Monday, September 1, 2003
Fast, Clean, and Healthy «
Someday, I’ll have to buy a new computer, and after reading about Dell’s Software License Policy, I know there’s one less vendor to bother with. The more I think about it, the more likely it is to be an Apple. I’m impressed with the solid-looking Apple books available in the computing section of every bookshop. So there’s a lot of learning: I consider that good, the more you put in, the more you take out (in principle at least). First, I have to find out if my ISP can even talk to Macs.
Currently, I use Opera as my browser of choice, and I’m very grateful for the option of using my own style sheet and making poorly-designed pages readable. I’ve linked to stuff in the Spectator before, and if this goes on, I might have to start buying the print edition. This week there is a perceptive article on Class slobbery. It chimes with my own few stints as a cleaner when I was a student, though I was fortuneate enough not to have to clean student flats while they were occupied, only at the end of term, before the conference season.
Snopes explain some of the Martin Luther King stuff I talked about earlier. Being better researchers than I am, they found the evidence of his plagiarism (though this says nothing about the standards of his fellow students, and what was expected at the time). It doesn’t revise my opinions at all, though it checks some of the accusations thrown at him.
I forget if I linked to this story: Masturbating may protect against prostate cancer (I remember that I meant to). It’s hard not to be at least mildly interested. (The article doesn’t say what it’s usually understood as saying. It says that regular ejaculation when young seems to be correlated with lower rates of prostrate cancer, no more, no less: and that includes penetrative sex, fellatio, and wet dreams). And indeed, Gary Trudeau threw it into an upcoming Doonesbury strip, which has already been axed by some papers. (“Axed” here does not mean that they will not print Trudeau’s work in future, but that a substitute strip will be run instead.)
“I decided not to run it,” said Lou Ziegler, editor of The Forum of Fargo, N.D. “You know what they say about pornography: ‘You know it when you see it.’ There is a line between what’s acceptable and what’s offensive dialogue in a community like ours. For me, this crossed the line. I knew it when I saw it.”
(Found through What You Can Get Away With.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:18 pm GMT
We’re getting through.
I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I don’t believe that the attackers of the BBC or as Ionica has it “all the idiots badmouthing Auntie” are drones for Murdoch. (Though Metafilter offers several sane voices on the Beeb.) But I do think that if they win, it’s the end of Britain as a civilised country. As most of the ones I’ve come across are Americans anyway, I don’t imagine that that bothers them. The future they want reminds me of the end of It’s A Wonderful Life: that soulless commercial desert. But it’s your choice, folks. You can object to John Humphries, but you can always listen to another station. Instead the free marketeers want to dumb us down to Rush Limbaugh, on every station, all the time. You will have a choice: it will be coke, pepsi, or some other shit. You can see the country five years hence, fallen to Daily Express readers.
Daily Express Reader 1: Ugh ugh ugh ghhhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
Daily Express Reader 2: NNN!!
They circle each other, grunting, for several minutes. One picks up a discarded bone, possibly a femur from a horse, examines in, beats in on the ground as if stirring some atavistic memory. Then throws it away in anger, his brow furrowed in pain.
DER1: (summoning all the anger and bile he has learned this morning, though he cannot remember what against): Moron!
DER2: Poof!
DER1: Asylum seeker!
DER2: Liberal!
DER1: Frechman!
DER2: Graduate!
DER1: (with finality). Guarrdian reader!
DER2: Oh!
He wilts, vanquished, and turns away.
(When I want to insult someone, I say Morpion!)
The Best Songs Since Johnny Rotten Roared found through Hot Buttered Death. Hard to disagree with the logic of the selection, although New Order is a major minus. They may have been influential, but only for the worse. I could reverse the order of the top three, but the spirit is there.
Urban sprawl piles on the pounds, in other words, walking about a bit is healthy, driving in your car is not. I have an American email friend whose ex-husband used to drive the half mile to church. Note the ex.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:13 am GMT
Wednesday, September 3, 2003
You Say You Want A Revolution «
Only last week I complained that nothing would change in Downing Street with Alastair Campbell’s departure. Hah! Who says blogs can’t change the world?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:06 pm GMT
Charlotte Beers, the former ad executive made undersecretary of State for public diplomacy in 2001,… said she was “dazzled” by a co-production of Sesame Street broadcast in Egypt since 2000. “The children are glued to the set. They are learning English, they are learning about American values.“
The show’s producers disagree:
“We don’t set out in any way to push American or western values. That’s not our mission at all,“ says Beatrice Chow, spokeswoman for Sesame Street’s foreign co-productions.
