s sort of right. I mean, OK, the slave trade on this side of the Atlantic withered away under Parliamentary assaults rather than actual battle. But there was the American Civil War, whatever that was about and whatever it achieved. And there seem to be no shortage of states one can call “Fascist” without blushing, down in South America. When the Berlin Wall fell, was there a war going on? Probably in a couple of backward states in Africa. Glad they did their bit. War did destroy Nazism, but, then again, the Nazis started it.
Hooray for Stephen Pollard! I’ve always considered Vladimit Putin a bit of a Fascist. And now some brave soldiers have triumphed, and started the war which will lead to his downfall.
Hooray for war! If my kids ever ask me what I did for my country, I want to proudly tell them that I raped a clutch of nuns on tables, bayonetted some babies in front of their wailing mothers, or at least flew an aeroplane into a civilian building. The world is all the better for soldiers.
These 188 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:07pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 5 September 2004
Elementary »
Both Michael and Jamie have posts on tattoos in languages the tattooees don’t understand.
But, dear God.
Most were satisfied with waving and cheering but 22-year-old Emma Fitch turned up with a picture of the athlete crossing the finishing line tattooed on her back.
Unfortunately, the tattoo artist had spelled the name underneath as “Homes”. But Miss Fitch, draped in a Union flag, was philosophical. “It’s a permanent tattoo so it can’t be changed. But I’m not too bothered because it still sounds like Holmes.”
From Thursday’s Telegraph: 40,000 turn out to greet Olympic golden girl Kelly.
These 29 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:38pm GMT Permanent link.
A Reason To Vote Tory »
Damain “PooterGeek” Counsell asks What Would Make You Vote Tory? and gets a number of replies. (I recommended the post to Anthony Wells, whom I believe has a professional interest in such questions.)
This isn’t a reason for voting Tory — but it’s a reason for not voting Labour.
Shona McIsaac, the New Labour MP for Cleethorpes, was a prize-winning case in point. She exemplified the willing subservience of Blair’s lower-middle managers when she said: ‘We have to get real. I was voted in because I was a Labour candidate. Few people, if any, voted for me as a person. I have a sneaking suspicion that my husband voted for me because I was me — but if I had not been the Labour Party candidate, I would not have voted for me either.’
Nick Cohen, Pretty Straight Guys, p33.
Clearly parties get elected on their manifestoes (assuming anyone bothers to read any of them — and ideally the choice is made after reading all of them, which may never happen; and I’m appalled, even as an anti-hunting ban person, that Blair plans to delay hunt ban until after election.*) But everyone knows that MPs don’t just nod through legislation. Unexpected events happen — 9/11, Beslan. These aren’t covered by any manifesto, or even ideology. We’re better served by representatives who think for themselves and campaign as individuals.
If there’s one thing I ask of Michael Howard and of Charles Kennedy, it’s to defeat this attitude, and to instill in all their members the belief that, once elected, they are not the servant of the party HQ, but of all citizens in their constituency, whether they had their vote or not.
* Charles Moore in the old Torygraph the other week on hunting.
But what interested me about the article was the assumption that caused it to be written — that hunting is about to be banned. There have been 40 separate stories in the broadsheet press saying this since November of last year, yet the strange fact is that no one, perhaps not even the Government’s business managers, knows whether it is true.
The question arises because, if the Government wants to ban hunting before the next election, it has to employ the Parliament Act. This fearsome device, which has hardly ever been used, allows the House of Commons to force through a Bill which the Lords have rejected, if 12 months have passed since the rejection, and if the Bill is reintroduced at least 30 days before the end of the current session. That would mean, in this case, that the Bill would almost certainly need to start again in the Commons by September 16.
There are fantastic complications. Several learned lords from the legal profession believe that the Parliament Act does not exist, because it was never fully enacted. Others say that the parliamentary procedures won’t allow the thing to go through in the time. Peter Hain, the Leader of the House, has dropped hints about waiting till Christmas (which would make the Parliament Act impossible).
And if the Bill is forced through, it has, by law, to be exactly the same Bill as last year. That means an unqualified ban, without compensation for loss of livelihood; yet without such compensation, the relevant parliamentary committee says, the Bill will be incompatible with the Human Rights Act.
Odd to force through a law which you know you will then have to change. Besides, this isn’t even the Bill the Government sponsored. The Government proposed a regulatory system for hunting, but this was overturned, in a favour of a total ban, by its own backbenchers. Even odder to force through a Bill which you do not want.
New Labour is dripping with lawyers. How could they let something as chaotic as this into the manifesto? And then let their otherwise rigidly controlled backbenchers rewrite it?
These 234 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:31pm GMT Permanent link.
In A Word, No »
Mark Kaplan of Charlotte Street asked:
Could not dreams be that nocturnal avant-garde studio wherein we attempt, impossibly, to create a private language — non-conceptual, hot-wired to our mnemonic and nervous systems, twisted to fit the obscure idiosynracy of our singular and defining perversions[?]
Answer: No.
I knew my degree would come in useful some day.
(Freud: bleah. Private language: ha!)
These 23 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 6 September 2004
Right But Repulsive »
The Cavaliers (Wrong but Wromantic) and the Roundheads (Right but Repulsive).
1066 and All That, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman
I can’t post on Breslan. I’m too trivial, too stupid, and too ignorant.
Masha Gessen on Slate considers Chechnya.
Russian intelligence has produced little or no evidence that al-Qaida is present in Chechnya. Russian officials claimed that there were Arabs among the hostage-takers, but this information has yet to be confirmed, and even if it is, it may mean only that foreign men have come to fight on the side of Chechens—something that has happened before and something that happens in every conflict, whether or not a major international organization is involved. On the other hand, it would be surprising if al Qaida had no presence in Chechnya at all. Chechens are Muslims, and they are at war; representatives of virtually every Islamic organization have at one point or another sent missionaries and recruiters to the region. They have also sent money. Researchers of al-Qaida say that, in addition to its own organization, the terrorist network has a number of loose affiliates, essentially freelancers, who get occasional financial support. Most likely, some Chechen groups or individuals fall into that category.
But Russia’s terrorism problem is not international Islam. It’s a war that Russia started and has continued.
David Aaronovitch in the Observer.
In the same week al-Jazeera, which has allowed itself to be co-opted as the publicity arm of such organisations
David’s elegant solution: al-Qaeda representatives’ words cannot be broadcast; instead they will be filmed and actors with authentic accents will read the transcripts.
The problem with this is the simple one that the war with terror was declared by terror itself.
I can understand that Germany could have declared war on the United States in 1941. Germany was a legal entity, and anyway a kind of shorthand for the collective will of the Reichstag. But ‘terror’? For one thing, terror is an emotion; it’s what terrorists seek to create for ulterior purposes — it’s not a thing. For another, all terrorists are not on the same side. When Mr Aaronovitch says “terror itself” he means al Qaeda, meaning, if we want a name, Osama bin Laden.
On Thursday night Channel Four showed the drama The Hamburg Cell, which attempted to get inside the minds of the young al-Qaeda operatives who carried out the 11 September hijackings. What the film showed was a classic cult in operation, with young men — pampered and envious, frustrated and egotistic — urging each other on to more and more pitiless acts of violence. The film not only explained the Twin Towers, it inadvertently explained Jonestown and the mass suicide in the Guyanese jungle.
My emphasis. The film attempted to get inside their minds; as they’re dead, and their accomplices won’t talk, we’ll never know if it did or whether it merely offered a plausible theory. As such it did not explain anything, never mind that something which explains everything, explains nothing.
Still and all, I have nothing in common with his email correspondent, and his last paragraph goes some way to rescuing his article.
The logic of this is not, however, to concede to terrorists. Much of what they want we can never give them, and much of what they want lies in the act of terrorism itself. And it as false a trope to say that there are usually political solutions to terrorism as to say that there are always military ones.
And, despite my intentions, I’ve written too much already. That Putin’s country is now seen as Wromantic (or tragic) saddens me almost as much as the events of the events of last week.
These 236 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Truth In Bloggage »
The Truth Laid Bear has set up Campaign Truth 2004.
Campaign Truth is a collaborative website devoted to providing an unbiased portal to information on candidates’ positions on the issues relevant to the 2004 Presidental Election.
The sort of thing democracy needs. Apologies to anyone who knew about this ages ago.
Links and plug intended as a small thank you for the wonderful TTLB Blogosphere Ecosystem.
These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:09pm GMT Permanent link.
Bloody Gentrification »
My house has moved up a Council Tax Band.
Bugger.
These 10 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:29pm GMT Permanent link.
In The Spring A Young Man's Fancy Lightly Turns To Thoughts Of Love »
In the Spring a livelier iris changes on the burnish’d dove;
In the Spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love.
Locksley Hall, Alfred Lord Tennyson
Apparently, Sperm levels drop with frequent ejaculation.
No seasonal variations in sperm levels, movement, or shape were seen, lead author Dr. Elisabeth Carlsen and colleagues, from Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, note. However, ejaculation frequency was higher in spring months than in the winter months.
Found through Will.
These 10 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:07pm GMT Permanent link.
Tough On Crime? »
Be tough on this.
Police are treating the murder of a 29-year-old Iraqi in Swansea as a racially motivated attack.
The man was assaulted early on Monday in Kingsway, in the city centre, and died later in hospital. …
Det Chief Insp Layton Bennetta said: “This was an unprovoked attack which is being treated as a racist incident.
Poor bastard probably came here to escape murderous thugs. I know there is no evidence that this was racially motivated, but if it was, I blame the Hate Mail and other tabloids for making such a fuss over “asylum seekers” while failing to make clear what they were seeking asylum from. And, indeed, how much the US has prospered from its openness (most of the time) to immigrants.
Bastards.
These 73 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:22pm GMT Permanent link.
PG Tips »
Via PooterGeek, Stephen Fry on Plum on target. Fry is, of course, good enough to admit that the author “Robert McCrum … [is] the Observer’s literary editor.” As you would expect from somebody with an ancestor who could jump backwards onto a mantelpiece.
America follows, providing the final linguistic ingredient to be added to ‘the marriage of suburban vernacular with classical syntax’ and to the mix of clerkish slang, youthful ‘buzz’, society yammer and aristocratic drawl to create the peerless Wodehouse prose cocktail.
Eliot was an admirer, Auden a student.
He describes the agony of plot creation, as does Wodehouse himself in many letters. At several stages in his literary career Wodehouse repeated his own plots or went so far as to borrow or buy the plots of others, yet McCrum suddenly claims: ‘The plot-making was always the part he revelled in,’ which certainly runs counter to orthodox Wodehousian belief.
These are far from caterpillars in the salad. Mere pips in a juicy grape. No lover of Wodehouse will want to be without this masterly appraisal of the good life of a good man. Who happened to be a very, very great writer indeed.
The plots are what raise Wodehouse from mere word-play. He was, IMO also, “a very, very great writer indeed.”
But Damian, who presumably read the newspaper, and then found the online version, missed the link: In Defence Of P. G. Wodehouse by every person’s Olympian of prose and reason, George Orwell.
But on the British side similar though opposite calculations were at work. For the two years following Dunkirk, British morale depended largely upon the feeling that this was not only a war for democracy but a war which the common people had to win by their own efforts. The upper classes were discredited by their appeasement policy and by the disasters of 1940, and a social levelling process appeared to be taking place. Patriotism and left-wing sentiments were associated in the popular mind, and numerous able journalists were at work to tie the association tighter. Priestley’s 1940 broadcasts, and “Cassandra’s” articles in the Daily Mirror, were good examples of the demagogic propaganda flourishing at that time. In this atmosphere, Wodehouse made an ideal whipping-boy.
What’s odd to me is that I’ve found queries such as “Why did Churchill lose in 1945” in my referrers. And this, and I hadn’t read it before, is as good an explanation as any. It feels right from the history I know. You wonder if Churchill knew his Wilde:
Yet each man kills the thing he loves, By each let this be heard,
Some do it with a bitter look, Some with a flattering word.
The coward does it with a kiss, The brave man with a sword!
These 151 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 7 September 2004
And Now For Something Completely Different »
A political message from a cute toddler (QuickTime, and fairly huge @ 8.8MB). Via Julian.
And a half-baked picture for half-arsed athlete. (I was sent this in an email this morning, and tracked it down.)
These 35 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:38pm GMT Permanent link.
If Anyone Sees £100M Lying In The Street, It's Mine I Tell You »
Taffy was a Welshman,
Taffy was a thief.
Taffy came to my house
And stole a leg of beef.
I went to Taffy’s house,
Taffy was in bed.
I picked up the leg of beef
And hit him on the head.
Traditional
Western Mail: Assembly crime policy has hollow ring.
Among Labour’s top 10 pledges was a commitment to create a £100m fund to fight Welsh crime.
During the election campaign Home Secretary David Blunkett visited Wales to talk the promise up, and it is thought to have gone down particularly well in constituencies like Rhondda, where Labour was fighting to win back a seat lost to Plaid Cymru in 1999.
Although police funding comes not from the National Assembly but directly from the Home Office, Labour portrayed its promised fund as a central plank of the battle against crime. With its emphasis on helping drug addicts and improving facilities for victims of domestic violence, the idea echoed Tony Blair’s promise in 1997 to be tough on crime and tough on the causes of crime.
Now questioning by Welsh Liberal Democrat Peter Black, has failed to identify where all the money earmarked for the Assembly Government’s crime fund is, how it is to be spent or even whether £100m has been allocated at all.
What has been discovered, says Mr Black, is that the Social Justice Ministry says it has £77.8m to spend over the four-year term, with the remaining £22.8m lying in some unspecified education budget.
But Mr Black says none of this is new money, but just a composite of budgets that existed before the election. He claims the vast majority of this money is being spent on important but peripheral activities rather than directly on fighting crime as is suggested by the name of the fund.
Just a little creative accounting. Quite necessary when you consider how expensive the Assembly is to run.
Found via Labour Watch.
These 29 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:12pm GMT Permanent link.
Destroying The Village In Order To Save It »
Matthew Turner quotes George Orwell.
If one loves democracy, the argument runs, one must crush its enemies by no matter what means. And who are its enemies? It always appears that they are not only those who attack it openly and consciously, but those who ‘objectively’ endanger it by spreading mistaken doctrines. In other words defending democracy involves destroying all independence of thought.
And John Band approves. The argument is alive at kicking at the Replican convention.
Real American patriots know that dissent is possible only in America, and therefore unnecessary. Actual dissenters, who don’t bathe very often and who habitually abuse the privilege granted them by the military, are therefore traitors. To Gitmo with ‘em all!
As Michael Berube (for it is he) notes, Roger L Simon has been blogging eerily similar sentiments.
What’s my point, you ask? Well, I’m certainly not suggesting that Roger Simon copied off my hard work all week. Simon is a fine, accomplished writer in his own right, and he knows the rules about this kind of thing. I’m just saying what should be clear by now — that for conventional-wisdom peddlers and for former-liberals-turned-neocon-warriors alike, michaelberube.com is now the most trusted name in news analysis.
For the rest of you, no one is more trusted than Giblets.
Florida has been in the news lately — and for something other than election fraud! — where millions of residents are once again battling the elements for the right to continue living in an overheated swamp infested with blood-sucking insects and killer reptiles. You make Giblets proud, Florida! Your devotion to the suburban colonization of nature is absolute!
Just like James Lileks, but less nausea-inducing. And Giblets’ colleague Fafnir, Bleat-like, dishes the dirt on the big decisions consumers need to make.
These 71 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:49pm GMT Permanent link.
A Liberal Token »
Will Rubbish links to a fantastic article by Nick Cohen. I agree with Cohen around 80% of the time (if David Duff is reading this, that’s a rough guesstimate, not a ‘scientific’ figure), which is about all I can manage with my closest friends. Although I was aware of the necessity of something like New Labour from around the mid-80s, I don’t like the monster it has become.
Suppose there’s a new Salman Rushdie case. I assume the law officers would resist demands to prosecute a novelist — although you can never be sure with New Labour. If they refused, wouldn’t Muslim fundamentalists feel discriminated against?
For some reason I have a flashbulb memory of reading Michael Foot’s review of The Satanic Verses in the Grauniad, and a similar recall of asking for the book in a dirty bookshop-whisper in Covent Garden, after making sure all other customers were white and liberal-looking. Cohen implies that the Tory government behaved pretty well.
An unusually stupid seven–year old could take apart David Blunkett’s argument for censorship in an instant. In one of the rare moments for quiet reflection his hectic private life allows him, the Home Secretary has reasoned that prejudice against Muslims has grown since 11 September, and he is right. ‘Muslim’ has become a synonym for ‘Paki’ and ‘wog’ and he’s right on that too.
But he then concludes that restrictions on inciting racial hatred should be extended to inciting religious hatred, loses the thread of his syllogism and descends into outright absurdity.
British neo–fascists who cover anti–Asian and anti–Arab racism with a religious gloss could be taken to court under the existing and uncontroversial laws against the incitement of racial hatred. Any half–decent prosecutor should be able to reveal the clumsy strategies of the British National Party and others to deliver coded racist propaganda in a morning — and the distinction between inciting hatred against a race, which can’t be right or wrong, and against ideas, which can, would be maintained.
This sort of thing brings out the conservative in me. Just as I can’t stand Tom Watson, who seems to be on a mission to discover new crimes (hint: ‘Car-Jacking’ is only demanding valuables with menaces; it’s illegal already — we don’t need a new moral panic), I hate the rest of the Party’s project to enforce conformity in new and unexpected ways.
Meanwhile what is there left to the said about English liberalism? Why can’t its adherents stand by their principles? If only for once? If only for five minutes? In this case, betrayal has come because the majority of British Muslims are at the bottom of the social pile. The dear old liberals feel guilty about them. But instead of offering them help, they pander to the most reactionary mullahs among them who are as determined as any racist to keep the faithful in their place. And people wonder why it is that the words ‘liberal’ and ‘hyprocrite’ find themselves placed next to each other in so many sentences.
I’m aware that I’m among the accused here, and my response for the moment is to stand red-faced opening and closing my mouth like a guppy or Bertram Wooster accused of purloining a silver cow-creamer.
These 219 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:14pm GMT Permanent link.
A Rethink »
I mocked Mark Kaplan the other day, but he’s rather good on Peter Hitchens.
I caught a glimpse of the delightful Peter Hitchens the other night. His face is increasingly frozen in a grotesque rictus of appalled indignation, which seems to be his default response to the world. The chin has retracted into the neck, outrage has enlarged and locked the eyes and the head has tilted backwards to facilitate looking down the nose.
I like the ironic ‘delightful.’ It’s a change from the editorialising of, say, Oliver Kamm, who will dip into his thesaurus for some pejorative, just to guide those plebs slow on the uptake.
I remember when I was a callow 19-year-old going to some student journalism course in London, and for part of the afternoon we were harangued by a Mail or Express journo, boiling anger erupting from every portwine coloured vein, and to this day I have no clue what he was so angry about. (I was the angry one; imagine Kevin the teenager, then chuck in a little Sartre and Hegel.) And Hitchens Minor is angry about everything, which is a little self-defeating.
I don’t agree with Mark’s conclusion:
So, a word of warning Christopher: political reaction can be bad for the physiognomy.
I can think of good Tory journalists. Hey, right-wingers reading this blog, not all the degree-educated are leftist. Even Rupert Murdoch is a trained hack and a graduate. He isn’t one of the ones I was thinking of, though. Bill Deedes, P.J. O’Rourke, and Boris Johnson are all professional right-wingers, but they seem affable enough. The first two are real journalists: they go to new places, observe, take notes, and then write: O’Rourke after long thought.
What is PH so cross about? There are terrible things in the world. But there have been as long as there has been history. (Most just get forgotten after a bit.) Hitchens reminds me of Robert Burns’ version of grace: “But we hae meat, and we can eat, so let the Lord be thankit.” The man needs to learn to count his blessings.
These 274 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:14pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 8 September 2004
Too Much, Magic Bus »
Every day I get in the queue (Too much, Magic Bus)
To get on the bus that takes me to you (Too much, Magic Bus)
I’m so nervous, I just sit and smile (Too much, Magic Bus)
Your house is only another mile (Too much, Magic Bus)
Magic Bus, Townshend
I don’t know. I don’t agree with Bobbie about who is to blame for the brutalisation of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Laban Tall and fellow thugs blame the 60s and/or Labour. I’m more on side with Upton Sinclair, John Steinbeck, and John Sayles, who see the selfishness behind the curtain in American society. They come, they steal.
I used to catch the 153 to see my girlfriend in Stamford Hill. Routemasters are were one of the glories of London. Earth had nothing to show more fair, sod the “cities, towers, theatres, and temples.”
But ultimately the people to blame are you and I, us half-hearted bus trippers who were there for the ride but didn’t care enough to stop it. No amount of posters in our windows or righteous indignation in the pub would ever have saved our little bus of joy.
Bobbie, we cared. The methods needed to convince Newt Ken and his tadpoles were stronger than I can endorse, however. I liked real buses, but killing pre-school kids isn’t my style. And anything less, Ken can finesse.
I’m old enough to remember when ‘Blue Peter’ trumpeted one man buses in my home city, Edinburgh. I’d already lost faith in the programme because they’d not only endorsed mandatory crash helmets but Peter Purves had ad libbed an enthusiasm for compulsory seat belts. (An odd aversion, since neither of my parents ever passed a driving test.)
I think Bobbie is wrong, but I can’t quite express why. If it came to a vote, we’d win. So we don’t feel strongly enough to stop them. That doesn’t mean they’re right.
I’m also old enough to remember when free school milk stopped. My parents paid for mine, probably why I’m 6’1 now. I can’t see any difference between New Labour (which includes Tadpole Man) and the Evil Witch. To quote Abba, “Must be funny/In the rich man’s world.”
These 268 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:01am GMT Permanent link.