“There are universal values that we encourage, such as sharing, co-operation, respect and understanding. But we see what the needs are of the specific country where the show is being broadcast — such as in South Africa where we introduced an HIV-positive character because of the Aids problem there.“
Maybe I spent too long reading Wittgenstein, but I don’t believe that you can just step out of a value system like that, even if I admit that the Western value system can’ be quantified.
So perhaps the US government officials are mistaking the generous spirit and scrupulous fairness of Big Bird as exclusively American virtues.
Tough call for me, but I think the US government are right here. Not in ‘mistaking the generous spirit and scrupulous fairness of Big Bird as exclusively American virtues’ which I don’t think they do, but in recognising that they have found a way to spread the word about the acceptable face of the West.
This leads to a neat segue into Matthew Leeming’s review in the Spectator of The Bookseller of Kabul by Asne Seierstad which has the following memorable maths problem
Little Omar has a Kalashnikov with three magazines. There are twenty bullets in each magazine. He kills 60 infidels with two-thirds of the bullets. How many infidels does he kill with each bullet?
Talk about cultural relativism. The poor kids are having their brains rotted in more than just morals. The answer seems to be one and a half. I’m no ballistics whizz but this makes no sense to me, and even if it works for the bullets, it’s a way of lying with statistics.
Still on ad executives, Gary North, a Hegel-quoting ad man, considers Bring ’Em On! to be a disastrous speech by Bush.
The bombing of the United Nations headquarters in Iraq may turn out to be the tipping point in Mr. Bush’s presidency. Prior to that bloody event, the killing of a soldier every few days was perceived as a normal daily event, something that would begin each segment of The Today Show. But the UN explosion killed 20 people and wounded a hundred. This was not of the same order of magnitude as the daily assassinations had been.
Now, every death is seen as an amplification of the UN attack. There has been a change in public perception because of the number of the UN victims. There is a phrase of Hegel’s, which was picked up by Frederick Engels, Marx’s financier and partner: “the transformation of quantity into quality.” I think we have seen this transformation.
After the apparent non-existence of WMD, I think there are two solid planks against the war in Iraq. One, in 1991, Saddam was developing the supergun, which, if it had worked (and we had been generous enough to sell him the parts), he could have lobbed warheads at Tel Aviv. He invaded Kuwait. And, of course, he terrorised his own people. We went to war with him. We defeated him totally, but we did not push into Baghdad, and did not attempt regime change, a decision which puzzled many at the time. Saddam was a clear threat to neighbouring countries, and world peace. He was a dictator who almost all observers (apart from the French) called ‘evil.’ He was unpopular. But we did not attempt regime change, even when the vast majority of Iraqis would have thanked us. And now we can see why.
Just as it only took 19 terrorists on “9/11” to kill over 3000 people, it only takes a few car bombing fanatics to destroy military operations, civilian policing, and the reliable supplies of water and power essential for normal commerce. It looks like we cannot hold Iraq in the way we seemed to expect to at the outset of the war. And now, everything that goes wrong is our fault. Once we call an election, who will vote for the West’s plenipotentiaries? North concludes:
America needs a new policy. One way or another, America is going to get a new policy. Too many terrorists are bringing it on.
The other reason, as I’ve said before is that our enemy now is not Iraq. Fifteen of the hijackers were Saudis. You ought to read Confessions of a Terrorist.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:11 pm GMT
Geoffrey Wheatcroft dismisses Two years of gibberish:
Any event as shocking as this was difficult to respond to perceptively or even sensibly. “Perhaps one of the most upsetting aspects of post-bombing America is the fatuousness of our response,” Thomas Laqueur wrote in the London Review of Books, little knowing how much truer his words would be made by his fellow contributors.
He is right about the inadequacy of the response. I remember buying an armful of newspapers the weekend after “9/11” with the intention of getting some perspective and being disappointed to find all the commentary vapid or tendentious.
On the other hand, I don’t think Mr Wheatcroft adds any light himself beyond an amusing list of writerly excess and the obligatory quote from George Orwell to remind us what a sound fellow he was (if you gloss over his use of “pansies”). The title for this entry is from Martin Amis. The editors of the next OED will have their work cut out defining worldflash. I welcome suggestions.
I can’t even agree with Wheatcroft’s conclusion because I don’t know what “If the old Leninist left was buried politically in the rubble of the Berlin wall, the literary-academic intelligentsia disappeared morally in the ashes of ground zero” means. I suspect that ‘politically’ and ‘morally’ are to be understood as having a kind of equivalence: but to be ‘buried politically’ means to be rendered ineffectual — there is some sort of objective correlative: ‘disappeared morally’ seems mere phrase-making. (Link found on dangerousmeta, who is more succinct than me: ‘Comes close at times, but never touches the fuze wire.’)