Billy Bunter With Broomsticks »
What ho! Jonathan Derbyshire has linked to my P.G. Wodehouse post. Straight on the blogroll for showing such splendid taste. Chiz, chiz.
Jonathan reviews Robert McCrum’s biography for Zembla magazine.
Zembla is so pretentious you want to hit somebody, or at least sit its editor down in front of web pages that suck. Once you get past the mystery meat navigation you still have to swallow the self-congratulatory tripe of the letter from the editor.
Fun With Words is our bi-line. This means although we may publish serious essays, we also mess about commissioning interviews with the dead, and we do ask authors to review their own books. We like to think the Fun With Words tag makes the whole magazine, which has enormous amounts of words in it, seem accessible and for everybody to enjoy.
I almost feel sorry for Jonathan at this point. The whole effort is saved by the contribution from Dame Edna.
I’m waiting to see when the first Harry Potter book hits the thrift shops. Soon surely. Am I the only person in the world who doesn’t get the point of Harry Potter? I always suspect anything that congratulates itself on appealing to adults as well as children, but then I’ve always thought The Lord of The Rings was a lot of unreadable twaddle. …
Probably none of my readers have ever heard of Billy Bunter, but Harry Potter, quite frankly, is just Billy Bunter with broomsticks. Call me old fashioned but it is — with a bit of the Famous Five thrown in.
Now that’s what I call literary criticism.
These 103 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:03pm GMT Permanent link.
Arrival Day »
The Head Heeb commemorates arrival of the first Jews in New Amsterdam on September 7, 1654, which was a good thing for all concerned. And, as everyone knows, New York Bagels (that is bagels made and sold in New York, not the bread-things supermarkets sell under that name) are the best in the world. Unless you’re a Republican.
Later, in Starbucks, two Young Republicans dialogue. … “I heard the bagels here were supposed to be different, but they seem the same to me.” (because you’re in a fucking Starbucks moron).
The stupid are always with us.
These 64 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:27pm GMT Permanent link.
Belated Birthdays »
Harry Hutton is 32, so why not send him some white mice? He runs the only website which offers goats as prizes for answering simple questions.
Victor S of Apostate Windbag is 29. He doesn’t have any goats, but he does keep “a journal of assorted left-wingery, but with a decided preference for discussing how the late Christopher Hitchens is a twat.”
Happy birthday to both of them.
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Scary Fandom »
Green Fairy is in spasms of ecstacy over Boris Johnson wallpaper, available, naturally, from Boriswatch which also links to Boris T-shirts.
I thought I was the only customer for the Andrew Marr (the BBC’s political editor if you don’t know who he is) T-shirt, but GF is apparently moist at the thought.
I’ve met him. He’s a nice bloke.
Class.
And he’s just popped up on the The World at One.
These 72 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:32pm GMT Permanent link.
John Band Gets About »
John Band has a peculiar comment on one of his posts from Ralph Nader supporter Tom Grey. I think James M of Dead Men Left has better pro-Nader arguments. Mr Grey is just spouting how nasty Kerry is, and for some reason telling Norm Geras what to write on his blog. Norm! Do what he says, or who knows which comments section he’ll hijack next!
Of course Mr Grey may be right about Kerry’s lack of fitness, but I still suspect that a vote for Nader is a wasted vote, and there’s nothing convincingly for Nader on Mr Grey’s site.
In further political dirt-digging, The Editors have seen an advance copy of Kitty Kelley’s new book and share the shocking revelations contained within!
George W. Bush is not a West Texas rancher whose simple heartland values and quiet inner strength have guided his climb to political and financial success! Actually, he was born into a wealthy Eastern establishment family, his grandfather was a US Congressman, and his father was a US Congressman, Director of the CIA, and Vice-President and President of the United States! George W. Bush went to Harvard and Yale, where he didn’t work very hard; he was a spoiled rich wastrel until at least his 40th birthday; he summers in toney Kennebunkport, Maine; he has relied on his family’s wealth and influence to get everything he got in life; and his Southern accent is totally phony!
Well, I knew this, and so did you. Nader looks a little better already.
George W. Bush is a horrible President! When given a daily briefing entitled “Bin Laden determined to attack in the United States”, he took no action, went on vacation, and a few weeks later 3,000 people were dead! Then he failed to get the guy behind the attacks because he had to invade another country which had nothing to do with anything!
All sadly true.
George W. Bush is an idiot! Really! He can’t form a coherent sentence, he shows no aptitude for or interest in any intellectual pursuit, and he routinely embarrasses himself and the country with his shocking displays of ignorance! He falls down constantly, and he almost died eating a pretzel!
He can form incoherent sentences:
“We’ve got an issue in America. Too many good docs are getting out of business. Too many OB-GYNs aren’t able to practice their love with women all across this country.”
Found through Oliver Willis, but conservative John Cole doesn’t understand it either. Oh, and is there anything I’ve read today where John Band hasn’t already left a comment?
These 174 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:27pm GMT Permanent link.
Undercover »
When I started this blog, I thought it wouldn’t last. (And I’ve found that if I don’t force myself to make at least one entry per day, it comes close to withering away all by itself.) I did consider posting anonymously, which would allow for certain kinds of freedom. But I’m a pig-headed SoB, and I’m pretty much of the opinion “if you don’t like it, you don’t have to read it.”
Many of my favourite bloggers — Norman Geras, Chris Brooke, John Band, Damian Counsell, not to mention the rest of you — have professional reputations which the open declaration of personal opinions might compromise.
I don’t include Oliver Kamm here. For one thing, he is convinced that he is ‘objective,’ for another when he posted on delinking Crooked Timber he failed to mention that he linked to them, not on account of their views, but because they were all impressively qualified and the right people to be seen out with. He seems never to have had any time for CT’s politics.
However, there are pseudonymous bloggers among my favourites too. Abu Aardvark explains why he chooses to keep his identity secret. Among the reasons I like.
* I did not want students being overly influenced or intimidated or upset by political views expressed in the blog. I try very hard to maintain a position of objectivity in the classroom, and often play devil’s advocate or even-handed arbiter among competing arguments. If students knew what I “really” thought, this could become problematic: more conservative students might feel alienated, while more lazy (or calculating) students might take the blog as a kind of “tip sheet” for the “correct” opinions for the purposes of papers or exams.
STATUS: half silly, half less so. Many students (past and current) do know about the blog, and don’t seem to have been adversely affected. (They’ve also, for the most part, been very good about maintaining the semi-secret — which I appreciate). The “tip sheet” concern is more relevant to me — if I go to great lengths to present a piece by, say, Charles Krauthammer, fairly in class, and defend it against knee-jerk or unthoughtful critiques, how will that play if students read something I wrote three days ago calling Krauthammer an idiot? But, on the other hand, quite a few students who read the blog have come to me to talk about things in it, to ask questions, and the like, so it could just as easily be seen as an extension of the teaching. And if students did try to parrot a “correct” view that was poorly argued or defended, they’d be in for a nasty surprise in the grading! …
* I did not want wingnuts hunting down me or my family.
STATUS: unclear. I have had commenters on blogs-to-remain-unnamed express the hope that people like me — by name — be killed. Do I really want people like that knowing anything more about me or my family? Maybe you think I’m paranoid, but remember — I’m the dad who thought that Finding Nemo was not at all funny.
* This one may seem kind of weird, but it’s real: I kind of liked the idea of proving myself without a pedigree. No credentials, no degrees, no CV — just clear writing and applied expertise (I hope!). Isn’t that what the Habermasian public sphere is all about — the power of rational argument absent considerations of identity or status?
STATUS: still applicable. But at this point, may have run its course, given that it has already worked in ways that I’m not yet at liberty to explain, and given how many people do know the “secret.”
Abu is an Arabic reader and worth reading as one more angle on the Middle East.
These 214 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 9 September 2004
Political Correctness Gone Mad »
Fellow Cardiff blogger Welshcake admits to being a bit funny that way… because he “can’t find anything remotely humourous in promoting the murder of someone because they’re gay.” He was writing about the Mobo Awards. I unreservedly agree. Liberalism is supposed to be colour blind. What sort of liberal says, “Oh, he’s black, so he’s allowed some ridiculous views, they don’t know any better, you know…"? Or indeed, “He’s Muslim, female circumcision is their thing, man …” But apparently the Mobos short-listed two — well I can’t quite say what I think of them — on similar grounds.
Michael Howard, no doubt, would damn us both with the title of this post.
Oral sexer, lesbian and queer must be assassinated
I’m boringly hetero, but there’s nothing like a little oral. And I don’t just mean jawing about it in the pub the following day. (Makes grotesque Hannibal Lecter “liver and chianti” type noise.)
These 145 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:51am GMT Permanent link.
Everybody Must Get Stoned »
Chrises Brooke and Lightfoot both recommend the Brick Testament, which is really splendid. If you’ve ever been concerned that we’re not living by God’s Law, I recommend that you start with When to Stone Your Whole Family. It’s in the good book, so it must be true.
These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:04pm GMT Permanent link.
Couldn't Put It Better »
I’m not really a fan of Harry’s Place. I think that I’ve said before that Gene is the only one IMO who has it together. And he’s right about Kerry. If I had the vote in the States, I’d be thinking of voting Libertarian, Green, Looney, or Fuck-the-lot-of-you. It may surprise some of you, But I agree with Gene not only on the empretzelization (now there’s a word you don’t see every day), but on what he ought to say (or, indeed, have already said).
President Bush misled the American people about the imminent danger Saddam Hussein posed to the rest of the world. But there’s no doubt about the threat his murderous regime posed to the people of Iraq. We should rejoice in their liberation from that tyrant and take pride in our soldiers whose sacrifices made it possible. But the Bush administration’s inexcusable mistakes and failures since April 2003 have seriously undermined the prospects for a free and democratic Iraq serving as an example to the rest of the Middle East. President Bush’s failure to secure the peace is putting at risk the achievements of our men and women in uniform. I know I can do better.
I agree that Saddam was a tyrant, and I agree that most Iraqis are glad he’s gone. I’m less convinced that the situation is that much better — and it’s a long way from better enough to justify the cost. Still, someone has to congratulate the troops who made the sacrifices, and that someone isn’t Bush or Cheney.
And Gene is right in his earlier post, Moral confusion, where he quotes Marcela Sanchez.
There is something terribly wrong when the United States, after Sept. 11, fails to condemn the pardoning of terrorists and instead allows them to walk free on U.S. streets.
While I know there is no definitive meaning of “terrorist” the Bush administration seems sickeningly cavalier about what they’re prepared to wage the “War on Terrorism” on. And the scare quotes are unavoidable.
But on speeches that politicians might have made front, they don’t come any better than our long national nightmare of peace and prosperity is finally over, which has been rescued from the subscribers-only archive and updated with links which show (or, as I haven’t tried any yet, purport to show) how prescient the Onion writers were. As the picture caption says “President-elect Bush vows that ‘together, we can put the triumphs of the recent past behind us.’” They got that right.
Thanks to Nick for finding it.
These 278 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:07pm GMT Permanent link.
I've Got A Website And I'm Gonna Use It »
Ladeez and gennilmen! Do not ever get on the wrong side of Chris Lightfoot. Don’t bottle it up Chris, say what you really feel.
And that’s my second Lightfoot link today.
These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:18pm GMT Permanent link.
The Important Issues »
Tom Watson scores a long, nearly troll-free, comments thread on banning hunting. Very democratic of you, Tom, but blog-readers really aren’t the people you should ask (and certainly not with that dodgy comments script which invites multiple submissions) — try your constituents, or better still check what was in the manifesto.
I’m glad that Tim Ireland (of the comments and permalinks free Bloggerheads) who’s also TW’s webmaster contributed for the ‘No’ camp. Not many others did.
Some people seem offended that the hunting thread gets 117 comments while Beslan only had three: but that’s because hunting is something we can affect.
The other hot issue of the day is Should Star Trek die?
I thought it already had. And there’s more social commentary in some Slashdot signatures than in the whole ST franchise.
The USA: Not as Bad as North Korea hplasm (576983)
if (now() > 20010911) { str_replace(’terrorism’,’communism’,$us_foreign_policy);} Paulrothrock (685079)
No wonder this show has enjoyed such enduring popularity. Look, I didn’t write the scripts, I didn’t demand that the sexy Mr. Shatner shave his chest and get his shirt ripped off every other episode. I just salute the people who did.
From Laura Goodwin’s Silly Star Trek Obsession, which, I should warn you, will not be to everybody’s taste.
“Patterns Of Force": Kirk undresses Spock and himself and they dress up like Nazis, but Spock can’t pass. They get caught, stripped, whipped, and thrown into a cell with only one bunk! Oh my gosh, somebody isn’t going to get much sleep tonight! Later, there is an incredible scene where Kirk, Spock, and McCoy are all literally in a closet together dressed as Nazis! Put beers in their hands and it would look like “Uniform night” at the RAMROD.
If you don’t find that funny, I wouldn’t recommend that you read the rest. For the dressing up as Nazis bit, I should remind you that everybody on Star Trek was Jewish, including Leonard Nimoy and William Shatner.
These 207 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:38pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 10 September 2004
The Groovies Of Academe »
Damian considers Intelligent Design and Peer Review. I don’t know who ‘chris’ in the comments is, but I salute him.
On the subject of science —
Every time I take a dump I’m taking part in experiments in digestion, but I don’t list this on my CV.
Sayeth the scientist known as Fontana Labs. That’s intended as a corrective to this.
[M]y Dean is very supportive of InstaPundit, and regards it as scholarship because it’s part of an ongoing experiment in communications and technology, and the University President had some nice things to say about the blog when we met at a dinner last June …
Which is intended as a corrective to the first comment here which had been “quickly corrected by Steven Den Beste, no less” in the comment immediately following it.
Damian has ‘a pretty strict “no ‘Blogging during business hours” rule.’ Professor Reynolds also claims to have “always kept it [blogging] separate from the day job.” As Mr Labs observes, “Yeah, the timestamps really make that plausible.”
Tim Lambert thinks that some acedmics at his alma mater are incompetent to judge plagiarism from the net.
These 123 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Hacking The Whip »
It’s a bit daunting being a whip. I mean, you haven’t actually got a whip — not a real one — but you start thinking it would be pretty useful.
But at least he has a blog — and loyal readers and several Lib Dems — to confess his worries to.
If you could out someone as a treacherous hypocrite on this blog, would you?
Straight to the deep stuff for an MP. Beslan, the third anniversary of 9/11, nah, ask the punters what to write next.
I’m taking a blogging break this weekend to have a look at Chequers. Great swimming pool, great people. Can’t really say much more than that. You know, the closer you get to really powerful people, the more you realise how much they’ve got going for them — tact, discretion, brevity. Inspiring stuff.
I can hardly tell the satire from the real thing.
And that title’s the worst pun of the year so far, so I’ll take a break myself.
These 72 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:58pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 11 September 2004
No Comment Necessary »
“He came softly, unobserved, and yet, strange to say, everyone recognised Him. That might be one of the best passages in the poem. I mean, why they recognised Him. The people are irresistibly drawn to Him, they surround Him, they flock about Him, follow Him. He moves silently in their midst with a gentle smile of infinite compassion. The sun of love burns in His heart, and power shine from His eyes, and their radiance, shed on the people, stirs their hearts with responsive love. …”
“… ‘What I say to Thee will come to pass, and our dominion will be built up. I repeat, to-morrow Thou shalt see that obedient flock who at a sign from me will hasten to heap up the hot cinders about the pile on which I shall burn Thee for coming to hinder us. For if anyone has ever deserved our fires, it is Thou. To-morrow I shall burn Thee. Dixi.’”
Update: text deleted. Written when I came in from the pub.
Image from Atrios.
These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:46am GMT Permanent link.
Remembering September 11 »
As Damian notes, Hak Mao says it best.
As Vice-President Dick Cheney has said, the next presidential election is an important one for the future of the country. The best way to give the terrorists (that is, all of them, not just this month’s flavour) the finger is to vote in favour of science (like stem-cell research), freedom of choice (like gay marriage), freedom of speech (like anyone but John Ashcroft), competent military planning (like anyone but Donald Rumsfeld, and by the way, he’s been very quiet lately), a strong economy (Paul Krugman for the cabinet), keeping church and state separate (it’s in the Constitution, duh!), and a leader who, when told that terrorists who were known to have attacked US nationals before were planning an attack on the mainland, might bother to read the goddam report, and not take another holiday.
Some of us haven’t forgotten. Image from here.
And then there’s even better photoshopping here. Support the President! Buy a T-shirt.
This is a forgery, sorry to disappoint you. Found through Jamie.
Still, as Gary Trudeau observed, the President is a gift to satirists everywhere. But then again, so was Hitler.
These 195 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 12 September 2004
No Sex In The Suburbs Of Surrey »
According to the Sunday Telegraph, Rowan Pelling, the editor of the Erotic Review “and her two full-time staff resigned last week after their publication - known for its racy but literary view of sex - was told that its offices would be moving from Soho to Cobham in the Surrey commuter belt.”
I don’t really appreciate her reasoning.
“I am afraid that I have given up on the ambition of being a porn baroness. It is just impossible to imagine The Erotic Review being produced out of Cobham. We are a Soho type of publication. It just doesn’t function once you transplant the magazine away from its contributors,” she said.
“We have a steady stream of guests lounging on sofas and we operate beside the Academy Club in Soho. The lifeblood of the magazine is having that intimacy with contributors. That’s why they write, and I would be frankly amazed if they trooped down to Cobham.
It’s a totally unfair stereotype to present hacks as a crowd of boozy no-hopers, who couldn’t work out the Network Southeast time table, and are too drunk to even hail a cab by the early afternoon.
The magazine, she said, flourished on “the natural and beautiful flirtatious relationship between young women and middle-aged men.
It was a fantastic meeting point for people who wanted to flirt in an old-fashioned manner. In my experience, that tends to be wistful young women who want life to be like a 1940s film and older men who are sick of political correctness. It appealed to people who were cross with the modern world and found themselves thinking ‘Why can’t we get back to the old-fashioned courtship between the sexes? Why do there have to be all these bloody rules?’
I thought that, if there is a problem with modern courtship, it’s because there are no rules, or no one knows what they are. And people do manage to copulate outside Soho.
Pelling admitted that other reasons, not always regarded as sexy, had also prevented her from accepting the move to Cobham.
“I have a four-month-old baby son. I live in Cambridge and there would have been no way I could have gone to work in Cobham and seen my child.”
Note that the Torygraph, in addition to using “bloody” has also dropped titles, and instead of using Ms or Miss or Mrs uses the simple surname. You can also note that she has clearly gone straight back to work. Anyone sensible would have edited from home and emailed or faxed stuff in.
She’d have missed a little fun, though.
Many contributors wrote without charging a free. Others settled for £50, exceptionally £250 for a very long article, and lunch.
“You’re expected to stay drinking until midnight,” recalled Pelling. “You can talk about sex as much as you want and there’s a serious obligation to flirt.”
I’m no Peter Cuthbertson, but I don’t think any pregnant woman or nursing mother should be “drinking until midnight” — especially if she started at lunchtime.
On a rather happier sexual note, the front page no less covers John Mortimer’s joy at son with Wendy Craig. Took his time finding out though, the sprog is my age.
These 242 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:29pm GMT Permanent link.
He Vants To Be Alone »
You’re not a Hollywood legend until you turn the fans away. So for all the stalkers who go here looking for this when everyone knows that our man Will looks like this, he wants you to leave or he’ll call the cops. I know that he’s supposed to be fanciable, but I can’t see it at all; for some reason, this is the only one I like.
Almost completely irrelevantly, I’ve just found how to seduce young boys and why is karl marx called a thinker in my referrers. AAAgghh!
Oh, and make your own Nicole Kidman jokes up.
These 99 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Very Civil, Very Disobedient »
I get the impression that the Torygraph is sending coded messages to the Home Counties intifada, instructing them how to resist the Blair government.
Melissa Kite, bylined as ‘Deputy Political Editor’ (which may not be so good; quite often all non-freelance staff have some editorial description) interviews Mike Williams a police constable (he is 50, and must be close to retirement).
The softly spoken Welshman predicted that dozens of police officers, in addition to many magistrates and lawyers, would find themselves having to choose between their favourite pastime and their jobs.
“Clearly it would compromise my position so, yes, I will have to comply with the law. But there are some who will go on. That is one of the problems that will materialise. I have heard personally from people who say they will continue.”
I’d be even more out of place among the huntin’ mob than I am among the SWs, yet I’m close to marching with them. (OK I do have a farming second- or third-cousin — I always called him, bizarrely when you think about it, ‘Uncle Tom’ — who hunts, but I’ve hated the idea of the sport since seeing a mounted fox head when I was five rendered me inconsolable.)
Pc Williams, who lives in small, semi-detached house in Caerphilly, was a beat officer in Cardiff until a series of injuries, including breaking the same leg twice in riding and motorcycling accidents, confined him to desk duties. He helps to feed the hounds almost every day and spends every weekend with his local hunt during the season. “I will miss it hugely,” he said. “It’s more than a hobby. It is my main enjoyment.”
I may as well slip in the observation that beat officers in Cardiff are a similarly threatened breed. I sometimes go to a boxercise class with a policeman who is close to retirement (he’s about 48; he claims that after 30 years of pension paying in, the paying out goes down — I can’t see the maths myself, but I assume he’s looked into it, he’s a thorough guy) who told me that when he started there were something like 30 beat coppers in Cardiff: now there are eight. The population has risen by more than 10% in the last ten of those.
Anyhoo, who’d a thunk the old Torygraph would be siding with anti-social elements, a “torturer” even? And this one seems nice enough.
Mary Urry, 81, ushers us into her flat with infinite kindness. She tells Jasmine the cat to make room for the guests, and urges us to make ourselves at home on the settee.
“Us” being the reporter and photographer, one presumes.
Who could argue when she sighs stoically: “I have been the victim"? Then she adds: “I try hard to be a good neighbour. I do try to help people. I’m not vicious. I don’t wish ill on anybody.”
She did, though, send those two letters to Angus Macdonald, at the housing association, a few weeks ago.
“I told him he was the Antichrist. I said to him, ‘you go to Spain, and if you start your nonsense there, you will get a bullet in your neck.’ And I meant it.”
She “probably” did also tell the wheelchair-bound boy with spina bifida that he should have been put down at birth “because he was being such a bloody nuisance”.
But the idea that she was torturing her elderly neighbours with the repeated loud playing of her Chas and Dave records — now that was rubbish, she says.
OK, she lacks New Labour polish, but, really, nastier things get said by whips in the Houses of Parliament every day. In 2002, Mrs Urry was evicted from her sheltered housing complex (hooray for the Torygraph’s search function!) for that late night music.
Mr Meic [Welsh for ‘Mike’ — DW] Phillips, of the National Consortium for Sheltered Housing, disclosed the results of research conducted by his charity into 4,000 sheltered housing units. It found that in the first quarter of this year, for the first time, the number of pensioners who were evicted for bad behaviour was greater than the number evicted for non-payment of rent. In March this year, for example, Tony Colley, 62, was served with an anti-social behaviour order and evicted from his sheltered housing in Maltby, south Yorkshire.
“He had the blonde and the brunette, two girlfriends in their fifties,” recalled one neighbour. “He used to sit on the wall with a gang of schoolkids smoking cigarettes, and women crossed the road to avoid them. Eh by God, it’s been lovely without him.”
I rather like Tony Colley. Who wouldn’t? Well, you know who. Blair Hails Powers to Tackle Anti-Social Behaviour (Scotsman, should be reg free).
Some of us on the left don’t romanticize the working-class. We know lots of them are obnoxious. They’re still people. And rules like this will make even you a criminal in time.
These 360 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 13 September 2004
Jason, You Plonker! »
Jamie posts on the Fathers4Justice fiasco.
Setting up a paramilitary wing of Maxim magazine is such a mid-nineties thing to do. And the pop culture reference is just tiresome, just another bout of nostalgia for childhood telly. And then there’s that stupid Brit bloke propensity for costumes. What the fathers 4 justice people are really asserting is their right to stay children, which is what may have been at the heart of the original divorce and access settlements. Divorce makes you feel cold and old, and they’re stamping their little feet about it.
While I quite like that F4J are non-violent and yet headline-grabbing, they don’t seem to have much direction. When Peter Tatchell stages something, you know who he’s aiming at. So F4J are unhappy, well that’s a start, but they seem to have no clue about the next step.
Matthew Turner is unimpressed by the coverage on Newsnight.
The most surprising reaction, to me, is Jon Snow’s on Snowmail, which I’m sure I can extract here: it’s two paras, it’s fair use, the programme has gone out, and he did send it to me.
As I write, there is the ludicrous spectacle of a man dressed in full Batman fig standing on a ledge next to the Queen’s balcony at Buckingham Palace. He’s waving at the Mall as four flunkies and a copper gather on a neighbouring balcony trying to coax him down and work out what to do. He and two accomplices caused a disturbance one end of the Palace and then he ran to the other end clambered in whilst their backs were turned.
Utterly amateur security. Any meaningful defences would have shot the protestor in the leg or worse. The new culture in post 9/11 Buck House. ‘Come on in boys, do what you like. We wont shoot..ever!’ A major sacking is highly unlikely. Meantime this would be a fantastic agit prop. Were it not for the atmosphere around the ‘cause’. ‘Fathers for Justice’ is campaigning for fathers to have access to children in their mother’s custody. But such is the aura of misogyny, and the utter obsessiveness you find yourself wondering whether ANY child should ever be exposed to their care.
I like the compactness of that. There’s a nice little essay in there. He came down while C4 News was on air, and apparently said he ‘got carried away.’
I could feel more sympathy, but I suspect that quite a few members of F4J have similar stories to the one recounted (and much blogged about since) on The Policeman’s Blog.
These 160 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 14 September 2004
Privacy On Parade »
I’m trying hard to think of any UK papers apart from the Torygraph I actually like. They all seem to be tabloids now, apart from the Guardian and that’s halfway there, and been there in spirit for the past decade.
I prefer to express my dislike by coming into contact with them as little as I can. I would never go to Green Fairy’s lengths of reading the Hate Mail online.
So when fellow blogger Blognor Regis suggests that Naomi Campbell might consider repaying the £3500 that the Mirror paid her after for invading her privacy, I’m fully on Ms Campbell’s side. Stuff the Mirror, I say. Even if she is going on television to talk publicly about her drug addiction, a) who cares either way? and b) that’s her right, it’s not for anyone to ‘out’ her in any way.
Mr Regis is also wrong on the “no-knockered stick insect” part as well.
(Image nicked from today’s Torygraph, as it’s from a bleeding pop-up window. Even the papers I like try my patience.)
These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Rolling Steyn »
Last week, Norm wrote:
It seems not to be the done thing amongst bloggers of the left to quote Mark Steyn approvingly. The hell with that. I find some of Steyn’s views rebarbative, but since on one or two key questions of the era he has a better position than what I’ll just refer to loosely as the ailing, yesbut segment of the liberal-left, and since he writes, too, in a sharp, spirited and often funny way, giving him an advantage over the mumbling, let’s-not-pay-too-much-attention-to-the-elephant segment of the liberal-left, I’m happy to cite those of Steyn’s opinions I want to, even despite other of his opinions which may be rubbing shoulders with them and are less congenial to me.
Oh sure, Steyn can often write well, but he’s more than just rebarbative, he’s under-informed about too much, and gives hostages to hyperbole. The Steyn piece which Norm, after further preamble, went on to consider, merely shows his strengths and weakness. (The issue is also discussed by Squander 2 and by Norm again, so I’ll be brief.)
PHOTOGRAPHED from above, the body bags look empty. They seem to lie flat on the ground, and it’s only when you peer closer that you realise that that’s because the bodies in them are too small to fill the length of the bags. They’re children. Row upon row of dead children, more than a hundred of them, 150, more, many of them shot in the back as they tried to flee.
It’s a good beginning. The repetitions of “bags” and “row” seem naive, artless. This is a man expressing his raw emotions and barely able to put words to what he’s describing.
Well, it’s not. There’s a lot of skill in the way Steyn writes, and, besides, he’s had time to read others’ reactions, and plot the next move. He spends the next four paragraphs discussing press reports and the rest is a mush of history, spurious comparisons, and, inevitably, electioneering praise for G.W. Bush.
You can’t turn Saudi Arabia and Yemen into New Hampshire or Sweden (according to taste), but if you could transform them into Singapore or Papua New Guinea or Belize or just about anything else you’d be making an immense improvement. It’s a long shot, but, unlike Putin’s plan to bomb them [sic] Islamists into submission or Chirac’s reflexive inclination to buy them off, Bush is at least tackling the “root cause”.
If you’ve got a better idea, let’s hear it. Right now, his is the only plan on the table. The ideology and rationale that drove the child-killers in Beslan is the same as that motivating cells in Rome and Manchester and Seattle and Sydney. In this war, you can’t hold the line against the next depravity.
Well, I really don’t see why, if you can transform “Saudi Arabia and Yemen” into “Singapore,” say, why you can’t go all the way to “New Hampshire or Sweden.” Is there some glass ceiling of refinement which prevents Arabs from reaching cultural Nirvana? I know Mr Steyn has gone over this before, so perhaps it’s boring to him, but he could tell us once again how Bush is succeeding in “tackling the ‘root cause.’” I’d like to be certain that he even has a plan.
But that wasn’t my beef with his column originally. Mr Steyn is entitled to his opinions, and he’s free to air them, and here’s the rub. The first thing I noted, just from reading Norm, was that he chose to knock a fellow Telegraph journo, one who sometimes occupies the same space as him on a different day. It seems just a little rude, especially as Adam Nicholson’s piece wasn’t bad. (Squander 2 discusses its weaknesses; I share Norm’s view of its strengths.) Where does Steyn choose to knock his colleague — and for that matter the Guardian and the New York Times? In The Australian, few of whose readers are likely to have heard of any of his targets, and none of whom will care. And what does he find wanting in Adam Nicholson? Belle-lettrism, mostly, not that Steyn would ever practice that. Far from being the cosmopolitan newsman he thinks he is, Steyn is a parochial hack who knows nothing outside of his newsprint fixation.
Of Isabel Hilton in the Guardian he says:
For one thing, Hilton is wrong: insurgent bullets can “penetrate military armour”. A rabble with a few AKs and a couple of RPGs have managed to pick off a thousand men from the world’s most powerful military machine and prompt 75 per cent of Hilton’s colleagues in the Western media to declare Iraq a quagmire.
Call the Faydeen or the remnants of the Ba’ath Party what you will, but many of them seem to be time-served officers from the Iraqi army, and thanks to Saddam’s bellocisity, they’ve seen more fighting than professional soldiers almost anywhere else. Actually, body armour seems to work pretty well, when it’s issued. The majority of casualties seem to be the result of explosions, so I’d say they were in possession of more than a “couple of RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades].” And don’t you just hate that boys’ toys familiarity with munitions? I don’t even know what an “AK” is. I thought it was Sloane for “yes.” But Steyn shares his absurd optimism and conviction in the weakness of anyone who crosses the US with the idiots who put too few boots on the ground in Iraq a year and a half ago. Perhaps they’d be in a better position now, if they’d taken the risk of opposition seriously.
All this was just an exercise to blow some of the dust off a post I’d considered but told myself not to bother writing, as Norm said, “Between us, J and I have already set out more than enough by way of textual exegesis on this single newspaper column.” However, I had to reconsider Steyn as he’s in today’s Telegraph, making a symmetrically opposite point to George Monbiot in the Grauniad, but that’ll have to be a fresh post.
These 641 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Understatement Of The Day »
Well, who’d a thunk it? An American understatement. OK (or AK if you’re a Sloane or you read the last post), the American in question is the peaches-and-cream, smoking, yet smokin’ Matt Yglesias.
At 0.025 megatons, my house will collapse, which would suck. A bigger, 0.15 megaton bomb would see me bombarded with 500 rem ionizing radiation. That’s a bit like rain on your wedding day, except it kills you by stripping the electrons off the atoms of which your body is composed.
That would really suck huh?
It’s thanks to sunny thoughts like these, no doubt, that Dick Cheney proclaimed a nuclear attack on an American city to be “the ultimate threat we face today.” Unfortunately, he also implied that this was a good reason to invade Iraq, which he said gave safe haven to al-Qaeda. It didn’t. What’s more, Iraq didn’t have any fissile material, and you need fissile material to make a nuke.
So since stopping terrorists from getting their hands on fissile material is so important, you would think the Bush administration would be enthusiastic about the Fissile Materials Cut-off Treaty which would make it harder for them to get any. And George W. Bush, at least, is prepared to sign the thing. Unfortunately, his team also scuttled the verification elements, which makes it worthless. The stated reason is that verification would be too expensive.
Too expensive? That’s my electrons at stake, mister. Don’t give me expensive, you Harvard-educated, phoney-Texan tongue-tied wannabe. You’re Preznit of the USA, not Arms-Dealer-in-Chief for the House of Saud. Or have I been reading the Murdoch press again?
Update: As I was reading “My Pet Goat” to a class of schoolkids — those terrorists would never attack such cute chillen, so I knew I’d be safe if I stayed there, dressing up as a pilot can come when the coast is clear — a man came in and whispered to me that George Bush has two jobs! Arms-Dealer-in-Chief for the House of Saud during the day, and he does the evening shift as the Preznit. Well, well, well. He must be tired and working too hard, poor lamb. I sure hope he naps during that second job.
Update II: Ooh I’m shrill tonight. Oh, yeah, read the whole thing. If Dumbass gets re-elected, the protons and electrons that make up you can say goodbye to one another.
These 205 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 15 September 2004
Bad Reasons For What We Know Already »
It’s not easy to say this, but I agree with Marcus of Harry’s Place. I don’t like the word “moonbat” which I thought was © Little Green Fedayeen and friends, though I can see that, in the dull way which passes for wit among bullies, it’s a play on his name.
I haven’t read Mr Monbiot in a while. And I’m impressed. For the Guardian, it’s a well-written piece. It’s just not a well-argued piece.
To the Normans, England was one big hunting ground. By the time of Henry II’s reign, according to the author Marion Shoard, almost a quarter of the country was royal forest. A forest is not a place where trees grow. It is land set aside for the king’s game, in which the nourishment of deer, wild swine and hares took precedence over the nourishment of human beings.
There’s an element of Humpty-Dumpty’s “a word means what I say it means” here. Yes the word “forest” has evolved over the last 600 years; so have most others.
“Chivalry” is derived from chevalerie, or horse soldiery. It was designed to instil in young noblemen the qualities required to conquer new lands and subjugate their people on behalf of the king and the church. These men, according to Ramon Lull, author of the 13th-century Libre del Ordre de Cavayleria, should exercise by hunting the hart, the boar and the wolf. This enabled them to refine the art of killing from the saddle with the bow and couched lance.
In other words, hunting is good training for soldiers. It teaches diligence, patience, endurance, and inures to the horrors of the kill. Fine. This stopped being an aristocratic pursuit so far back even the Monbiots were commoners.
In the thunder of the hunt today we hear echoes of the joust, the tourney and the cavalry charge. As if to remind us of its military associations, the hunters wear the uniform of the 18th-century soldier. And though not all redcoats are aristocrats, it is the noblesse and the classes abutting it who still run the show.
It’s a poor reminder if it takes the Guardian to tell the Telegraph, Mail, and Sun readers what it all means.
As an animal welfare issue, foxhunting comes in at about number 155. It probably ranks below the last of the great working-class bloodsports, coarse fishing. It’s insignificant beside intensive pig farming, chicken keeping or even the rearing of pheasants for driven shoots. But as a class issue, it ranks behind private schooling at number two. This isn’t about animal welfare. It’s about human welfare. By taking on the hunt, our MPs are taking on those who ran the country for 800 years, and still run the countryside today. This class war began with the Norman conquest. It still needs to be fought.
This may sound rather New Labourish, and I have dipped into New Labour, but I’m far more for raising the working-class than I am lowering the toffs. And, though George misses it, I think ownership of the land changed hands twice in recent history: once with the industrial revolution, and again after WWII when many great houses converted to tourist centres.
As Marcus points out:
Sorry, George but if you want to assume the title of people’s leader you might want to ditch the references to the exclusive pile you were educated at, digs at less expensive public schools as being inferior to your school, and try to disguise the inconvenient fact that one’s parents aren’t exactly slumming it.
And George Monbiot likes to remind us of his education.
I remember being astonished by the arsenal of shotguns, rifles, pistols and air rifles which appeared one frozen dawn when we gathered by the lakes to flick bottles across the ice and shoot them. One boy used to delight in releasing a squirrel and two ferrets in the squash courts. He later became master of one of Britain’s most famous hunts, which is inconvenient for those who claim that hunting has nothing to do with sadism.
Thing is, that’s where I like my sadists: a long way from me. Anyway, I’ve never claimed that “hunting has nothing to do with sadism.” I wouldn’t claim that newspaper columnist score-settling or even its poor relation blogging has nothing to do with sadism. I happen to think that nature is rather cruel (I am an aficionado of David Attenborough), and we can sublimate, but not control, it.
George makes the point (which I think is specious, unless you cite very selectively) that those who hunt are “those who ran the country for 800 years, and still run the countryside today.” In one sense, clearly they’re not. Worms got Henry VIII long ago, for instance. “[R]un the countryside” seems to mean “allow other methods than vegan soy bean farming.” Gorgeous George has confessed to not being a vegan himself, so some animal cruelty is acceptable?
I saw it from both sides: as a member of the chivalric order and as one excluded from it. At home, I used to join the local boys in “running down” the hunt. This is the only traditionally working-class component of foxhunting: the fit young men of the village work out where the horses are going and, taking short cuts, try to get there before them. This way you could enjoy the thrill of the chase without the expense of owning a horse. The hunters tolerated us, but that was all. At the meet they would remain in the saddle, drinking from their stirrup-cups, talking only to each other. If we asked one of them a question, he would ignore us, or address us as if a worm had spoken, or walk his horse straight through us, so that we had to step out of the way.
All I really know of public school is “If.” Harry Potter doesn’t count. And, if you must, some Geo. Orwell and Cyril Connolly. This sounds like a straightforward description of “fagging” to me. These days, less snotty people ride. And I know, from personal experience, that one snub has more weight in memory than twelve embraces.
Against George, there is the Telegraph. First up, Vicki Woods.
Normally, she rings from the M1 to say: “You doing much this afternoon?” Er — why? “Because I’m chaining myself to the House of Commons with some people.” I wriggled out of her chain-protest, but she persuaded me into “spreading a huntsman over Beacon Hill with some people”. Cut out of industrial carpeting, painted by many hands and pegged out on the hillside by many more, the huntsman was the hardest day’s night I ever did in my life. But glorious to behold. The “some people” all used noms de guerre, which made for a very heady, Allo Allo-type atmosphere.
I like Vicki. I love that 60s convention-defying ‘i.’
Never mind the arguments, which both sides fudge, anyway. Being “against cruelty to foxes” is admirable so far as it goes, but that’s not far except among vegans. Protesting against “job losses in the countryside” is casuistry. Everyone knows hunting is not about paying country-dwellers peanuts to kennel hounds. No — it’s about riding recklessly about on a crisp autumn morning, sharpened by the kill.
Now if George Monbiot eschewed meat, I’d understand. So it’s not killing he hates, but the wrong kind of killing. And then there’s Mark Steyn.
With rumours of mushroom clouds over North Korea and genocide in Sudan, it’s good to know the Government has identified the real threat in the world today. As The Telegraph reported: “Chief constables intend to site CCTV cameras on hedgerows, fences and trees along known hunting routes to enable them to photograph hunt members who break the law after hunting with hounds is outlawed.
He does openings well, doesn’t he?
The controversial measure was agreed at a secret meeting between David Blunkett and the chief constables of England and Wales after the hunting ban was announced last week. Police chiefs warned the Home Secretary that enforcing the ban would cost in excess of £30 million and divert resources from front-line policing.”
So far, he’s factual. The Home Office Minister discusses (ahead of legislation, as is only right) the effects of the Hunting Bill with Chiefs of Police. Reading between the lines, they object.
But, if they can’t and they have to snake the electric cable down every tree trunk in simulated wood-effect vinyl casing, it will still “send the right message" — which is that the monumentally useless British constabulary is happy to invent an entirely new criminal class if it reduces the already minimal time they have to spend dealing with the real criminal class.
This is where I lose it with Mark Steyn. Never mind that he presents the “war on terror” as a black-and-white struggle between Yurp and the US. Never mind that he is, in fact, Canadian. He doesn’t live here. He doesn’t deal with our constabulary. As he admitted at the top of his piece, the invention was the Home Secretary’s; the Police themselves invented nothing.
These 587 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:04am GMT Permanent link.
Er, Didn't You Forget Something »
With all the coverage of Jason Hatch, alias Batman, one thing seems to have overlooked. Hatch and his co-conspirator have been described as “protestors” — but during his five-hour vigil at Buck House, he doesn’t seem to have actually protested about anything.
Today’s Telegraph.
He said: “The Government has made activists of loving fathers. It was easier to get to the Queen’s balcony than it is to see my own children.
“I would do anything, literally anything, even die, to get to see my own children.”
However, this doesn’t seem to be the fault of the government.
Earlier this year Hatch changed his name to protect the identity of his children from his second marriage. Two years ago at Gloucester Crown Court he was convicted of harassing his second wife and given a 12-month conditional discharge.
He denied charges of making threats to kill her and her mother, which were ordered to lie on the file. Later he obtained a court order giving him supervised contact with his children once every three weeks. He is now waiting for a High Court hearing to apply for equal contact with the children.
I’ll usually blame New Labour every time it rains, but I can’t see how I lay Mr Hatch’s complex private life (two ex-wives, and a partner who’s just dumped him) on David Blunkett.
The Telegraph leader (not something I normally bother with — like Matthew Turner), Beware men in tights, which Michael Brooke also liked, is somewhat splendid on Batman’s inappropriateness as a father.
I even agree with Janet Daley.
Why are so few people scandalised by the timorous, seemingly complacent, way that the police behaved?
Mr Hatch was not suicidal: according to all reports, he was not threatening to jump from his ledge, nor was he claiming to have a hand-grenade on his person (which he might well have had in that suspiciously thick belt), both circumstances that would have merited delicate treatment. He was, in fact, a prime candidate for arrest and removal from the scene.
Yesterday, I surprised myself but suggesting in the comments to this post that the police should have fired on him. He was wearing a thick utility belt. And yesterday’s Telegraph ran a cartoon depicting Osama bin Laden watching ‘Batman’ on the ledge. I’m not advocating that the police shoot to kill; if Batman had had a grenade or a bomb-strapped to his body, that would have been dangerous anyway, only to disable. We ought to take terrorism seriously. And, to link to Matthew Turner for a third time, I completely agree with him here.
These 219 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:22pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 16 September 2004
Er, Gentlemen, If You Can Be Bothered »
BBC: 5 stories, 3 more on the protest, a further 3 on the background, 2 features, and Have your say.
Independent: 1 report of the invasion, 3 stories on the rest of the day, A way of life wrongly attacked or the end of a centuries-old cruel blood sport?, and parliamentary reporter Simon Carr and a leading article.
Guardian: 2 on the security breach, 3 further stories and a leading article.
The Telegraph doesn’t conveniently list all hunting-related stories, but there are quite a few.
Much the same for the Times, but at least 6 stories.
In the Guardian, Simon Hoggart gives good value.
My goodness, I thought, if they had been terrorists armed with machine guns, some of the least known MPs in the country would be lying dead by now.
Indeed, rightly or wrongly, hunting has been discussed in the press at ridiculous length. You’d think that those with the good fortune to have a vote in the only debating chamber which matters might consider making a contribution. Or just showing up to listen. I mean here’s Comical Tommy.