Standard Model of Fundamental Particles and Interactions Chart: as with all Flash pages this is a little hard to read.
Is there no escape? Alistair Campbell turns up at the premiere of Calendar Girls.
I’m no fan of ol’ Dubya, but one of the reasons that I’ve nearly stopped buying the Grauniad is that it publishes bollocks.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:19 pm GMT
Thursday, September 4, 2003
They F You Up «
A few posts ago I linked to the Grauniad’s fatuous Oliver James article on GW Bush. (I’m not going to link to it again: it’s had enough publicity from me.) James mentions slyly, without actually naming it, Theodore Adorno’s F Scale. I remember trying (being the operative word) to read Adorno’s book on The Authoritarian Personality, when at university. (It comes up if you study Milgram and obedience.) If you know anything about questionnaire design, you will see immediately that the F Scale is flawed: if you agree or strongly agree with every question, you are labelled a ‘fascist.’ Now of course, some people like to be obliging, so you will get some odd false positives. Also, Adorno was no scientist: the questions are aimed at what he thought constituted fascists, which is why there’s one on astrology. Being soft in the head and a blackshirt may go together, but they are not the same thing. And so on.
Chuck Anesi, who so kindly wrote a javascript version of the F Scale, puts the prosecution case trenchantly:
It should be noted here that that the authors concluded that it had "still to be demonstrated" if the F-scale actually did, in fact, measure fascist receptivity at a personality level. They were sure it measured something — but not exactly sure what. T. W. Adorno returned to the University of Frankfurt, where he amused himself as a principal figure in the Frankfurt school of “critical theory”, producing a Freudian-Marxist melange of pseudo-scientific speculative foolishness that is now, thank God, thoroughly discredited.
Oliver James’s most recent book is called They F*** You Up, which seems typical: the only poem he would reference is one with dirty words, and then he won’t go through and use them.
I’m far from convinced that the present US administration is fascist. However, David Neiwert has an article I haven’t finished yet: Rush, Newspeak and Fascism: An exegesis. So far, I think it has some merit, more than James, less than the whole story.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:04 pm GMT
The Telgraph says Anti-abortion killer faces death defiantly. The print edition runs a photo of one of Hill’s victims holding a pistol, giving the impression that his murder was part of some Wild West stand-off rather than a cold-blooded, pre-meditated attack.
The BBC angle: US anti-abortionist executed. Let’s see how many idiots badmouthing Auntie attack the careful avoidance of the word ‘terrorist.’
Anti-death penalty activists, for their part, had urged the Florida governor to “stop the martyrdom of Paul Hill“
“Please commute Paul Hill’s death sentence to life in prison without possibility of parole, because killing Paul Hill will actually encourage more murder,“ a group called Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty wrote in an open letter to Jeb Bush.
I’m with the anti-death league here.
Tim Ireland (aka Bloggerheads) has a PhotoShop tribute inspired by Hangingday’s obituary. Hangingday, clearly in no mood to stop flogging a dead horse, or indeed being sarcastic about a terrorist murderer after his execution contemplate what happens next.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:32 pm GMT
Sunday, September 7, 2003
Catharsis-Purgative «
BBC: “writing about troubling experiences helps people deal with them.”
Myself unto myself shall give
This name, catharsis-purgative…
And sign criss-cross with reverent thumb
Memento Mori upon my bum.
James Joyce
(From memory, as I can’t find the book at present.)
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:43 pm GMT
“A fool chooses to starve himself and we all watch.… One billion people have no choice and we ignore them.” Guilty as charged.
Today there will be an exercise involving a mock chemical attack on the City of London. Viewers of Spooks will notice the similaries to Episode 5 of the second series. Who says the BBC is not a propaganda organ? (The precis of the episode, BTW, is pants.)
On a happier note: kittens!
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:10 am GMT
Monday, September 8, 2003
If You Know Your History «
Well, I clearly don’t, after taking Test The Nation Quiz. Scoring a rather miserable 60/70 (which translates to a meaningless 135). Everyday Life: 11/15; Past Times: 12/15; Arts and Entertainment: 14/15; Our World: 14/15; and Pot Luck: 9/10.
Despite taking it after being in the pub and listening to Radiohead on the free CD with the Grauniad, I still scored better than most graduates and most people in my (admittedly generous) age group. I was struck by the unfairness of the conclusion that “People from Cardiff have the worst general knowledge” when they never ask if you live in Cardiff, only what the nearest city is. We’re clearly dragged down by the Valleys. ;)
Don’t forget the Cardiff connection: Major Ingram and Tecwen Whittock.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:05 am GMT
Giles Foden on what al-Qaida really is.