The house is debating and the protestors are more or less peacefully demonstrating.
He’s clearly not on the green benches himself. Actually, I looked at Tom’s site for his observations about being a whip. I’m glad that he’s now au fait with “the difference between new clauses, clause stand parts and amendments” and knows why “debates on committees are taken in the way they are ie in no particular order relating to the sequence of clauses in a Bill.”
I had had this quite irrational belief that all MPs understood the procedures of the House. I thought that was their job. Clearly, I was mistaken.
These 246 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13pm GMT Permanent link.
Kind To Be Cruel »
As Harry of the Place says, “Stand firm comrades, stand firm.” For once, I’m with him all the way.
Well done to animal rights campaigners. Now you can sleep easily at night knowing that foxes can only be shot dead by farmers. Now no longer will dogs allowed to finish them off. Lets hope that all the farmers are a good shot though.
I know both Nick and Alister (bloggers I normally agree with; but then, if we all thought alike all the time, life would be kind of dull) find the Countryside Alliance hilarious.
Todays’ massive Alliance demonstration outside Parliament against a hunting ban is not about hunting, Chief Executive Simon Hart has said.
But I think it’s right. Hunting, if it means going out with a shotgun and looking for foxes, is not to be banned. Nah, it’s “toffs” (and as the DT is wont to point out, they’re not all toffs) having fun. As Alister says:
They should reflect that fox hunting only exists because Cromwell banned deer hunting. The republican aspect of anti-hunt sentiment still exists.
Well, there wasn’t much Cromwell didn’t ban. It’s all very well being a republican, but there are some historical figures — like Cromwell and Robespierre — you should avoid citing as examples. Consider this argument as a thought experiment. “A far-right government would sort out public services. Just look how efficient the German state was under Hitler!” Something about it fails to convince, does it not. If Cromwell was agin something (and Hitler banned fox-hunting), I’m probably for it.
Nick also found Dear Pro-Hunting Lobby.
Banning hunting will not “destroy countryside management”. Left to themselves, foxes will have exactly the number of cubs that the land can sustain.
Indeed, this is how nature is well known to work. Picture the scene: Ethopia, one or two skeletal cattle forge among the scrub despondently, a few weed like crops wither under the pitiless sun, the nearest water hole is six miles away and filthy. Mr Ethiopian to Mrs Ethiopian: “Darling, I don;t think the land can sustain any children, so let’s not have more than ten.” And Ethiopians are intelligent, foxes ain’t. Is there a publisher out there looking for “Thomas Malthus for beginners"? I’m open to offers.
Will is on jolly good form.
And I’ve been thinking about George Monbiot’s little rant. If I understand it, he says that because posh people invented hunting, it is ipso facto oppressive. I wonder if he’d care to visit Neath (anti-hunting MP Peter Hain’s constituency) and explain to the lads there that they’re holding the working class back by playing that game with the funny shaped ball?
These 335 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:41pm GMT Permanent link.
In Space, No One Can Hear You Whistle »
Some things get lost in translation, like Hamlet.
You may think you’ve read Hamlet before, but you can’t really appreciate it until you’ve read it in the original Klingon. Now’s your chance. Enjoy!
I think when Worf said that, he said “seen” rather than “read,” but no matter. A little ironic as the Enterprise finally found its new captain because David Lynch saw Patrick Stewart in “Coriolanus” in the Barbican, and cast him in “Dune.”
Chris Brooke reconsiders Clangers and Klingons, having discovered the fruit of “someone’s decision to translate the Internationale from French into Klingon” along with other Klingon Translations of Terran Poetry.
The BBC reports a German radio station now has a Klingon service.
Sadly, the splendid story that an Oregon mental hospital sought a Klingon speaker has been debunked.
The government agency that treats mental health patients in the Portland, Oregon, area had listed Klingon as one of 55 languages that clients might speak. Now, Multnomah County officials are taking back their call for Klingon interpreters. County Chair Diane Linn says the inclusion of the “Star Trek” language on the list was a mistake. Officials note that no mental patient had ever come in speaking only Klingon. And not a dime of public money was spent on Klingon interpretation.
Pictured, Roxann Dawson, minus rubber head. I think I should rephrase that.
These 121 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Dodge, Duck, Dip, Dive, And Dodge! »
Seeing as both Chris and Norm seemed to enjoy it (and, also, because it was there) I went to Dodgeball last night. We went for a pizza and a couple of beers before. As SN said in an email:
After a couple of glasses of Grand Peroni and/or red wine it could, in fact, prove to be the funniest comedy in the history of funny comedies (this probably does depend on the wearing of beer goggles).
Actually, it was a lot better than that. (Just as well as the second beer was in unquestionably the worst pub I have ever encountered — smack next the UGC, and unavoidably convenient. I suggested that we instead repair to the bar of the Big Sleep Hotel across the road, but was over-ruled because it was ‘expensive.’ I’d pay a lot of money not to drink in a hangar with leopard skin booths and a Sky+ TV screen as large as the one the movie was on. There was some compensatory Schadenfreude from watching Man U exhibit less leg speed and co-ordination than the Serjeant-at-Arms and the other tailcoated flunkies of the House of Commons had earlier. Given that the invaders — the hunt supporters, not the Frog footballers — could have been armed, the “men in tights” showed uncommon courage. I didn’t see Peter Hain tackling anyone. Oh, that’s right, he showed his admiration for parliamentary debate by staying away. Quel surprise.)
Dodgeball is a silly film, which benefits greatly from merciless editing; it’s both short and feels short. It’s also got some very strong dialogue.
Lance Armstrong : Quit? You know, once I was thinking of quitting when I was diagnosed with brain, lung and testicular cancer all at the same time. But with the love and support of my friends and family, I got back on the bike and won the Tour de France five times in a row. But I’m sure you have a good reason to quit. So what are you dying of that’s keeping you from the finals?
And some sharp observation on the inanities of sportscasters. (Blackball, which also tried to mock the same thing, suddenly looks a lot weaker.)
Cotton McKnight : It looks as if the Average Joe’s do not have enough players to compete, they will have to forfeit this game.
Pepper Brooks : This is a bold strategy Cotton, lets see if it pays off for them.
It’s probably not to everyone’s taste, with transgressive humour — especially Rip Torn’s celebration of sadism — and much play about genital injury. Despite that, it seems to come from the right side. No matter how cruel and painful what you see is, the director’s sympathy remains with the hurt.
Cameos by David Hasselhoff, Chuck Norris, William Shatner, and the already mentioned Lance Armstrong don’t do any harm at all. As Chris said, “fun film.”
These 324 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:56pm GMT Permanent link.
In Which I Revise My Opinion Of Neo-cons »
John Quiggin thinks Wolfowitz is right, and I agree. This is Wolfowitz being right.
In the interest of disclosure, I should say that I have known Mr. Bambang for nearly 20 years. I knew him particularly well in the late 1980’s, when I was American ambassador in Jakarta. I know him to be a journalist of enormous integrity, someone who takes seriously his responsibility not only to publish the truth but also not to publish falsehoods. He is also a Muslim who has courageously denounced terrorism and extremism on the editorial pages of his magazine.
He’s right on several counts here. He discloses his bias, which is always good to see. He is comprehensive about Mr Bambang’s strengths: “someone who takes seriously his responsibility not only to publish the truth but also not to publish falsehoods,” thereby nullifying blog carping. And finally Mr Wolfowitz mentions that Mr. Bambang is a Muslim. In an era of frenetic Muslim-baiting, “why won’t they condemn this, or disown that?” he cooly observes that Mr. Bambang does exactly those things, and publicly.
However the meat of this post is to note my support of American Committee for Peace in Chechnya. Its members include Richard Gere and P.J. O’Rourke, whom attentive regular readers may already know I admire. They also include quite a few I spit at the mention of: Zbigniew Brzezinski, Michael A. Ledeen, Richard Perle, and Caspar Weinberger to include some names which leapt out at me.
Still, they’re doing the decent thing in supporting a Muslim state which endorses terrorism against a particularly repugnant Western ally. I hope none of those named support terrorism themselves. I don’t. But, while recent Chechen tactics have been repulsive (not just hostage-taking of young children, but the bombing campaigns which preceded that), they do have a right to be heard. And if the support of those I normally loathe gets them that, especially if no more infants die, I might even soften toward Richard Perle.
As Melanie Philips once contemptuously quoted some thin-skinned appeaser, “Jaw-jaw is better than war-war.”
I still don’t buy this “war on fascism” thing, though. I’ve seen their efforts elsewhere.
These 278 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:26pm GMT Permanent link.
Through A Glass Darkly »
Through Chris of Explananda, I found this fascinating and detailed and long consideration of Seymour [’Sy’] Hersh. I mentioned Melanie Philips in my last post, one of the breed of ivory-skinned, ivory-tower journalists who creep along library rows and sigh about how it was all so much better when … Hersh is a rather more red-blooded spirit; one who rather than shrieking that everyone is out to get him, goes out of his way to make it so.
In 1969, when he published his first revelations about My Lai, he got a call from a reporter at The Washington Post, who said to him: “You son of a bitch, where do you get off writing a lie like that?”
Imagine, the gall of the man! We know our boys are civilised; they never commit atrocities. We may have read books like “The Naked and the Dead” or “Slaughterhouse 5” or “Catch-22” but we still know war is glorious and chivalrous and decent, despite the wimpy carpings of, say, Wilfred Owen. Think of the catchphrases of manhood Vietname produced. “Charlie don’t surf.” “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
At the bureau, he soon realized there was more to life than bridge and crossword puzzles. One day he was sent to a crime scene on the South Side; a man had shot five members of his family and then killed himself. Hersh saw the bodies and quickly called his office, shouting “Bulletin!” He started to dictate the details to the rewrite man, at which point an editor got on the phone. In a long, two-part interview with Rolling Stone, conducted by Joe Eszterhas in 1975, Hersh recalled:
He said: “Ah, my good dear energetic Mr. Hersh. Pardon me for interrupting but these, alas, poor unfortunate victims, do they happen to be of the American Negro persuasion?” And I said yes. “Will you please then cheap it out?” Which meant one paragraph. You learn a lot about the newspaper business that way. It wasn’t a story because they were black.
O Amorica!* Land of equality before the law and opportunity!
His beat in Washington was the Pentagon, where the press briefings were highly regimented. In his 1976 book, The New Muckrakers, Leonard Downie, Jr. noted that Hersh “soon made a habit of walking out in the middle of unproductive sessions and going instead to high-ranking officers in their lunch rooms, to question them, informally and uninvited, on subjects the briefing officers dodged.”
Now, this is a mensch. Not a common bowing-and-scraping journalist, but a man who knows his true worth, which is exactly the equal of every other bugger on the planet — string-puller or street-sweeper — and unafraid to show it. You can keep your pallid columnists, as Nicholas Engstrom roundly ends:
perhaps Robert Redford can play him in the movie.
Though I preferred Hoffman in that Watergate film.
Seriously though, Hersh has also written a new book, considered by Fred Kaplan on Slate. And Kaplan isn’t altogether pleased.
Seymour Hersh’s new book, Chain of Command: The Road From 9/11 to Abu Ghraib, reveals our most intrepid investigative reporter working near the top of his game. Basically a compilation of the pieces that Hersh wrote for The New Yorker over the past few years — expanded, updated, and re-edited, in some cases significantly so — the book holds up as a cohesive tale and a searing indictment of the Bush administration: its chicanery with intelligence in the months leading up to the Iraq war, its inadequate planning for the war’s aftermath, and its muffing of all the wars — in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the broader war against terrorism — ever since.
So I ought to be impressed, this is belief-confirming stuff. But Kaplan titles his article, “Does Torture Work?” It’s a very serious question; I’ve written on the efficacy of torture before. I remember reading, I think on Atrios, the administration argument that it wasn’t torture unless the complainant could show organ failure or broken bones. But as Hitchens notes in the post linked to above, just shooting a corpse (which the torturee does not know to be dead) is effective, and immoral, coercion. And with mobile phones, it’s quite easy to say, “We have your mother/sister/wife/daughter/son and we’ll kill her or him if you don’t …”
I had other things to say, but they feel featherweight compared to the Hersh pieces. Read those. I think, at the moment, that I believe that if I have principles, I will never support torture, not even in a Beslan-like situation. I wish I could be sure that I’d hold to that.
*It’s spelled that way in Finnegans Wake. Who am I to argue?
These 404 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:12pm GMT Permanent link.
Don't Know Why »
Mel of Inveresk Street has slummed it by linking to me, and I’ve been itching to return the favour. I’m doing it now because I have an OS X update which requires a restart, so I have to get through all the windows I’ve had open for days.
Sadly, as I suspected, the post I was going to link to, "It’s what’s inside that counts", has been outed as a phoney by eagle-eyed Damian.
Still, it’s funny, it gladdens the sad heart, and it ought to be true demmit!
Anyway, as I’ve said before, my favourite good bad-movie is Storm Warning, which is about the Klan as well as being the only film in which Doris Day dies.
It’s an awful film. There isn’t a single black face; non-sheet wearing Hollywood rules no doubt. But its heart is in the right place. And the bad guys scatter at the sight of Ronald Reagan, which is ironic or apposite, according to taste.
These 161 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:33pm GMT Permanent link.
Does It Have To Come To This? »
You know the last act of “Oedipus Rex” where he rips out his eyes? I feel like that with blogs sometimes. Both my parents are safely dead, so I’m unlikely to kill one and sleep with the other, but that was always unlikely for most of the audience anyway.
Harry is unimpressed with Robert Fisk. The dorty lying peeg:
We all have our memories of 11 September 2001. I was on a plane heading for America. And I remember, as the foreign desk at The Independent told me over the aircraft’s satellite phone of each new massacre in the United States, how I told the captain, and how the crew and I prowled the plane to look for possible suicide pilots. I think I found about 13; alas, of course, they were all Arabs and completely innocent. But it told me of the new world in which I was supposed to live. “Them” and “Us”.
Laban Tall, safe in his Thomas Hardy alias, and Harry find this risible. Would they have combed planes and confronted armed terrorists? It’s not for anyone to declare in advance: we are made by our deeds. And Harry asked:
What planet is he living on?
This is Planet Earth.
But then comes Michael J Totten.
Robert Fisk continues to live up to his name.
Uh-huh? What does that mean? I have no idea.
The attack on September 11, 2001, was the worst terrorist act ever. It was also the most devastating attack of any kind inside America ever. Does Robert Fisk really think we should have treated such an atrocity the way we would a pipsqueak of a bomb in a trashcan at the mall by the IRA?
“Inside America” here means on “mainland USA.” We’re not talking about possible wars or anything in someplace like Argentina. Until that date, the “most devastating attack of any kind inside America ever” had been Timothy McVeigh’s bomb which blew apart the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Does Mr Totten propose screenings of short haired white men? In terms of deaths caused by one indvidual acting alone, Mr McVeigh stands alone. I note from Mr Totten’s home page that he delights in the description of “A hard-headed liberal,” well they don’t come much harder of heart than Mr McVeigh. This is to ignore the important question. “Is he a wog?” “Is he a nigga?” Mr McVeigh passes this important test: his skin is as the driven snow, He is one of us.
Old school terrorists like the IRA and the Basque ETA don’t behave this way, nor will they ever.
Ah, ta be sure, ta be sure. The IRA didn’t intend any harm with the Brighton bomb (blowing up the incumbent political party is standard procedure, surely). nor did they harm the even the fingernail of any babbies with the Birmingham Pub Bombings, Canary Wharf, or that one in Manchester. It makes the cockles of me heart warm to think o’ the priests who assured the bambers they warr doin’ the Christian ting.
And then there’s the segregation in Ulster. The way families are driven out of estates, mostly by violence. With a little more anarchy, might the drivers-out resort to murder. Oh no, Sir! These are good Christian folk! I shouldn’t mock. Really. Mr Totten has his lucid moments.
History is what it is.
Well who could fail to agree with that? A door is a door. A bathplug is what it is. Never a truer word spoken, Mr Totten. Others say you are a half-witted right wing weird beard, but not me. You say the truth. Sadly, it’s trivial and moronic, but you’re an American, and that’s not your fault.
It swung on its hinges on September 11. It would have done so if even if Dennis Kucinich sat in the White House and George Galloway ran Britain.
The bats! The bats! My heroin must be running low. “Swung on its hinges.” Am I mis-hearing some Klingon here? What the hell is the boy talking about?
Then Totten changes Fisk’s “One article I wrote for The Independent in 1998 asked why Iraqis do not tear us limb from limb, which is what some Iraqis did to the American mercenaries they killed in Fallujah last April” to:
One article I wrote asked why Englishmen do not tear French people limb from limb …
Which would be fine, but (ahem) they have done. It’s not the eejits who voted Mandelbum into Parliament, whose ancestors thought a monkey was a French spy (sadly, IQ is genetically determined, as the 2001 election showed), there’s Agincourt, Waterloo, which, like all battles, were triumphs of the sensitive artistic part of humankind. Well the sensitive artistic part that likes Wagner anyway. It’s best not to ask what the refined Japanese did in their prison camps, or what the Germans, the nation of Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, and pretty much all decent philosophy, music, and art of the C19 did in the concentration camps. And certainly don’t ask how the US treated Japanese-Americans in WWII, or African-Americans ever, nor ask why Groucho Marx was excluded from the very clubs he wanted to join. No, nice people never do nasty things. That must be horrid plebs like Lynndie England. America has always been a land of equals. Unless you were a slave or Jewish. Oh, duh! France is anti-Semitic now! France has always been anti-Semitic, and the US has always been equal. Look at all the black and Jewish presidents. England (hah!) had one (titter) Jewish PM. While the great egalitarian United States… had some great comedians. Izzatafact? Curtain. Curtain! You’re all fired. You’ve been a lovely audience. Tossers …
These 714 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:28pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 17 September 2004
New Security »
Peter Hain inspects the troops. “Keep an eye out for that silly long hair and his ape-dog-rat-thing companion. They are a threat to the Empire. And there’s an old guy and a kid with swords, but I’ll take care of them.” [Breathes deeply through mask.]
Guy on the right: “Never you mind sir, my stormtoopers never miss. One guy and a dog-thing against the death star? My sides are splitting.”
These 74 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:00am GMT Permanent link.
Fun In The Sun »
Checking out the front pages on the BBC site, the ‘Hate Mail’ and the ‘Excess’ each lead with one of Diana’s sons (I’ve just looked at them and I’ve forgotten his name already; you’d know him if you saw him: ginger hair, posh). The Torygraph goes in for a spot of class warfare. But the Sun actually does some reporting. Amazing.
And yesterday, just a day after hunt supporters stormed the Commons Chamber as a protest, I smuggled a fake bomb into Parliament.
Had I been a terrorist, I could have left the “device” in a toilet or in the restaurant where I worked.
It could easily have blown up the Chamber just 20 yards away - killing hundreds of MPs.
Alternatively, I could have strapped the “explosive” to my waist and triggered it beside Mr Prescott.
I think they overestimate the damage a bomb light enough to carry (never mind conceal) can do. But otherwise, good story.
These 82 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:15am GMT Permanent link.
New Links »
Updating the blogroll seems to be the thing to do.
I’m going to add the wonderfully titled the Scottish Patient found through Alister who describes him as “veteran agit-propper, cannabis cafe punting, class struggle waging, literature propagating hibee” (we all have our crucifixes to bear) and “well known to many of you as the founder of Rebel Inc. publishing and the man who brought a certain Irvine Welsh to the world’s attention.” His blog is less than a week old and already I disagree with him.
While David Hume and the other Enlightenment figures of the 18th Century were betraying the interests of Scotland and the Scottish language, Fergusson swam against the stream and wrote his poetry in Scots.
Ah canna for ane meenut imagine Davy Hume in Scoats, but nae matter. The man’s a right tube, but he’s got some nice photies on his blog.
Through the Normblog profile I’ve found GAUCHE, written by Paul Anderson, another Scot, and one who’d “set up a publishing company” if he were “suddenly to win or inherit an enormously large sum of money.” (I work on these segues.) He also writes professionally for Tribune. And he likes Andrew Marr.
Marr, currently the BBC’s political editor, has been consistently ribbed by Tribune in recent years because he was a bearded badge-wearing paper-selling Trot when he was a student at Cambridge University a quarter-of-a-century ago.
I remember Marr from when he used to drink in the pub I worked in behind the offices of the Scotsman. He’d lost the beard by then. His drinking buddies used to go on a bit about how clever he was and how he was destined for better things than the Scotsman (not a bad paper then or now). They were right.
Like other left-of-centre practitioner-critics of the recent past — notably John Lloyd of the Financial Times and Martin Kettle of the Guardian — Marr is less than impressed by what he reads, hears and sees every day. He makes well directed swipes at the hackneyed emotionalism that has crept into every newspaper, the cult of celebrity and, particularly, the decline of reporting of politics and serious discussion of policy.
Unlike Lloyd and Kettle, however, Marr doesn’t consider that the problem is simply (or even largely) that journalists have been overcome by an all-pervading cynicism about the political class that renders them incapable of doing the job required of them in a democratic polity. Although he says that politcal journalists “have become too powerful, too much the interpreters” and that “the political story has become degraded”, he argues that the reasons “have as much to do with politics as with journalism”. The Labour government’s current troubles with the media are as much a deserved reaction to its strict news management regime as they are of hacks acquiring a permanent anti-politician sneer. “Central control and manipulation created, within a few years, some of the worst press coverage any government in modern times has suffered,” he writes of Alastair Campbell.
Marr identifies the real enemy as an “idle, office-bound, marketing-directed copycat culture in modern news which is turning off readers and viewers”. What journalism needs now, he says, is fewer columnists and more reporters getting out of the office and talking to real people. At the risk of giving Tribune’s new editor, Chris McLaughlin, a good excuse to get rid of me, amen to that.
Writing about Seymour Hersh yesterday, I said much the same thing. Paul Anderson agrees with me. Clever chap.
These 244 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:47am GMT Permanent link.
Right By Your Side »
Nick Barlow has found the website for Iain Wright. I don’t think it’s a parody.
Iain will press police, the council and local communities to use new powers from Labour to get tough on drug abusers and smash the teen gangs on our streets.
Um, aren’t Labour the incumbent party? Why did the present MP let these “drug abusers” and “teen gangs” terrorise Hartlepool?
Iain is urging people to phone in on 01429 224403 with details of problems in their area so Iain can press the police and council for swift action.
Don’t phone the police! Phone the answering machine of your local candidate, and he’ll phone the police when he gets home. Won’t make much difference to the time it takes them to come out.
Labour’s Iain Wright … Will work day and night to bring even more investment and jobs into the region
Call me an old fusspot, but I think MPs should have lives, and they should sleep. Of course, that may be what the green benches are for. On the other hand, candidates could not use ridiculous hyperbole. Just a suggestion.
Still, you know what they say, “Things can only get better…”
These 120 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:19pm GMT Permanent link.
The Dictatorship Of The Bourgeoisie »
Just so we all agree for once, I agree with Matty who agrees with Brownie. I also agree with Harry who agrees with Polly.
Sadly, this preposterous waste of political energy will drag on and on, because this time their indignation is justified. Although they rail in vain against their waning power, they have every right to feel aggrieved at this assault on their relatively harmless if distasteful pleasures. So hounds will be publicly massacred, the police will be mocked and the law openly defied.
And John, the Middle Aged Curmudgeon is good too.
For what it’s worth, my view is that the law of untintended consequences will come into play and the countryside fox will be wiped out as country folk take up their guns and snares and poison with renewed vigour once the hounds are off the scene.
Once when I lived a vegan house, I read an article in a (the?) vegan magazine to the effect that we’d save animals a lot of suffering if we just slaughtered them all. If the author was being ironic, he kept it well hidden. No more foxes will get torn to pieces by hounds because there will be no more foxes to tear. I can’t find a logical a priori reason for this, but that’s the most distasteful idea I’ve ever heard. (OK, possibly the third most distasteful — after genocide and using nuclear weapons in anger; and then there’s torture, sigh.)
My interest, though, is in the arguments on all sides and how they have been presented and to what ends. It’s a fascinating microcosm of the dismal level of political debate in this country …
To blow my own valve trumpet (not a hunting horn) I noted yesterday that the chamber was empty. There are good reasons for banning hunting — and very good reasons for disliking it. As Brownie of Le Place de Harold says:
I’m quite sure it would come s something of a surprise to Sir Teddy Taylor and Anne Widecombe, both of whom voted for yesterday’s bill, that they are, in fact, closet class warriors.
So a few more (ahem) Members could have bothered contributing to the debate. Everybody else has an opinion, why was Tom Watson watching it on the telly? Brownie is also right about comparisons with the miners’ strike.
Notwithstanding the above, should we be inclined to look for a class angle on the fox-hunting debate specifically and violent protest generally, we only need cast our minds back exactly 20 years, when this country witnessed a conflict that really did set a entire community on collision course with the State. Just as yesterday, our televisions screens relayed pictures of running battles with police. Of course, the protagonists then were not TV chefs, establishment actors, friends of the Windsors and the sons of multi-millionaire, international rock-stars, but mere 12-hour-shift miners. And when they talked of a threat to a ‘way of life’ and the ruination of entire communities, they did so without a scintilla of hyperbole. Where today there is the prospect of hundreds of culled hounds, then, thousands of working men faced the stark reality that they might never earn another wage. And whilst yesterday’s violent protestors are given the cover of “people who would in ordinary circumstance never dream of breaking the law”, their counterparts in 1984 merited “the enemy within”.
In those days, remember, the BBC was biased — cutting the film of miners’ demos to make it look like the miners attacked the coppers. Of course, mining was largely doomed anyway, but the manner of Thatcher’s attack was unforgivable.
I don’t know about you, but my toes were curling watching the scenes outside and inside Parliament on tv on Wednesday. Those images will have been broadcast across the globe, and it’s the second time in a week that our government and its security look really stupid — ineffectual and brutal at the same time.
On C4 News last night a Lib Dem MP claimed that a constituent of his reported five guys sneaking away from the demonstration holding yellow hard hats. He reported them to a constable, who referred him eventually to an inspector, who didn’t want to know. So he dialled 999. I just love the image of that. Police everywhere and you have to phone 999 to get their attention. Not that he got it, but they were warned.
C4 News also showed the CA [Countryside Alliance] members blocking the M25, with “softly, softly” observation from police and a great deal of emotion from truckers and couriers whose means of earning a living was being disrupted.
The view I’m closest to, unsurprisingly comes from my one reader sharp enough to spot that I was blogging drunk last night. She saves me having to articulate what should be obvious.
This from the Guardian? If instead of voting to ban fox-hunting, the parliament had voted 356 to 166 to deport/imprison all [insert minority group here], it is the duty of people to go along with the majority until a less obnoxious government is elected? To read this, not in the conservative press, but in the bloody Guardian — I think I’m going to dig out my compass and check that the earth’s magnetic field hasn’t reversed or something.
Funnily enough, if I’d been able to drive in the 80s, and I hadn’t had better things to do, I’d have joined a hunt sabbing mob. I’m not saying that I’d have stayed. From what I know, they’re zealots, and not that good at normal conversations about footy or girls. And I very strongly dislike animal experimentation. But it’s the increasingly nasty activities of extremists against animal experimentation which are on the down escalator of public support. Either Bill Deedes (for it is he) is subtle in his argument, or his logic is rubbish, but I’ll quote him anyway.
Bombarding people with threats to their lives, loved ones and property via e-mail or their letterbox is a tactic that will appeal strongly to some of the extremists who attach themselves to many protest movements.
Once that passes a certain point, the nation involved is in serious disorder. We are talking about blackmail. Years ago, when a Labour government enabled Leo Abse’s Bill to decriminalise homosexuality, Rab Butler, shadow home secretary, summoned me as chairman of the Tory MPs’ home affairs committee. “I want you to persuade our members not to oppose the Abse Bill,” he said. “Thanks very much,” I replied. “Why?” “Because the police tell me so many homosexuals are being blackmailed.”
That was decisive, we agreed. But what animal rights extremists do is worse than that. They threaten to harm children. And even if it is a threat they do not intend to carry out, it is a deadly form of intimidation, Orwellian in its implications.
Now I don’t get the relationship between legalising homosexuality and prosecuting this mode of terrorism. But there was a time when most people wouldn’t support the legalisation of homosexuality (I’m not sure how a vote now would go), but it was still the right thing to do.
These 600 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Architects »
Good morning, gentlemen. This is a twelwe-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive in the entrance hall here, and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these …
I’ve just watched Newsnight Review, which had three guests — Rosie Boycott, whom I have an unaccountable attraction towards, Ian Rankin, who is, in his defence, from Fife, and some sickeningly pretentious blonde architect. When the presenter made the entirely reasonable opinion that Daniel Libeskind can’t design buildings which anyone can stomach, she was all over the place. Oh, they look so adventurous from the outside. That’s what architects do: amuse passers by. It’s not like anyone has to live or work inside.
Oh, I see. I hadn’t correctly divined your attitude towards your tenants. You see I mainly design slaughter houses. Yes, pity. Mind you, this is a real beaut. I mean, none of your blood caked on the walls and flesh flying out of the windows, inconveniencing the passers-by with this one. I mean, my life has been building up to this.
I’ve been to the Imperial War Museum North. I can’t think of a better case for making drugs illegal.
Yes, well, of course, this is just the sort blinkered philistine pig ignorance I’ve come to expect from you non-creative garbage. You sit there on your loathsome, spotty behinds squeezing blackheads, not caring a tinker’s cuss about the struggling artist. (shouting) You excrement! You lousy hypocritical whining toadies with your lousy colour TV sets and your Tony Jacklin golf clubs and your bleeding masonic handshakes! You wouldn’t let me join, would you, you blackballing bastards. Well I wouldn’t become a freemason now if you went down on your lousy, stinking, purulent knees and begged me.
He even wears silly Bono glasses.
Oh (blows raspberry) the abattoir, that’s not important. But if any of you could put in a word for me I’d love to be a freemason. Freemasonry opens doors. I mean, I was…I was a bit on edge just now, but if I were a mason I’d sit at the back and not get in anyone’s way.
They’ve endured Osama bin Laden. Do the people of New York deserve this insult?
These 122 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 18 September 2004
The Good News Bible »
As the man says:
Opting out: The single most effective way to avoid viruses and spyware is to simply chuck Windows altogether and buy an Apple Macintosh. Apple’s operating system, Mac OS X, is harder for the criminals to infect, and the Mac’s market share is so small that hackers, virus writers and spies get little thrill, financial gain or publicity from attacking the platform.
There has never been a successful virus written for Mac OS X, and there is almost no spyware that targets the Mac. Plus, the Mac is invulnerable to viruses and spyware written for Windows. Not only is it more secure, but the Mac operating system is more capable, more modern and more attractive than Windows XP, and just as stable.
Macs are as good as, and often better than, Windows PCs at doing the most common computing tasks: Web browsing, e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, photos, music and video. The Mac version of Microsoft Office can handle Windows Office files with ease, and it produces files that Office for Windows handles effortlessly. Apple’s computers are also gorgeous.
OS X runs on God’s own operating system, UNIX. They look wonderful. Then again hackers are poor misunderstood souls who need your charity. Your generosity is appreciated!
These 31 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:33am GMT Permanent link.
Are You Talking To Me? »
I need to prettify my sidebar.
That part was true; the rest was rambling.
These 13 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:57am GMT Permanent link.
Abu The Shrill »
Abu Aardvark was in the library when he happened on Civilization and it Enemies. The blurb had, as is the wont of book blurbs, a couple of recommendations.
On the back cover, the first blurb came from Daniel Pipes. The second, from Instapundit.com.
Now, before you follow the link above, ask yourself, “Did he read the book?”
These 42 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Find Out Inside »
I bought the Guardian today, I can’t really say why. I get almost no pleasure from it. And Simon Hoggart is online anyway. On the front page in what can only described as “large, friendly letters” is the legend, “Britain in 2020: Who’ll be running the country? Who’ll be England manager? Who’ll be on the throne? And what will it mean to be British? Find out in our free magazine inside.”
In what sense is the magazine free? And what do they mean by “Find out"? There is only one way to find out the answer to those questions: wait 16 years. I just leafed through it, muttering “Bollocks.” The silly photoshop exercises — like the crocodile in the Cam — are the sort of thing Tim Ireland does better.
If the Grauniad cared about the environment at all, they’d waste fewer trees. Bloggers find the good bits anyway. Gert manages to be impressed. Norm says all needs to be said about Martin Jacques.
If the Grauniad shed a couple of pages of commentary, it would suddenly look weightier and more serious.
Still, at least I know what’s on tv next week.
These 191 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:30pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 19 September 2004
Be That A Right Hook? Or Be Thee Pleased To See I? »
Arrrr. Avast me hearties and splice the mainbrace, most smartly …
Captain Bluebeard
Arrr. Young Peter Cuthberrrtson be up and about right early for a pirate, and he be reading the Daily Telegrrraph. Arrr. He bain’t be best pleased with what met his eye there. He be blaming it on old Roy Jenkins, who be safe at home in Davy Jones’s locker.
The number of women who are seeking treatment at hospital casualty units after being injured in drunken catfights is rising sharply, consultants warn.
Arrr. Me beauties, we be wantin’ fine gals like that to be sailing on this high seas. Mind, I be not taking these land lubbers on trust. I be wanting to see some statistics, I be.
Hospital staff, already under pressure from the rising numbers of emergency admissions, say that they are struggling to cope with a “disturbing” increase in the number of intoxicated women requiring treatment. In some areas, the number of admissions has tripled in five years.
Arr. These wenches carry their grog well. I even be thinking o’asking the winner to scrape the barnacles off of me rudder.
“There has certainly been a big increase and some of the fights are really vicious,” he said. “It is not just cuts and grazes, but fractured hands as a result of them punching other people, and broken cheekbones.”
Lubbers, the lot o’ them! Girlies who can’t even be making a proper fist. If they was proper pirates with swords and pistols, bain’t nobody be going to casualty.
Master Harry Hutton be claimin’ that Henley is more violent than Columbia.
It bain’t be the swingin’ sixties. It be the grog companies, selling this grog what tastes like pop, it be. The scruvy dogs.
And happy Talk Like a Pirate Day.
These 177 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:23pm GMT Permanent link.
I Be Not Impressed By Science Fiction Beasties »
I be suprised by Damian’s liking of The Chronicles of Riddick, because I be disappointed by ‘Pitch Black’ which be making me think its director be a bilge rat.
They be having no imagination these lubbers.
These guys have a lot of potential to be great horror movie stars. These be cool monsters.
I be wantin’ to see Sky Captain, which bain’t be about monsters nor pirates neither. But it do have a right tasty wench in an eyepatch.
Pirate Beavis: Eyepatches be cool!
Pirate Butthead: Arrr!
And if thee be a clever pirate, thee should be taking the Google Labs Aptitude Test. “What be wrong with Unix?” Arr. Found through Pirate Gary.
These 113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Modern Day Piracy »
Arrr, me hearties. I were going to post on this anyway, but here’s a jolly tale of piracy.
Modern-day pirate Philip Berriman is re-opening his floating off-license in an astonishing revenge bid against Customs and Excise over an £11m drugs bungle.
The North businessman was sensationally cleared of masterminding one of Britain’s biggest cannabis smuggling operations, but only after being held on remand for 15 months as a class A prisoner.
Philip, 46, skippered a yacht carrying 3.7 tonnes of cannabis — worth £11million — from North Africa to Cornwall. …
Now Philip has found a way to get even with Customs and Excise by exploiting of a loophole in the law, which he claims allows him to sell cheap EU cigarettes and alcohol in international waters 13 miles off the coast of Britain.
And which port is he moored 13 miles out of? Hartlepool. And he be one of the 14 candidates for Hartlepool. Guacamoleville has their biographies. Until I read that, I’d dismissed Mr Berriman because he looks miserable in his photo. (Mind you, most of them do.) The UKIP bloke looks really miserable, and the NF candidate looks like the crazy guy with the moustache in “The Long Good Friday.” Everything I’ve heard from Iain Wright sounds like the Conservatives 20 years ago, or the BNP if they talked to their lawyers and had all the stuff about “blacks” and “asylum seekers” taken out.
So it looks like a three-way battle for my affections between Mr Berriman, bit of a crim, ideal training for government, or there’s Jody Dunn.
Jody Dunn, barrister specialising in family law with Amicus Chambers. Born 27th July 1969. Educated at City of London School for Girls, Woodhouse Sixth Form College, St. Andrews University, City University (Common Professional Examination in Law), and the Inns of Court School of Law. Formerly a disc jockey and radio presenter. Worked as a Barrister for the European Parliament. Finalist in the Worlds Debating Championships in 1996. Author of books on coping with divorce. Married with 2 sons and two daughters.
You can see right off she’s shifty. How can she salute the flag of St George, if she went to university in Scotland? And she was a finalist the “Worlds Debating Championships in 1996.” Good job she’s a Lib Dem — the Labour whips would soon tell her that she trying to enter Parliament, not some debating society. In the People’s Party, MPs do what their bloody well told, and don’t bother with this thinking malarkey. And she knows something about the law! Good grief! Tom Watson didn’t learn about procedures in the House of Commons until he was a whip. And she’s defended people who might have been guilty. She’s clearly what Ronald Reagan called the “L-word.”
If I had the vote, I’d seriously consider Jody, although, as I don’t, this is my third and final choice.
Alan Hope, landlord of the Dog and Partridge public house in Yateley, Hampshire.
Sadly he’s not local, and has no intention of moving. He is, however, “Leader of the Monster Raving Loony Party since 1999.” So he’s probably sane.
One final killer fact. Iain Wright is “[m]arried to Tiffiny with three children.” People called Tiffiny shouldn’t be allowed to breed. Will no one think of the children? Does anyone care about the children?
At least Frank Zappa could spell.
Arrr.
These 349 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:35pm GMT Permanent link.
This Be Annoying »
So annoying that I almost hope this lot, who can not only spell and punctuate, but can do so in Welsh, drive them out of business. I’ve never met a Welsh speaker daft enough to need “Welcome to Ikea” translated, but it’s the thought that counts.
These 48 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:00pm GMT Permanent link.
As Cunning As A Cunning Fox Who Is Professor Of Cunning At Oxford University »
The most interesting consequence of the fox-hunting debate has been how much baggage has been hung on which seemed to a exclusive hobby which wasn’t very good at what it claimed to be for, and was slowly dying out like all the other ‘traditions’ of the aristocracy.
Charles Moore in the Telegraph finds Parliament since 1997 to be to blame. (I have some sympathy with this view.)
So feeble are the protests of MPs that he will almost certainly succeed. They have traded the freedom to represent their constituents and scrutinise laws for a quiet life. They don’t even always need to vote in the lobby now, since things called “deferred motions” allow them to leave their vote behind on a piece of paper. They go home early. They don’t work on Fridays.
Eric the Unread makes the point I believe is most important. I was going to contrast him with the posts by David T, Harry, and Norm, but he does the job better than I could by himself. Instead, I’ll compare him to Daniel Davies.
Because hunting foxes with dogs is a sadistic pleasure.
Which is an argument for the ‘ban’ side. However, I prefer the succinct summary of Eric.
The fact fox hunting provides pleasure to some is not enough reason to ban it, since it also has utility and may be less cruel in terms of wounding and the absolute number of foxes who will be killed. Besides, as Miles Cooper noted, "foot packs with guns enjoy their day out hunting".
The pro-banning side (which I was once on) seem to believe that foxes will be left alone when hunting is illegal. Were that true, or were I not convinced that shooting, poisoning, and trapping are all far more painful for the fox as well as far more likely to accidentally injure other creatures and people, I’d support a ban. I’d also support any serious effort to reduce meat eating. Factory farming also has utility, but I’d get rid of it if I could. I hadn’t heard of Temple Grandin until I read this Butterflies and Wheels post, but why aren’t her slaughterhouse designs compulsory?
These 231 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Keeping Tabs On Blunkett »
The late Hugo Young on David Blunkett.
At the pinnacle sits Blunkett himself. Everything, in the end, is left to his judgment. He alone strikes the balance between security and liberty. He alone will be privy to the evidence that justifies imprisonment without trial. He alone will decide whether the security services are right when they claim that, after all, 160 not 16 people are a danger to the state.
Blunkett has said quite enough to reveal a mind that plainly lacks discrimination about either liberties or lawyers. He thinks they both get in the way of the state, and the power that, in his hands, he cannot conceive as being anything but benign. Who will hold him to account?
The rest of the page is good too. Someone should be keeping tabs on Blunkett.
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 20 September 2004
Facts And Froth »
Harry of the eponymous place recommends
Between the lines, Andrew Marr’s “tips on how to sort the facts from the froth” in newspaper. Typically, the Guardian’s first sentence is either a lie or a very vague truth: “BBC political editor Andrew Marr has spent a lifetime reading newspapers.” Well most of spend out first year unable to speak, let alone read, I doubt young Andy was any exception; if it’s true in the less pedantic sense, then so have I.
If the headline asks a question, try answering “no"
Is this the true face of Britain’s young? (Sensible reader: No.) Have we found the cure for Aids? (No; or you wouldn’t have put the question mark in.) Does this map provide the key for peace? (Probably not.) A headline with a question mark at the end means, in the vast majority of cases, that the story is tendentious or oversold. It is often a scare story, or an attempt to elevate some run-of-the-mill piece of reporting into a national controversy and, preferably, a national panic. To a busy journalist hunting for real information a question mark means “don’t bother reading this bit”.
And watch out for quotation marks in headlines, too. If you read “Marr ‘stole’ book idea” then the story says nothing of the kind.
Harry then uses this interview with Greg Dyke to illustrate one point. I’m more fond of the gravelly cockney than Harry is. (But then there’s this old post, where I quote an email from a friend who actually worked for him.) I think that knocking the Grauniad is becoming cliched here. But one for the road.
“Sue says I’m obsessed with him,” says Dyke, ruefully, in a quieter moment.
With who?
He whispers,” Blair.”
This might be my Gary Farber moment, but it’s “With whom” you silly cow …
NB: updated to remove a factual error.
These 157 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT Permanent link.
When Jupiter And Saturn Meet »
When Jupiter and Saturn meet,
What a crop of mummy wheat!
Yeats
I’ve no idea what the Yeats quote means. It just came into my head. He was a crazy guy.
This is a cake-having and -eating post.
Libertarians Jim Henley, Matt Yglesias, “Log Cabin Republican” Andrew Sullivan, lefty Jesse Taylor at Pandagon, and “Conservative” Matt Turner line up to laugh at Mark Steyn’s “annual column” (Henley) “written … in September 2003” (Yglesias).
He’s not the only voice from the lost world of September 10, 2001 weighing in. John Kerry, the doomed Democrat, has abandoned any talk of “victory" — in Iraq, I mean; he’s still hopeful of holding New Jersey. But instead he is promising to let America’s troops “come home”, which is another way of saying “surrender”.
“Come home” is also another way of saying “victory” unless Mr Steyn believes in permanent war.
Perhaps he does: Jamie found Strains Felt By Guard Unit on Eve Of War Duty about low morale in the South Carolina National Guard who are “scheduled to depart Sunday for a year or more in Iraq.” (The end of the piece backtracks a little, noting others who say that morale is fine.) Jim Henley (again) asks “Remember how higher-ups in the Stalag system were always threatening their subordinates with transfers to the Russian front?” and relates a tale of soldiers told to re-enlist or be sent to Iraq for a year.
Now where does Mr Steyn note “Freedom is Slavery"? Jim Henley (yet again), just to show that Steyn’s critics aren’t all mindless androids takes issue with Matt Yglesias over Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo. But you don’t need me to tell you to read Jim. (Whatever he is — apart from good — the former Republican voter is not a writer of liberal “boilerplate.")
Meanwhile John B of “Shot by Both Sides” lives up to his blog’s title, taking flak left (in the comments) and right (in his own comments). In John’s case, this proves he’s right to me; in Steyn’s, it just shows he’s an idiot.
These 272 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:46pm GMT Permanent link.
21st Century Fox »
Mea Culpa. In my last foxhunting post I forgot to link to James Hamilton’s excellent consideration from the humane pro-hunting side. A pragmatic and statistically based rejoinder comes from Middle Aged Curmugeon John. I have no idea whose take is correct.
Norm says, “I think humans should stop eating meat.” If I thought that was practical, so would I. The only meat that gets eaten in my house is the nastier end of the slaughterhouse produce, padded out with jellies and, these days, with carrots. (I think cats see well enough in the dark as it is.) I’ve been linked back to by Ophelia Benson who has now found a Temple Grandin website. So here’s a utilitarian argument from Temple Grandin’s site.
Gentle handling in well-designed facilities will minimize stress levels, improve efficiency and maintain good meat quality. Rough handling or poorly designed equipment is detrimental to both animal welfare and meat quality. Progressive slaughter plant managers recognize the importance of good handling practices. Constant management supervision is required to maintain high humane standards.
We’ve got dolphin-friendly tuna. Anyone want to push this one?
Eric relates how he started eating meat again.
These 140 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Daily Telegraph Agrees With Virtual Stoa Shock »
Yesterday, Chris Brooke wrote Good for Steve Harmison — ” the first England player to opt out of the forthcoming tour of Zimbabwe.”
Congratulations, then, to Stephen Harmison — not only for being arguably the best Test bowler in the world, but also for recognising that cricketers, like the rest of us, face moral choices. …
Whatever our cricketers feel about this wider picture, they ought at least to make a stand against the treatment of their fellow professionals in Zimbabwe.
That sounds suspiciously like Workers’ Solidarity to me.
These 34 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Straight On The Blogroll »
I’ve been thinking of remixing the blogroll — breaking it into political and other categories, but I think there are too many generalists (I include myself as one) left over. It may happen later.
In the meantime, found through Nick, the Rt Hon Member for Henley, editor of the Spectator, Daily Telegraph columnist, and so on and so forth, Boris Johnson joins the old blogroll.
These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:05pm GMT Permanent link.
Another Bush-Kerry Post »
If you know anything about web design, you’ll have heard of Jakob Nielsen, a man pretty much guaranteed to divide opinions. I’ve read a couple of his books, and they’re worth a look, but I’m not sure that they live up to their hefty price-tags. He thinks quite a lot of himself and he has been “inducted into the Scandinavian Interactive Media Hall of Fame” which I’m sure makes him the envy of all of you.
Whatever, I signed up for his newsletter a long time ago, and this week’s issue is on the Bush and Kerry Email Newsletters. He rates both fairly dismally. (He rates most things pretty low as a rule — he’s a great believer in the net falling short of its potential, usually due to poor design, not all that surprisingly, as that’s what he sells.)
Kerry also has an annoying splash page that asks users to disclose their email addresses before offering even a glimpse at the content they might receive. If we’ve learned anything from our user research on email usability, it’s that people are getting very reluctant to give out their email addresses, and sites must be clear about what they offer in return. Premature requests for personal information are extremely pushy.
He rates Kerry terribly compared to Bush on content, much higher on negative campaigning while lower on positive campaigning. Of course, these newsletters go on to mostly card-carrying members, but they’re the ones charged with energising or persuading their friends, family, co-workers, and so on. And, it seems, Kerry isn’t giving them much inspiration.
He doesn’t like the emails themselves either. Neither party sends out its emails in the candidates name, which would stand out in an inbox. The Bush campaign seems to use any name available.
Subject lines were universally lame, with Kerry having the most user-repellant subjects, like “Tonight,” “Don’t stop now,” and “Deadline almost here.” Why would anybody think that those messages were anything but spam? Bush had somewhat better subject lines, like “Kerry’s Flip Flop Olympics,” and “Participate in W ROCKS in Alameda County,” though he also had content-free subjects like “Brace Yourselves.”
The good news is that we in the UK can learn from their mistakes. I hope.
These 243 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:08pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 21 September 2004
Happy Birthday Hak Mao »
It’s Hak Mao’s birthday today! It must be because Will says it is.
Must. Fight. The. Temptation. To. Comment. As. Benjamin. Mackie.
Pictured: a different black cat.
These 28 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:46am GMT Permanent link.
How To Get Your Comments Noticed »
Now that Boris Johnson has a blog (for which, thanks to Tim Ireland), it might to a good time to learn the language of conservative commentators, should you wish to express an opinion and be seen as speaking for “ordinary decent law-abiding citizens of” Henley. See, that’s a good phrase. Grabs ‘em by the goolies and the Honourable Member (Fnarr! Fnarr!) has to take you seriously.
Good thing that Mr Wallace Arnold lets us in on his success on the BBC (dread company!) programme “Question Time.” The secret is in the choice of phrases.
- "and in this case life should mean life"
- "let’s make no bones about it"
- "the ordinary decent law-abiding citizens of this great country"
- "drive a coach and horses"
- "let me make it perfectly clear"
- "it’s time to get off your high horse, say goodbye to cloud-cuckoo land and start living in the real world — like the rest of us!"
- "I am frankly disgusted"
- “you can’t call them animals: animals don’t behave that badly”.
I look forward to using many of these myself as I tangle with Mr W.J. Phillips in the comments of Tory Boy.
These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59am GMT Permanent link.
A Different Kind Of MP Blogging »
My Member of Parliament, Alun Michael (he’s also related to Josephine Crawley Quinn, aka Mrs Stoa) is the subject of a very hostile Telegraph editorial, The invertebrate minister. He seems to have become the target of choice for the Countryside Alliance (whose members, you may recall, having surprised themselves by breaking into the Chamber, could think of little better to do than point at him), and now of the anonymous Telegraph leader writers.
For some reason this reminds me of the Gary Larson cartoon showing two deer, one with a target on its chest, and the other saying, “Bummer of a birthmark.”
I don’t really have an opinion on this. If Mr Michael was advised to stay away by the police (whose members are more likely to take actual blows than the minister), he ought to listen. OTOH, if the CA and their allies are in the wrong on this (as many maintain, and I hope many on the government benches believe), they ought to be confronted, and argued down.
On a related note, how many people do you know who still use the Nokia ring-tone? I haven’t heard it in a while — until Sunday that is, when a phone went off in the Sunday organic market, and I turned thinking “Which prat is that?” To see Rhodri Morgan, stout old Labourite, lift a mobile to his ear.
These 227 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:32pm GMT Permanent link.
Nude For Thought »
Please don’t let this story be true. Complaints prompt review of nude art.
An art college in London is reviewing its decision to display students’ work following complaints about some of the figurative pieces — specifically the nudes.
Maggi Hambling called any ban “incomprehensible.” I mostly remember her on a C4 arts quiz show hosted by George Melly; she once appeared wearing a false moustache. That was a little “incomprehensible” too, but entertaining. She’s a good lass, as Will Rubbish would say.
Eric the Unread has a good post the word “scumbags” and quotes Bill Bryson’s splendid Mother Tongue, “The emotional charge attached to words can change dramatically over time. … Shit was considered acceptable until as recently as the early nineteenth century.”
Are we entering a entering a time where we’re publicly sensitive to every damn thing?
These 113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:37pm GMT Permanent link.
Worst Pun Of The Day »
I know I inflict titles like the last one on you, and if you wondered whether I only post when I can think of a particularly awful pun, the answer is, “No, but it helps.”
This joke here is just cruel. (Though not if you’re Abiola Lapite.)
These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:11pm GMT Permanent link.
Is The Daily Telegraph Shrill? »
In today’s paper Vicki Woods sounds rather shrill.
[My son has] gone back to report on what we (in this house) call the imploding mess in Mesopotamia and what Tony Blair is suddenly calling the Second Iraq War. When did that start, pray? You go to bed on a Sunday night content to know that Bush and Blair have Iraq under total control apart from a few “hotspots” run by a ragtag of “Saddamite bitter-enders, foreign jihadists and al-Qa’eda”. And you wake up Monday morning to a full-scale “new conflict” and more calls for “sensible and decent people” to be friends to the Iraqi nation and uncritical supporters of the worldwide War on Turr. “Britain will not desert the Iraqi people” (Blair).
The Prime Minister’s amazing ability to say something and make it so by force of will never fails to astound me. It’s only beaten by his amazing ability to say nowt and make it sound like summat. Are we sending more troops for the Iraqi people? Or fewer troops? Have we actually got any more troops? Is that Hoon-person up to speed on matériel? British forces shot off 100,000 rounds in “largely peaceful” Basra during August. I hope the army of MOD clerks (who apparently outnumber HM forces) are working overtime on resupply.
But that’s pretty muted compared to Jim White who superbly covers the good, bad, and ugly sides of last week’s Commons fiasco.
Still, from miner to assistant master of hounds via international pop star in three generations: who says there is no social mobility in Britain?
And so last week, as you imagine Bryan was popping his tux into the dry cleaners, his son was evading several old blokes in buckled shoes to make public his feelings about the threatened future of his favourite country pastime.
Personally, I would have been more impressed if, rather than getting exercised about the loss of his right to kill, he had invaded the Commons to protest about what is going on in Iraq, to jab his finger at sanctimonious politicians who suggest that citizens whose front rooms have been turned into abattoirs by US helicopter gunships ought to be grateful they are no longer living under the murderous regime of Saddam Hussein.
The loss of their life, after all, is a small price to pay for liberty.
But then again, what do I know? Thanks to Otis’s dad, I spend far too much of my time in Soho.
They’re not all shrill. Mark Steyn writes about the “men in tights” thing today (not the movie), but then he knows as much about the British Constitution as I knew about the chaetognath last Thursday. There seems to be this correlation: smart = shrill; dull = faithful to the “War on Turr.” Perhaps it’s just me.
Note: this use of the word “shrill” may be © Professor Brad deLong. No infringement is intended.
These 103 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:54pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 22 September 2004
Real Bloggers Wear Pajamas »
Boris Johnson replies to comments on his own site.
Cripes, I never realized I was so popular!
This blog thingy is a jolly good wheeze.
Yours etc,
Boris
Wise words, sir, wise words.
Daniel Davies seems to be hunting (ahem) out everyone who linked to his "sadistic pleasure" CT post. Of the retorts I’ve seen, he’s at his most eloquent and persuasive here on The Sixth International.
We all do something like that. I checked back on the Butterflies and Wheels notes page to find a further consideration of slaughterhouses. I found that Ophelia Benson is also a “veg” (her term), so perhaps advocacy of less cruel slaughtering methods is not as widespread as I hoped.
I sort of disagree with Ophelia on intelligence. I hadn’t heard of Howard Gardner before, but I don’t think I agree with him either. Peter Cuthbertson took up Ophelia’s baton, and my opinion should be clear from the comments. I’m a little flattered that Ophelia’s co-blogger, Jeremy Stangroom, also had something to say.
Ophelia can speak for herself, but I suspect that her objection is not to the idea of the possibility of the modularity of intelligence, but rather the invention ex nihilo of inteligences.
I’m a tad sensitive here, because I hold the obverse of all Peter’s expressed views in this thread. I don’t believe in race; I do believe homosexuality is genetic; I don’t believe in a general intelligence which is measured by IQ tests (and even if I did, I’d think that its utility would be very limited); and I do believe that, partly because Binet’s original intelligence test was a filter for what we now call the educationally subnormal — people who are child-like in adulthood—that IQ tests are good for that one thing, so I do hold that killers on death row with very low IQs be treated differently (but then I’m unequivocally against the death penalty anyway); I still believe that the Stanford-Binet IQ test is “fashionable nonsense” — it’s just “fashionable nonsense” stuck in the 1920s.
So, reading the Butterflies and Wheels post on slaughterhouses mentioned earlier and one of the comments, I came across I am what I think and do on Temple Grandin and autism, which links to Dr Grandin’s own paper on autism.
It is likely that genius in any field is an abnormality. Children and adults who excel in one area, such as math, are very poor in other areas. The abilities are very uneven. Einstein was a poor speller and did poorly in foreign language. The brilliant physicist, Richard Feynman, did poorly in some subjects.
If I were to defend general intelligence here, I’d note that Einstein grew up in Switzerland, one of the most multilingual of European countries (since he was Jewish, he might have learned Yiddish and Hebrew as well), lived in Prague for a time as an adult, and managed to lecture at Princeton, so the “did poorly” may be in comparison to his more motivated peers; and Feynman seems to have been fairly easily distracted and an impatient sort. Still, they’re hardly good cases for ‘g.’
These 414 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:08am GMT Permanent link.
Back To Abu Ghraib »
Brad the Shrill found this Guardian Special Report on Abu Ghraib. It’s too horrible to quote from. Disturbingly it keeps mentioning officers, and doesn’t mention any privates, like Lynndie England, as being behind the tortures.
Given this necessary assumption, all short-cut artists, let alone rec-room sadists, are to be treated, not as bad apples alone, but as traitors and enemies.
Christopher Hitchens. What do you think, Chris, they’re all bad apples? They don’t seem to be getting their kicks in the rec-room. What say we send these bad apples home? For everybody’s sake.
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:21am GMT Permanent link.
Well, Someone Likes 'Fahrenheit 9/11' »
For some reason, that someone isn’t one out of “all the reporters for all the major television and print media … trapped in five-star hotels” to quote Juan Cole. Unlike some, she actually sees the film before she decides it’s propaganda.
September 11… he sat there, reading the paper. As he reached out for the cup in front of him for a sip of tea, he could vaguely hear the sound of an airplane overhead. It was a bright, fresh day and there was much he had to do… but the world suddenly went black—a colossal explosion and then crushed bones under the weight of concrete and iron… screams rose up around him… men, women and children… shards of glass sought out tender, unprotected skin … he thought of his family and tried to rise, but something inside of him was broken… there was a rising heat and the pungent smell of burning flesh mingled sickeningly with the smoke and the dust… and suddenly it was blackness.
That is propaganda. And she admits it.
How do we feel about it this year? A little bit tired.
Which will gladden hearts in the Pentagon:
“At some point the Iraqis will get tired of getting killed and we’ll have enough of the Iraqi security forces that they can take over responsibility for governing that country and we’ll be able to pare down the coalition security forces in the country.”
So it seems that Donald Rumsfeld is winning. (Found through Oliver Willis.)
And some more propaganda:
We have 9/11’s on a monthly basis. Each and every Iraqi person who dies with a bullet, a missile, a grenade, under torture, accidentally—they all have families and friends and people who care.
What sentimental rubbish. River (update: whoops, got her name wrong, duh) will be reporting that Iraqi children flew kites and played and laughed before we invaded and we all know that’s a lie. It must be, because Michael Moore said it.
And “9/11’s on a monthly basis” what tosh!
What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.
Thus, violence killed 300 Iraqis last week, the equivalent proportionately of 3,300 Americans. What if 3,300 Americans had died in car bombings, grenade and rocket attacks, machine gun spray, and aerial bombardment in the last week? That is a number greater than the deaths on September 11, and if America were Iraq, it would be an ongoing, weekly or monthly toll.
Juan Cole again, poor deluded ‘expert.’ Mark Steyn says it’s Christmas all the year round. Or as Andrew Sullivan puts it:
So what if Iraqis are dealing with two 9/11s a month? Our Blessed Leader, who is responsible for the security of Iraqis, never makes mistakes, does he? And the last thing pro-war journalists should ever do is raise questions.
Zeyad, welcome to the Order of the Shrill. Baghdad Burning is currently third from the bottom on Jeff Jarvis’s “B-Roll Middle East.” Might be worth keeping an eye on that.
These 164 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:48pm GMT Permanent link.
Where's My Flying Car, Dude? »
Oh, there.
As motorways become more and more clogged up with traffic, a new generation of flying cars will be needed to ferry people along skyways.
And not before time, there were flying cars in Philip K. Dick’s novels, and they were usually set around 2000.
However, such vehicles could be some 25 years from appearing on the market.
Aw, boo. And then it seems that they’ll be a lot like planes so you have to go to your local airport, and then fly from there to the airport nearest your office. If they’re the same airport, that’s a long wasted trip. That sucks, man!
Where’s my silver jumpsuit? Why can’t I just beam over? What the hell happened to the future anyways?
These 86 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Mutineers, Deserters, Or Traitors »
Either these goons were acting on someone’s authority, in which case there is a layer of mid- to high-level people who think that they are not bound by the laws and codes and standing orders. Or they were acting on their own authority, in which case they are the equivalent of mutineers, deserters, or traitors in the field. This is why one asks wistfully if there is no provision in the procedures of military justice for them to be taken out and shot.
You see the technique, I trust? He offers two theories but only posits the consequences of the second; the first is forgotten. No matter, it was not that likely anyway. Or again:
It seems to be generally assumed that the work of the sniggering video-morons is black and white: one of the very few moral absolutes of which we have a firm and decided grasp.
It’s the fault of the privates. You know, the little people. They get out of hand.
Beyond the reports themselves, the key strategy of the defense is both to focus on the photographs and to isolate the acts they depict—which, if not the most serious, are those with the most political effect—from any inference that they might have resulted, either directly or indirectly, from policy. Thus the dogged effort to isolate these acts as “violence/sexual abuse incidents” that originated wholly in the minds of sadistic military police during the wee hours, and that, above all, had nothing whatever to do with what was done “to set the conditions” for interrogation—even though this division is quite artificial and many of the latter activities, as vividly demonstrated by the sufferings of Detainee-07, were conducted by precisely the same people and were equally, or more, disgusting, sadistic, and abusive.
That just implicates higher-ups in the Army. Well really, you can’t trust those army types.
As Lieutenant Colonel Steven Jordan, the head of the Joint Intelligence and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib, told General Taguba in December 2003, “Sir, I was told a couple times… that some of the reporting was getting read by Rumsfeld, folks out of Langley [CIA headquarters], some very senior folks.” For Jordan, that meant a lot of pressure to produce. It also meant that what went on at Abu Ghraib and other interrogation centers was very much the focus of the most senior officials in Washington.
Abu Ghraib: The Hidden Story found through Matthew Turner. It’s long and it will probably make you very, very angry.
The words are blunt, though a writer less fond of euphemism might have put the matter even more plainly: “American interrogators have tortured at least five prisoners to death.” And from what we know, Mr. Schlesinger’s figures, if anything, substantially understate the case.
It has become a cliché of the Global War on Terror—the GWOT, as these reports style it—that at a certain point, if the United States betrays its fundamental principles in the cause of fighting terror, then “the terrorists will have won.” The image of the Hooded Man, now known the world over, raises a stark question: Is it possible that that moment of defeat could come and go, and we will never know it?
These 87 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 23 September 2004
Presenting Pajamaman »
Yawn. Yet again there’s a bit of interest (mostly among bloggers, but also in some newspaper columnists with a deadline in 15 minutes and nary a thought in their pretty little heads) about bloggers as some kind of answer to journalism. It’s the sort of thing Harry de la Place does well, and he’s got all the links.
2 things though. As I said in the comments to an earlier Harry piece:
Matt Yglesias thinks bloggers added nothing to the Killian Memo story, and I really can’t see why Drudge can be thought to have contributed anything, ever. It was the Washington Post which proved they were forgeries, not the Little Green Fedayeen. Just because the memos could have been produced in Word in no way proves that they were.
There may be some cases where bloggers did bring something. As Andrew Sullivan noted in Time magazine:
Trent Lott, hounded by bloggers for a racist remark originally ignored by the big media, would still be Senate majority leader.
While the image of the “pajamahadeen” hounding anybody is far from pretty, maybe something did change. I think his other examples are feeble, though. Sullivan is very good at stroking his readers’ egos. When will he run for office?
Second, one improvement mooted in Harry’s comments is more op-ed in the papers — giving jobs to bloggers who have proven their worth. Nay. Nay. And thrice nay. What the big media needs is a cut in columnists and leaders, and a lot more of the reporting that can only be done while wearing clothes.
OTOH, proving by-the-by how self regarding blog are, Edward_ of Obsidian Wings:
In the comments on Brad DeLong’s blog, someone offered a humbling comparison of the influence of NYT columnist David Brooks versus that of the collective writers of Obsidian Wings. There just aren’t enough emoticons: …
This is, unsurprisingly, picked up by Brad the Shrill and by Kevin Drum. Now, I think that one researching journalist is worth a thousand columnists, but as we’re comparing like with like, any one of the Obsidian Wings crew are more deserving of the NYT gig than an idiot like David Brooks. (That link may explain the All-Bran advert with William Shatner I saw on Sky last night. Then again, nothing might explain it.)
On the third hand, "From Where I’m Sitting" is the sort of dreck that should never make a respectable paper. Let’s quote someone who claims to be authoritative (in this case, serving in Baghdad), and offer no proof that he who he says he is. (Remember how exercised members of the 101st Keyboard Squad became whenever Salam Pax expressed anything other than dewy-eyed devotion to the neocon cause? Suddenly they started alleging that he was blogging from Manhattan. Actually, working as a translator for the military, he was taking a lot more risks in the cause of liberation than James Lileks ever has.) And then we get in the comments:
If the writer is who I think it is, he is unimpeachable, and not just because he’s a Major in the USMC [United States Marine Corps]. I can’t say any more than that since he apparently wants to remain anonymous but I’d take anything he told me about Iraq as the absolute truth.
Again from someone who wants to be anonymous. This would be fine, but everything the ‘Major’ says goes against all the reports we have from the ground. Blogs contain unexploded propaganda. Handle with suspicion.
These 414 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:14am GMT Permanent link.
The Dread Gogglebox »
Chris Brooke favourite Tim Collins is on Question Time tonight, along with Backword favourite, the Minister for Permatanning, Peter Hain, aided and abetted by Simon Hughes, Richard Dreyfuss, and Julia Hartley-Brewer. I hope that Mr Hain tells Mr Dreyfuss that he is responsible for all the teenage gang crime in Hartlepool, the poor biddable mites following the odious example he set in American Graffiti.
QT regular Wallace Arnold has some tips for the baby-faced Tory. But it’s not all plain sailing.
I was in the newsagent, picking up my copy of The Spectator, when the gnarled old man behind the counter said: “Saw you on telly last night!”
“Aha—the dread gogglebox!” I replied, with a genial chuckle, adding, “I certainly gave Mr Peter Hain a run for his money, didn’t I, and my friends tell me I made a couple of very interesting points on the vexed issue of Iraq?!"Much to my surprise, the newsagent then glared at me and snapped: “I was talking to the lady behind you.”
I turned smartly around. There was Miss Jade Goody from Big Brother, a television programme. She was standing any-old-how in a lewd T-shirt that stopped well short of her belly button, chewing a piece of gum with an open mouth and looking, I may add, rather too pleased with herself.
It emerged that at the very same time I was starring on Question Time, Miss (Mssss!) Goody had managed to barge her way on to Celebrity Dieters on Holiday in Their Undies, an hour-long special on ITV.
If there’s a clash in the schedule tonight, it’s going to be a tough call.
These 96 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:49am GMT Permanent link.
Yusuf Uckup »
I know everybody posted on the Cat Stevens story yesterday, and the general take was “how ridiculous, he’s a fifty-year old singer …” I was reluctant to comment, because I didn’t feel that way. Apparently he denies it now, but I clearly remember reading reports of his support for the Rushdie fatwa. Attempts on the life of a civilian for saying something you don’t like strike me as terrorism, pure and simple. I can’t argue that he’s a threat to US security, he is just a fifty-year old singer, but he’s certainly politically undesirable to me.
The BBC report does offer some pleas of mitigation.
He has spoken out against the Russian school massacre and the 11 September terror attacks.
After 11 September, Mr Islam said: “No right-thinking follower of Islam could possibly condone such an action.”
He also set up a charity raising money for orphans and families afflicted by war in areas such as Kosovo, Bosnia, and Iraq.
In an interesting Harry’s Place thread, Chris Bertram points out “the man denies that he ever backed the Rushdie fatwa. With what credibility I can’t say, but the details are somwhere on the catstevens.com website.”
The one voice I agree with here is Juan Cole, who takes the denial into account and dismisses it.
He later explained this position away by saying that he did not endorse vigilante action against Rushdie, but would rather want the verdict to be carried out by a proper court. These are weasel words, since he was saying that if Khomeini had been able to field some Revolutionary Guards in London to kidnap Rushdie and take him to Tehran, it would have been just dandy if he were then taken out and shot for having written his novel. In my view, that entire episode of the Khomeini fatwa showed how sick some forms of Muslim activism had become, and served as a foretaste of al-Qaeda’s own death warrant served on a lot of other innocent people.
And Professor Cole concludes.
NEW RULES: If you advocate the execution of novelists for writing novels, you and John Ashcroft deserve one another.
These 163 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 24 September 2004
Would You Vote For A Man Who Tortures Innocent Men, Women, And Children? »
Tim Ireland is off on holiday for three weeks, a break he deserves after the triumphs of setting up Boris Johnson’s blog and his latest animation Something funny happened on the way to Abu Ghraib.
OK, take a moment to study the picture below, taken in Abu Ghraib sometime in late 2003. My, my, my… doesn’t everyone look ever-so-serious and ever-so-busy? Does this look like a late-night lark to you? Does this look like the work of a few out-of-control troopers who just happened to be stupid enough to take pictures of their crimes… or does this look like a professional set-up?
Note to Will Rubbish: Tim Ireland — Good lad; Christopher Hitchens, poseur and apologist for torture — not a good lad.
And that is partly why the Abu Ghraib nightmare is such a source of demoralization and despair. Thugs and torturers, who are always on tap in limitless supply, do their work in the dark and, when caught, plead exceptional circumstances. It’s as if they are on an urgent self-appointed mission. But the battle against Islamic jihad will be going on for a very long time, against a foe that is both ruthless and irrational. This means that infinite patience and scruple and intelligence are required, as well as decisiveness and bravery. Given this necessary assumption, all short-cut artists, let alone rec-room sadists, are to be treated, not as bad apples alone, but as traitors and enemies. If Rumsfeld could bring himself to say that, he could perhaps undo some of the shame, and some of the harm as well.
Dear reader, we know why C Hitchens and Donald Rumsfeld won’t say that. Hitchens can only believe these things happen in the dark because he squinted at the photos (if he even bothered to look) through a fug of nicotine and carbon monoxide in some crepuscular whisky bar, his eyes crossed with drink and his face puffed with rage and self-importance as if he had just head-butted a Portuguese Man o’War. Hitchens has been good enough to add a new word to the Orwellian lexicon darklight, which describes the ambient lighting to suit the Republican Party.
Still, I treasure his contribution to Backword.
These 161 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:31am GMT Permanent link.
Some Have Greatness Thrust Upon Them »
Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, exhibit number one is what the seraphs, the misinformed, simple, noble-winged seraphs, envied. Look at this tangle of thorns.
Nabokov, Lolita
We all have our youthful follies.
“There is something awfully naive and charming and sincere about [him],” he wrote to his parents. “I cannot help reacting against all the negative criticism of the regime that one hears in England. Nag, nag nag, the whole time.”
Plus ca change, as they say, that could have been written any time since September 11 2001, but it was Nigel Nicolson, who “two years in succession […] had joined Nazi friends in torchlit processions in Berlin.”
At Oxford his attitude changed and the Munich crisis clinched his recantation.
He was unfortunate in his military career.
At the end of the war in Europe, Nicolson’s brigade was involved, as part of the British 5th Corps that occupied Carinthia, in the hand-over to the Red Army of about 40,000 anti-Soviet Cossack prisoners—men, women and children—and, to Tito, of some 30,000 Yugoslavs who had opposed him during the civil war. The majority of these people were either murdered or died in captivity.
The incident had its sequel in 1989 when Nicolson agreed to give evidence on behalf of Count Nikolai Tolstoy during his libel battle with Lord Aldington, staff officer at the time, whom Tolstoy had accused of organising the betrayal of the Cossacks, knowing their likely fate.
Nicolson had kept a record of events, from which it was clear that British soldiers had lied to their captives about their destination as they were herded on board cattle trucks that would transfer them to their enemies.
He recalled how, when Tito’s partisans emerged to take control of the trains, the Yugoslavs “began hammering on the inside of the wagon walls, shouting imprecations, not at the partisans but at us, who had betrayed them. This scene was repeated day after day, twice a day. It was the most horrible experience of my life.”
And then he was a Tory MP.
Nicolson was never comfortable with the Conservative tag. Yet he managed at first not to cause too much offence and in 1955 was re-elected with an increased majority.
I can imagine Will Rubbish muttering “Bad lad” but from here, his life gets better.
The crunch came in 1956 when, having committed the almost unpardonable offence of supporting a Labour private member’s Bill to abolish hanging, he then abstained in the vote of confidence in the government over Suez. His actions led to demands for his resignation from his constituency association. When he refused, his executive sent a telegram to the Prime Minister repudiating their member and pledging loyalty to the government.
In 1959, Nicolson, with the support of the chairman of the Tory Party, Lord Hailsham, insisted on the matter being put to a postal ballot of members. But in the meantime, he had become embroiled in a controversy of an entirely different nature.
In 1949, he had founded, with George Weidenfeld, the publishing firm of Weidenfeld and Nicolson. The firm struggled in its early years but the book that made the firm famous and contributed to Nicolson’s debacle in Bournemouth was Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, the controversial tale of a 12-year-old sex kitten with whom a middle-aged man falls in love.
Nicolson did not wholly believe in the book and had argued against its publication, but he was compelled to defend it when the firm took the decision to publish just as he was trying to save his political career. The two controversies peaked simultaneously and the postal ballot went against him by 3,762 votes to 3,671.
“Some have greatness thrust upon them,” as the poet Shakespeare had it. For those acts alone, he’s a good lad in my book. He is survived by two daughters and a son, Adam, who is also a good lad, being much disliked by Mark Steyn who can sniff out a “miglior fabbro” the way some dogs can sniff out cancer.
These 132 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:22pm GMT Permanent link.
Separated At Birth »
For the benefit of Peter Cuthbertson. Explanation here. Knowing the difference, alas, shows that Hak Mao, most of Harry’s Placers and myself are of a certain age. We shouldn’t laugh.
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 25 September 2004
Kenneth Bigley Murdered »
According to MSN:
A posting on an Islamic Internet site Saturday claimed that an al-Qaida-linked group has killed British hostage Kenneth Bigley.
The BBC is still reporting on attempts by UK Muslims to have him freed.
Update: this is what you get for blogging breaking news, even if that news seems well-sourced and plausible. The BBC is still claiming that Ken Bigley is alive.These 17 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:12pm GMT Permanent link.
Dumbing Down? »
My copy of “Labour Today” came in the post this morning. I thought I left the People’s Party last year, but the news doesn’t seem to have reached the marketing department. Perhaps they think that if they keep sending me stuff I’ll rejoin out of guilt.
The cover shows a “headteacher Dexter Hutt” (bet the kids call him “Jabba” or am I showing my age again?) who “turned a failing school into one of the best in the country.” He’s sitting with the fixed grin people show when the cameraman takes his time closing the shutter. But then headmasters are usually unnatural all the time. It seems to go with the job. He’s also in the middle of a class of children playing with working on laptops. I know that’s a big Labour thing now, but I thought kids across the West were computer-literate in their teens.
It would seem not. The Poor man has been set as one of two blogs (the other is Paperwight’s Fair Shot) for students at the University of South Carolina to analyse.
I am gobsmacked. I am speechless. One of the things that attracted me to blogs was the level of literacy, even among geeks. Blogs are, most of the time, properly punctuated and correctly spelled. I assumed that the audience was smart. It seems there are 18-year-olds who don’t recognise satire. There is one (I forget which) who not only apparently can’t tell where Andrew Northrup stops and the comments start, but who can’t tell which comments are porn spam.
Last year, Kevin Drum mouthed off on the five paragraph essay (something he apparently learned about from Jeanne d’Arc). These kids are in university, and they haven’t even got that down. Few of them understand that, when you’re asked to choose between two blogs, you’re supposed to at least write a paragraph about each one and then give reasons for the one you prefer.
The students’ blog are all on the left hand-column of this page. Paperwight has commented on many of them. If you have a history of suicidal thoughts or attempts, or have any sharp objects or guns in your house, don’t even bother checking them. You know that authors often get asked about their “ideal reader.” If you have a mental picture of who reads your blog, prepare for a nasty shock.
These 393 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:42pm GMT Permanent link.
Why Boris Is Right »
Will Rubbish wrote a post directed at me FAO Backword D … (that’s me) which I foolishly rose to. I should have stopped at the first sentence, but … I don’t like Christopher Hitchens these days, but for a fair (if, for me, toe-curling) interview see Johann Hari. For an intelligent analysis, see my favourite blogger of the moment Gary Farber, who happens to admire both contrarian and interviewer.
Will is a good lad. We just happen to disagree on many things. (There is no one I’ve yet encountered I haven’t disagreed with—and I hope there never is.)
Will copies much of Boris Johnson’s Remember what happened to Scargill (link to www.boris-johnson.com so Torygraph registration not required) into the comments thread. I’ve been meaning to comment on it anyway, as it’s a good piece even by Boris’s high standards.
I can remember exactly where I was when I experienced my first spasm of savage Right-wing indignation. It was 1984, at breakfast time—about 10.40am—and I had a spoonful of Harvest Crunch halfway to my lips. The place was the Junior Common Room of my college.
For the previous two decades I had viewed politics with a perfectly proper mixture of cynicism and apathy. Whatever I read under the bedclothes, it certainly wasn’t Hansard. Like everyone at my school, I had undergone vague sensations of enthusiasm when the Falklands were recaptured, but otherwise, frankly, I did not give a monkey’s.
Occasionally I would glance at the political columnists in the newspapers, and be amazed that anyone could pay them to write such tosh. I hadn’t a clue who was in the Cabinet. The world was too beautiful to waste time on such questions.
So I was sitting there in a state of glorious indifference, hungover, probably lovesick, when something happened that caused a sudden streak of rage to course across my brain. Someone was rattling a tin in front of my nose.
I looked up. I stopped crunching my Harvest Crunch. It was one of the goateed Marxists, and he wanted me to cough up for the miners. Normally, I was as soft a touch as the next man for your right-on cause: debt relief, leprosy projects—count me in.
But, as I reached for my pocket, I found myself remembering some stuff I’d read about these miners, and the chaos they were causing with their illegal strike. Oi, I said to my fellow-student. No, I said. I won’t give any dosh to these blasted strikers, because, as far as I can see, they are being execrably led, haven’t had a proper ballot and are plainly trying to bring down the elected government of the country.
The bearded student Marxist (I think he’s now at Goldman Sachs) looked so amazed that he almost jumped out of his donkey jacket, but I stuck to my ground.
I find a lot to like there. The self-conscious admission of rising late. The memory of the days when a donkey jacket was the garment of the working class. (I wore a double-breasted naval thing I’d bought in Oxfam which only pasted muster in the murk of the seedy nightclubs I spent most of my public hours at the time.) The tacit notion that one can’t be a lefty and a banker.
He was right about the miners’ strike. Trying to “bring down the elected government of the country” didn’t bother me so much. I knew they were, and I agreed. The other two points, though, did worry me. They’d gone on strike at the wrong time. They’d been out-manoeuvred, as became embarrassingly apparent. Boris is right about the ballot. At the time, I remember trying to pass it off as right-wing propaganda to my dad, who wouldn’t have it. My middle-class friends did take it.
Boris is right on many counts. If you’re to start a war, you better bone up on all other wars, and learn which tactics work and which don’t. (In other words, at least know your Hegel.) He’s also right on the fault-lines of the miners’ strike. I don’t agree about the lasting harm to the left; Labour was already divided, and the SDP had formed by then, but the rout there strengthened Thatcher, and kept her in power, when it might have gone either way.
Go back to that miners’ strike, and the Scargillian revolt. Remember how people began with some feelings of sympathy for the rebels. We all heard their message; the threat to the communities, the Hovis ad pit villages, the way of life that would never return.
All of which I agree with, and (I hope) Harry’s Placers do too.
But suburban Britain was never likely to indulge Scargill for long, and as soon as police were pictured with blood running down from under their helmets, the mood began to turn.
That was, AFAIK, propaganda. Not that policemen bled; I’m sure they did. But they attacked first, which alters the moral spin.
But that is the past, which as the poet Auden has it, “may say alas, but cannot help or pardon.” Boris hopes the hunting lobby will learn.
Matthew Turner was the first blogger I found with an opinion on the siege on Peter Hain’s house. I commented:
Although I don’t like Peter Hain, and I know that he was going to Brighton for Party rather than national business, the police should have allowed the protestors to make their point and then used whatever force necessary to move them on.
I stand by that. I know that there is a lobby of aggrieved people. That doesn’t give them the right to cut off anyone’s water supply and surround their house. I was sympathetic to the hunters, because I thought that a majority decision wasn’t enough to prevent a minority’s freedom. (I usually think “gay” here. I don’t care how the vote would go; gays can do what they like within the limits of other laws). Now, as Boris predicted, they’ve lost my sympathy.
These 546 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:07pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 27 September 2004
Of Feeds And F***s »
A couple of weeks ago Michael Brooke recommended the OSX newsreader Newsfire, which is the best example of its genus I’ve come across so far. So thanks, Mike.
I’ve added every site in the sidebar with a feed, plus a few news sites like BBC News and many of the Telegraph RSS feeds. The Telegraph gets the RSS business right. There are separate feeds for just about all areas of interest which makes ignoring stuff I’m not interested in (like fashion, gardening, and motoring) a synch. To conserve bandwidth, the rss feeds are mostly empty of content, so you don’t get several pages you’re not bothered about delivered to your desktop. These people know what they’re doing.
(If you haven’t got OSX—and why not?—the Telegraph helpfully links to Dave Winer’s aggregators page on the Harvard Law site.)
I find the “Breaking News” feed especially interesting. Just now, I got the link for ’Thank you for calling NTL…now f*** off’, which may yet show up in tomorrow’s paper.
A telephone company has launched an inquiry into how callers ringing its complaints line were greeted with a string of expletives. …
The message, which was added to interactive voice recordings, said: “Hello. You are through to NTL customer services. We don’t give a f*** about you. We are never here.
“We will f*** you about , basically, and we are not going to handle any of your complaints. Just f*** off and leave us alone. Get a life.”
Squander Two worked for British Gas and lives in Glasgow. Police can eliminate him from their enquiries.
These 184 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:44am GMT Permanent link.
Anything To Oblige »
Harry Hutton is 23rd on Google for British National Party. You know what to do.
These 15 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:19pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 28 September 2004
Innuendo »
I’m the Dude. So that’s what you call me. You know, that or uh, His Dudeness, or uh, Duder, or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing.
Ah, Marc Mulholland got there first. Though Roy Edroso is funnier:
Fancy Bush doing something underhanded to win an election! Bloody Democrats, traitors all. Shame! Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.
I should confess that I used to subscribe to the ‘October Surprise’ theory, but I came to realise that it placed far too much faith in the DoD. Hitchens dismisses the likelihood with a sneer.
We are invited to believe that these hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave, ready to uncork him when they get a call from Karl Rove? For shame.
How many prisoners are there in Abu Ghraib or Guantanamo? Would one more really upset their plans? (One of the things that really disgusts me about the occupation is the news that Saddam has access to a garden, while MI made human pyramids out of the children of bootleggers and other unfortunates ratted on to the cops.)
Even if the US were holding bin Laden, it must be extremely likely that, despite being 6-foot-six with a limp and a dialysis machine, he flitted out like a bat some midnight while his jailers were intent on raping fourteen-year-olds.
Hitchens starts with one remark by Teresa Heinz Kerry, and from that he builds a nest like a dung beetle in which everyone who disagrees with him is secretly hoping for further loss of life in Afghanistan and Iraq. And he means secretly, because his method of checking this relies on telepathy.
What will it take to convince these people that this is not a year, or a time, to be dicking around?
As Marc says —
But Hitchens wasn’t always so respectful of the office of President. So stark were his recent fulminations that I had to rub eyes and re-read his latest expressions of outraged dignity. This is the same Hitchens who was so sure that Clinton’s “war crime”, a raid on Khartoum in August 1998, was a “crime … directly and sordidly linked to the effort by a crooked President to avoid impeachment”. That was clear eyed wisdom then, it seems, but to suggest an October Surprise now is disgraceful “dicking around”.
Indeed, when he started his (IMO correct) pursuit of Kissinger, Soviet missiles were still targeted on Western Europe. That was, however, a time “to be dicking around.” If any deviation from unswerving loyalty to the President is dangerous now, how much worse can it have been when we had an enemy with better resources than landmines, hijacked planes, and a penchant for hostage-taking?
Not entirely co-incidentally, I’m reading Orwell’s Victory, in which Hitchens quotes, with approval and apparently without irony, Orwell’s reply to the Duchess of Atholl’s invitation to speak on the platform of the League of European Freedom.
Certainly what is said on your platforms is more truthful than the lying propaganda to be found in most of the press, but I cannot associate myself with an essentially Conservative body which claims to defend democracy in Europe but has nothing to say about British Imperialism. It seems to me that one can only denounce the crimes now being committed in Poland, Jugoslavia etc. if one is equally insistent on ending Britain’s unwanted rule in India. I belong to the Left and must work inside it, much as I hate Russian totalitarianism and its poisonous influence in this country.
(Page 27.) And don’t you just love Amazon?
Customers who bought books by Christopher Hitchens also bought books by these authors:
- Noam Chomsky
- Edward W. Said
- Henry Kissinger
- Gore Vidal
- Francis Wheen
Now that’s funny.
These 309 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:16pm GMT Permanent link.
Melanie In Wonderland »
Thanks, but no thanks, to Chris Brooke who, being made of sterner stuff than the present writer, manages to read two blog posts by ‘Mad’ Melanie Phillips.
But if the implied reason he went to war was wrong, then what was the justification for removing Saddam?
Ah, there wasn’t one. As any fule know. And, not having emptied her bile in her first post, she lays it on the rest of the Prime Minister’s Labour Conference speech, mostly for this paragraph.
And remember when to be in favour of gay rights was to be a loony leftie, race relations was political correctness, and Red Ken frightened people even as brave as your own leadership? Now the parties compete for the gay vote, unite against the BNP and Ken has led and won the debate on congestion charging and community policing. So many things that used to divide our country bitterly, now unite it in healthy consensus.’
I’ve said in the past that I am in some ways a conservative: my favourite book in the Bible is Ecclesiastes, and, if I had a motto, it might well be “Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose.” Like all lefties, I do acknowledge a kind of progress, and if “So many things that used to divide our country bitterly, now unite it in healthy consensus” is a nice way of saying “things have only got better” then I agree. (I think we have new prejudices and new phobias to replace the old; but that’s for another discussion.)
Blair uses the word ‘gay’ twice in the paragraph above, once in “gay rights” and once in “gay vote.” Ms Phillips reads this as
Gloating about the grip of the ‘gay rights’ agenda, which avowedly aims to destroy sexual and social norms and is acting as the spearhead of a movement to destabilise family life while viciously suppressing, through intimidation and character assassination, any attempt to warn of the harm this may do — the agenda that this Labour government has ruthlessly and obsessively embraced since 1997 — reveals the purportedly ‘right-wing’, ‘Tory’ Tony to be a different political animal altogether.
But Melanie, he’s not ‘gloating,’ and didn’t you used to claim to be ‘left-wing’? Actually so much of the rest makes me feel ill, that I’m not going to bother, but this stands out:
Blair actually praised that most self-destructive oxymoron, a ‘multicultural society’ …
As well he might. I suspect most of my readers have been the US of A, and probably New York. If New York is not multicultural, I don’t know a place that is. New York is an amazing city (plus both James Lileks and Osama bin Laden hate it). Would there were more like it. So, IMO, ‘multicultural society’ is neither ‘self-destructive’ nor an ‘oxymoron.’
And as for a ‘consensus’ supporting Ken Livingstone, presumably Blair …
Blair did not mention any such thing. He says two things:
And remember when … Red Ken frightened people even as brave as your own leadership? … Ken has led and won the debate on congestion charging and community policing.
That’s pretty good speech writing. Blair backs Livingstone where “Ken has led and won the debate” and lets him flounder where he hasn’t.
Whenever I think Blair’s scary, from now on I’ll remind myself that it could be a lot worse.
These 336 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Clit Power »
Many a true word department:
Found through Pandagon's ads. Alternatees—and doesn't the girl on the home page look like the young Joan Bakewell? Thinking man's crumpet indeed. Disappointingly, they also do a men's version. I mean, duh. My dick while fairly nasty and brutish hasn't actually bombed any innocent children nor lied to the American people. Not en masse anyway: the odd two or three after a few drinks, but of course.
These 73 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:17pm GMT Permanent link.
Tom Cruise Is Gray »
No, I shot him. The bullets and the fall killed him.
A post delayed from the weekend. Go see Collateral. I seem to have been alone in finding Heat overblown and over-rated. But Collateral puts Michael Mann back at the top as a serious film-maker. He does unexpected violence as well as he ever has—viz the scene is Last of the Mohicans were the line of redcoats march past the Mohicans, one of whom axes the last man in line, or the one in Red Dragon where we think the killer is “cured” by love, only to see him machine-gun a rival behind a hedge. As with the best of earlier Mann, the violence is mostly off-screen, or after we’re familiar with the humanity of the about-to-be-deceased.
Ted Barlow of Crooked Timber said “When I walked out of that movie [Shaun of the Dead], I immediately said to my friend, “People are going to be watching that movie thirty years from now.’” Well, maybe, in a cultish, camp, ironic “Rocky Horror” way, but I felt the same about Collateral.
Smart, wordy, speechy script by Stuart Beattie, which I think breaks into a prelude, an overture, and five acts—far more than the standard three of Hollywood ritual (mocked, as it should be, by the Orange ads). So many British films are gangster films (and as I’ve seen John Mackenzie’s house, I can see why), but they’re absurd, pallid, and flimsy stuff compared to the American genre—when it gets it right.
I am, however, happy not to review it. I saw it without having read anything beyond star ratings, and I advise you, if you can, not to either. There are loopholes which, if you’re inclined to revisit films in detail inside your head, as I am, will bug you like an itchy nose inside a space helmet. It grips, and if you tolerate filmic license or shorthand, you may even learn something.
If you read the title wrongly, how am I to blame for that?
These 324 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Serendipity And The Philistines »
The ever-estimable Julian Sanchez links to the ever-execrable James Lileks which also includes this “gem.”
Went to the postcard show on Saturday, and for once I was able to stay until I ran out of money. My bankroll expired faster than expected, because I found some mint-condition 1893 World’s Fair postcards. Also because I was sitting at a table looking through some advertising cards when a fellow asked the vendor if she had any 1933 Chicago Fair cards. I don’t collect the ‘33 Fair much, because the cards are awful – garish, poorly rendered, like a hand-colored still from a Flash Gordon movie smeared with Vaseline.
“I just found this,” said the vendor. She handed him an ashtray.
I held my breath.
“No, thanks,” he said. He put it down. I picked it up. Perfect condition. Moderne bas-relief of the Fair. Fifteen bucks.
I slid it towards me, added it to my pile of purchases; no sirens went off, no one shouted USURPER! And ten minutes later it was mine.
I also bought a soda-bottle sleeve from 1936. I didn’t know this, but in the Old Days they’d slip a paper sleeve over the bottle to keep the condensation from dripping on your lap. This particular sleeve had a Coke logo, and was made by the No Drip Company.
Ooh postcards! soda-bottle sleeves! Hold me back, people! But what is this story from the nasty old reactionary Telegraph?
In a terse letter to his 11 fellow trustees Mr Dyson, the engineer and inventor of the vacuum cleaner that bears his name, said he was resigning after five years in the role because he believed that the museum had abandoned its founding ideal of promoting function-led, problem-solving design.
What a crusty, old, boring, jumper-wearing, snob James Dyson is. Design is, as Lileks says about cute things and all that stuff. James Dyson put his vacuum cleaner through 1,000 redesigns before going to market? James Lileks just giggles at home (and, on tough days, plays ‘Abu Ghraib’ with Flea, or whatever her name is) while his wife goes to work, “that ain’t design,” says mid-Western Jim, “that’s ‘work.’ Hee-hee-hee. The Pres and I are above that.”
These 111 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 29 September 2004
Why I Hate Christoper Hitchens »
I may be giving away my advanced age here, but the first school history which animated me was when I reached 3rd year in 1976, — we studied the American War of Independence. I was “lucky” in being taught it a convenient 200 years after the Declaration of Independence.
However, as I’ve said before Hitchens is very fond of the word “great” — the old public school influence coming out after the third bottle, no doubt. And he does love to tell us how his heroes are better than the rest of us.
We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal and independent;
Perhaps he picked the wrong country to live in. There’s always China … Or North Vietnam. Don’t they have statues of him there?
These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:44am GMT Permanent link.
Blogroll Update »
I haven’t added Pharyngula to my blogroll yet, which, considering the previous post is an egregious omission. The difference between “Trotskyist” and “Trotskyite” may start fist fights in the arts departments (do remember to teach students how to say “Would you like chips fries with that?” sometime in the third year), but in what the rest of us patronisingly call the “real world” the only things which matter are science and technology (mostly the latter, but we include those geeks because they occasionally have the odd bright idea—as I’m afraid I will discuss the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment and its repercussions at great length). If Donald Rumsfeld asked the Pentagon staff and hangers-on what the difference between Gulf Wars I and II was, I can see Chris Hitchens saying “It was my consciousness raising writing in the Nation, Slate, and so forth, that emboldened America!” Alas Rummy shakes his grey head, and replies “I’m afraid it was Moore’s Law and smart missiles, mostly programmed by Koreans who couldn’t read English, and even if they could, timeshared their lives between code and porn.”
There is a more pressing threat than the one from the obscurantist Marxists of the English dept. In the US it’s now obvious; here in the UK, it seems to be supported by Bible-fondling Tony Blair.
Intelligent Design creationism is bad theology, bad politics, bad education, and bad science. That last point is made for me every day as I read the real science literature, and see what a contrast it makes with the ideological press releases that come out of the Discovery Institute.
You may think that I hate Americans. I don’t. I hate idiots. In New York, on the West Coast, they work things out. Elsewhere, where Presidents come from (or claim to come from; having failed the mandatory Maine “Human Intelligence” test, which makes hunting you a crime) they believe any old religious shit. If you wish, read PZ Myers, he’s upset one Osama of the mid-West already. I try not to say, “read the whole thing” but if you don’t, the terrorists have won.
These 302 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:37am GMT Permanent link.
Through Inaction »
I remember having my one emotional argument with my favourite tutor, when I was in university. It was about (inevitably, I suppose) free will. He was arguing that the difference between humans and computers/robots (I maintain there is no difference; the brain is a computer) was the impulse to sacrifice one’s life. See Asimov’s Laws.
- A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
- A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
- A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.
I asserted that rats were disinclined to move across broken glass under most conditions, but put broken glass between a rat and her babies and she would cross it without hesitation. And what about Colonel ‘H’ Jones who sacrificed himself for his troops in the Falklands War?
If Sociobiology or Darwinism predict anything, they (it?) predict that we care more for our genes than ourselves. How much must it hurt to lose a small child? How much more to lose a 20-year-old? And how much more than that to learn that a brave man died for the lies of a pious politician?
“I waved goodbye to my son, who had his chin held high, who thought he was defending his country. But Blair lied to the nation, to me and to my son. No weapons of mass destruction have been found. He got into the war over oil and I want him to apologise.”
Don’t we all?.
These 242 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:18am GMT Permanent link.
Katherine The Sorely Missed »
Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings posts “probably the most important post Katherine has ever written” on her behalf, Legalizing Torture.
A few more like Katherine, and I might start to believe that blogs really the medium of the future. It’s the sort of story which a humanitarian journalist would cover, instead of, say, microscopically analysing one remark by a candidate’s wife.
These 60 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:45pm GMT Permanent link.
Going Local Down In Hartlepus »
Nick Barlow finds much to amuse him in Decca Aitkenhead’s Hartlepool coverage, especially where she describes her encounters with Iain Wright.
Did voters ever bring up Iraq, I asked?
“I’ve met more than 4,000 people by now, and do you know?” Wright said. “Only two have even mentioned it. It’s local issues people care about; that’s why they want a local candidate.” Not five minutes later we met a man who had voted Labour all his life, but wouldn’t this time because of the war. “What an amazing co-incidence,” Wright marvelled afterwards. “He was the third.”
The man merits his own tv show. I’m not one for reality television as a rule, but I like a good laugh.
“I think I’d say, being courteous and responsive to local issues. I’ve tried to be as local a councillor as possible.”
But apart from being local, what else did he offer? The question seemed to throw him. “Well, I’m local—”
But so was the taxi driver outside—and many of the names rejected by the NEC. If he excluded being local, could he describe his other qualities?
“Well you see I don’t think you can exclude it. You see, I’ll live in the town.” But Blair is seldom in Sedgefield, and presumably he didn’t think the prime minister ought not be its MP. He looked blank.
“I think I’m bright.” He paused. “I think I’m articulate. I’ve been to university. I can string a sentence together.” Then he relapsed. “I think it’s absolutely fantastic that one of our own could be going to parliament on Thursday.”
“One of our own” is a curious circumlocution for “me,” “myself,” or “I.” The “local” factor is a little odd, since the incumbent MP, Peter Mandleson is celebrated for living in London, and Ms Dunn comes from Darlington, which is 20 miles away.
But Iain Wright is a bright lad. Honest too.
Why, someone asked from the floor, had a planning application been made to sell off part of the hospital’s land? “It hasn’t,” Wright flatly denied. Jody Dunn calmly held up a copy of the planning application; Bloom asked how Wright, as a council cabinet minister, could conceivably never have seen it. Then Wright was asked exactly when he had signed the Save Our Hospital petition, because nobody could find his name on it. “It was in March,” he said firmly. How was that possible, demanded the questioner, when the petition formally closed last Christmas? “I - I,” Wright stammered. “I can’t remember.”
Wright fought hard for selection.
The anger dates back to the candidate selection process in August. Members were given 24 hours to submit nominations by email. Twentysix were submitted, including several long-serving councillors, Mandelson’s old election agent, and a former MEP. The NEC vetted them, and presented the local party with a shortlist of three. Wright was the only Hartlepool name on it. “Local, long-standing members, not even allowed to stand before their own local party? Judged unsuitable even to look at! How can that be? It was shocking - a disgrace,” Fisher said. “We were given a choice of one. We felt railroaded into it, and we’re seething. I can only assume the NEC had an image of what they wanted, someone who’d say yes to everything and wouldn’t rock the boat. And that’s Iain Wright for sure. He’s a lightweight.”
Jody Dunn’s only fault, it seems to me, is an excessive supply of honesty.
We’d picked what appeared at first to be a fairly standard row of houses. As time went on however, we began to realise that everyone we met was either drunk, flanked by an angry dog or undressed; and in some cases two or more of the above.
Anyone who’s campaigned during the day has had similar experiences. What sort of people do you expect to be home in the early evening? That’s probably true in Chelsea, too.
In other news, Labour apologise for racist leaflet.
A statement from the Welsh Labour executive said: “The leaflet dealt with the issue of Travellers’ sites in a totally inappropriate manner. Welsh Labour believes that, where such issues are raised in political debate, it should be done responsibly and as a means of addressing prejudice, not pandering to it. It is acknowledged that the leaflet breaches the cross-party concordat on these issues.
“Welsh Labour apologises that the leaflet appeared in the name of the party and that its distribution, however limited, was not prevented. We accepted that the use of the images concerned was likely to cause offence to the Travelling community and to residents of Llanedeyrn and Pentwyn and could undermine good relations between them.
I knew Labour had been desperate in Cardiff; I hadn’t realised how much.
These 165 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Another Holiday Destination Off My List »
Just when I was thinking that Kazakhstan sounded like a lot of fun.
Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a living being a Gypsy catcher. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine. It is not customary for a man to grab another man’s khrum. “Khrum” is not the word for testicles.
The ‘misconceptions’ are part of an television act, broadcast on Channel 4 here, and on HBO in the States.
It was partly Borat’s casual but relentless anti-Semitism that led Vassilenko to object publicly, in a letter to The Hill, a Washington weekly. (In real life, [Sacha Baron] Cohen [the actor who plays Borat] is an observant Jew, but the Anti-Defamation League also condemned him, arguing that “the irony may have been lost on some of the audience.”)
As with Ali G, you laugh at Borat. Borat is a way of making anti-semitism look foolish. And I think that, despite what David Duff says in Chris Brooke’s comments, minds have been changed; Britain is less racist than it was in the 1960s, it’s not just people being made to shut up. There are all sorts of factors involved, but one of these must surely be Alf Garnett, aided by all sorts of racist loons, who made themselves look foolish without the help of scriptwriters.
At least I learned one thing.
Vassilenko is also chagrined at Borat’s portrayal of women in Kazakh society, epitomized by his claim that “in Kazakhstan we say, ‘God, man, horse, dog, then woman, then rat.’” Vassilenko said, “I don’t think our women like that, not to mention the men. We have women ministers, women judges, businesspeople.” Nor should Borat have been appalled, as he was in one episode, to learn that American women can vote. American and Kazakh women both got the vote, Vassilenko pointed out, on August 26, 1920.
Found through Avendon Carol.
These 128 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Bloody Democrats, Traitors All »
Yesterday I quoted Roy Edroso’s shorter Christopher Hitchens.
Fancy Bush doing something underhanded to win an election! Bloody Democrats, traitors all. Shame! Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug.
But I had no idea of the depths that the Democrats would sink to.
Indeed, as Senator Orrin Hatch (R-UT) and others have noted, terrorists “are going to throw everything they can between now and the election to try and elect Kerry.” This was made obvious when the 527 group Terrorists For Kerry began campaigning for the Massachusetts senator throughout various swing states. Just yesterday at a Kerry rally in Nashua, New Hampshire, Ayman al-Zawahiri spoke to cheering throngs of Democrats, laying out a scathing attack on George Bush and firing up the base with appeals to standard Democratic issues such as universal health care, better funding for education, and the purging of crusaders and zionists with a tide of blood.
And the terrorists’ plans have been working for John Kerry so far. While New Hampshirites, for example, disagreed with many of Zawahiri’s stances on the slaughter of innocents, they were generally taken by his independent, “maverick” persona.
It must be true, I read it on the internet.
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 30 September 2004
When Tony 'Muffed It' »
Chris Brooke wrote an interesting post yesterday on Melanie Phillips, who considered that Tony Blair “muffed it” in his conference speech. Mick Hartley seems to agree.
Now, I think Blair wasn’t at the back of queue when egomania was being handed out, and I take it as read that the departure of Alistair Campbell has sapped No. 10’s intellect (though I’ve yet to see any confirming evidence), but that man’s not daft. Rachel Sylvester believes that Blair has lost women’s hearts and minds.
The pollster Deborah Mattinson, who held focus groups with women for Labour in 1997, says the disillusionment among female voters is so intense now because their expectations were so high then. “Women fell in love with Tony Blair,” she says. “They liked him more than they thought they would ever like a politician, they thought he was going to be really different, they were passionate about him. Now they feel betrayed by him. It’s as if their lover has cheated on them. It’s going to have to be flowers every Friday if he wants to win them back.”
This week, the Labour leader presented the first bouquet. His conference speech was designed to appeal specifically to women. Female voters complain privately that Mr Blair is too messianic, so he was more downbeat and less rhetorical than usual. Women accuse him of arrogance, so he admitted fallibility and almost apologised for being wrong. They do not like politicians speaking in grand generalities; so he used specific examples of people who had benefited from government policy—"Natalie” from Nottingham—to make his point.
That sounds like Blair, reading focus groups the way Roman priests read the Emperor’s bowel movements, and steering by their signs.
Melanie Phillips writes for the Hate Mail which sacked writer who painted Hindley picture. “Jane Kelly, who has worked for the paper for 15 years” claimed “her sideline as a Stuckist painter did not conform to the paper’s high moral tone.” (The Guardian doesn’t directly quote her saying any such thing, BTW—which is not to say that she didn’t say it.)
“Jane is a very talented writer, but she is a bit unpredictable. I wasn’t surprised when I heard what happened, but she’s the type of person newspapers would normally try to keep hold of because she is such an original writer you would make exceptions for her,” said one senior staffer at the company.
Friends of Kelly’s say the paper is mad to get rid of her. “She is one of the few who understood words of more than one syllable,” said one.
The Daily Mail, high on moral tone, low on polysyllables?
These 175 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:44am GMT Permanent link.
So Prove Me Wrong »
Norm links to, and comments wryly on, this hopeless piece of guff. (Note that Paul Carr is familiar with post-publication amendment himself — see this Guardian correction; his allegation may be correct, but neither his article nor the Guardian clarifications department substantiated it.) Norm takes issue with the statement that “a hot story in Blogistan is still worth nothing until the mainstream media pick it up” on the grounds that “while the reasoning may be formally correct, the statement is also misleading: because, if the story is in fact hot, the media will have eventually to pick it up; otherwise, long term, they, their reputation and their readership figures would suffer.” I’m not sure that this is true. A story which sells newspapers (say about some C-list celeb’s sexuality) may be of little interest to the obsessives who blog—and may or may not make print, depending how little else is happening that week, and how bothered editors are by the Press Complaints Commission. The press quite often sit on hot stories — take the rumours about the Prime Minister’s “crisis” during the summer. It seems that some journalists knew more than they published. Not reporting, in this case, may have done their reputations some good; there is a virtue in omerta.
As for the Dan Rather story, the Poor Man finds in the LA Times Blogger Who Faulted CBS Documents Is Conservative Activist.
But it did not come from an expert in typography or typewriter history as some first thought. Instead, it was the work of Harry W. MacDougald, an Atlanta lawyer with strong ties to conservative Republican causes who helped draft the petition urging the Arkansas Supreme Court to disbar President Clinton after the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the Times has found.
The identity of “Buckhead,” a blogger known previously only by his screen name on the site freerepublic.com and lifted to folk hero status in the conservative blogosphere since last week’s posting, is likely to fuel speculation among Democrats that the efforts to discredit the CBS memos were engineered by Republicans eager to undermine reports that Bush received preferential treatment in the National Guard more than 30 years ago.
Republican officials have denied any involvement among those debunking the CBS story.
Reached by telephone today, MacDougald, 46, confirmed that he is Buckhead, …
As any fule kno, the proof that the memo was forged was in the Washington Post.
Now comes the ‘falsifiable hypothesis’ part, can the blogosphere make a story ‘hot’ without the help of “old media"? To take part in this experiment, read Sebastian Holsclaw’s Republicans Must Not Support Torture, and if you haven’t already, Legalizing Torture by erstwhile Obsidian Winger Katherine.
These 294 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:25pm GMT Permanent link.
You Don't Say »
Hak Mao posts today on women’s haircuts.
The book, published in the thirties, and not looking as if it had been opened once since, declared that the [then] current [women’s] fashion for bobbed hair was responsible for the sharp increase in Sapphic vice since the end of the war.
It reminded me of World O’Crap’s Some Other Sunday Thoughts, which takes instructions from Mom Of 9 (not recommended, unless you’re into cuteness and tinny music). Mom of 9 regrets just about every aspect of the modern world. That reminds me of some Saudi guy …
The hair is the natural covering God has given to the woman to signify her humility and submission. If she cuts it short, she is dishonoring herself and is displaying a rebellious spirit. […] Likewise, the man’s hair is to be short to signify his headship under Christ.
Well, that’s hair sorted, now as to raiment.
It’s kind of funny that for nearly 6000 years, women always wore long dresses, but only since the last 40 years, a dress is suddenly “impractical” to wear. You cannot change history to validate what you want to make acceptable for today. Nowadays, women think that they cannot so much as rake a few leaves without adorning themselves in a pair of pants.
If you saw a man wearing a dress, what would you call him?
World O’Crap suggests “Holy Father.” The accompanying image (pinched from Gregorian Ranting) might give you another idea.
These 79 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Well Fuck Me, A Result Of Sorts »
I’m channel hopping between “Question Time” and “Newsnight.” The latter is calling Hartlepool as close, but suspecting a Labour hold. Michael Crick (best known for his splendid biography of Jeffrey Archer; but historically solid Labour) blustered around voters in semi-comic style. And on BBC1 just now, Geoff Hoon, asked if Iraq was worse than he expected, said “Yes, it is.”
Anyway, onto the real story of the night. This afternoon I wrote So Prove Me Wrong, and the mainstream media have indeed picked up Katherine the Greatly Missed’s crucial torture post. The Washington Post (I suspect that this is not a permanent link) covers it like this.
Blogger Obsidian Wings started a blogger rampage on the issue yesterday.
Given that so many journalists blog these days, I don’t think that blogging is that abstruse. Now, who will be cited as “blogger Crooked Timber"?
These 132 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:27pm GMT Permanent link.