This discussion on MetaFilter renews my faith that there is indeed intelligent life across the pond. What were they bitching about? Michael Meacher in the Guardian. Pretty much required reading in my view, shame that the online version — I read it in print, easier on the eyes — doesn’t take advantage of hyperlinks to make checking the references easier.
And on checking references: the sources of George W Bush’s CV.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 10:35 am GMT
Tuesday, September 9, 2003
Lucan Back «
The Telegraph falls on the old standby of Lord Lucan who apparently wasn’t the Ben Gunn lookalike who died on Goa in 1996. What a surprise.
The ever-reasonable David Aaronovitch dissects Michael Meacher’s article (discussed earlier). Reluctantly, I confess my ignorance on this. I thought that planes were scrambled from news reports at the time (although a lot of the reportage turned out to be blind speculation). I don’t think the politician has been born who can run an airtight conspiracy, and I can’t really believe that the neo-cons controlled everything.
However, I’ve also got problems with the intelligence leading up to the attacks. The intelligence was ropey of course, because the other side weren’t co-operative, but there seem to have been some in the CIA who thought that not enough was being done. And I still fail to see what Iraq has to do with any of this. It seems to be a have become an issue of faith. I refuse to swallow the argument that being against invading Iraq puts me on Saddam’s side: if that were so, then John Major, George HW Bush, Bill Clinton, and Tony Blair (between 1997 and 2003) would all be guilty of keeping Saddam in power while he terrorised his own people. We never went to war because he practiced torture. Would that we had. (Although, no, I can’t assume that an expeditionary war like this is ever right. Defensive wars, like the Falklands, may be unavoidable. This one was not.)
Mr Aaronovitch breaks down Meacher thus:
- The Americans (and the Brits, but not, it seems, the French or the Germans) are running out of oil and gas, and the Muslims have got lots.
- A few years back, some neocons devised a plan to get their hands on the oil, etc, so as to be able to dominate the world.
- Trouble was, they couldn’t go ahead with the plan unless public opinion was mobilised, as it was at Pearl Harbor in 1941. Which, by the way, President Roosevelt knew all about, but decided not to stop so that he could have a war.
- Subsequently, the Bush administration and its agencies did “little or nothing” to stop the plotters of 9/11 and—when their operation was under way—little or nothing to bring it to a halt.
- After September 11, the Bushites forgot all about terrorism and Bin Laden and concentrated on invading places that had oil and gas.
- So, “the ‘global war on terrorism’ has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for… the US goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies.”
Roughly, I go along with point 1 (minus the sarcastic aside about ‘the French or the Germans’), the first half of point 2, point 3 up to the word ‘mobilized’, the first half of point four, all of point five, and point six apart from the “the US goal of world hegemony.”
Stephen Zunes does some debunking of his own: The War in Iraq is Not Over and Neither Are the Lies to Justify It.
My friend Susan asked following my Oliver James/Adorno piece what I understand by the word “fascist.” I wrote a reply which seems overly glib to me now, and I am still considering a satisfactory response.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:41 pm GMT
Charles Moore lays out what he considers the “BBC’s mental assumptions [which] are those of the fairly soft Left” and are
that American power is a bad thing [check], whereas the UN is good [check], that the Palestinians are in the right and Israel isn’t [check], that the war in Iraq was wrong [check], that the European Union is a good thing and that people who criticise it are “xenophobic” [check], that racism is the worst of all sins [check], that abortion is good [check] and capital punishment is bad [check], that too many people are in prison [check], that a preference for heterosexual marriage over other arrangements is “judgmental” [check], that environmentalists are public-spirited [check] and “big business” is not [check], that Gerry Adams is better than Ian Paisley [check], that government should spend more on social programmes [check], that the Pope is out of touch except when he criticises the West [check], that gun control is the answer to gun crime [check]…
Far more impressive than my general knowledge was yesterday.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:22 pm GMT
Wednesday, September 10, 2003
Too Many People Had The Suss «
Too many people had the suss/Too many people support us E.M.I. Unlimited Edition (J. Rotten, P. Cook, S. Jones, G. Matlock)
The Grapes of Wrath was published in 1939, and tells the story of the Joad family who were forced to move to California after losing their tenant farm as the landowners no longer needed a large peasant workforce with the arrival of agricultural machinery.
This is what happens in technological capitalism. No one pretends that it doesn’t hurt. New jobs are created; usually more old ones are destroyed.
Some people, like the Joads, had to take it. I suppose that the Oklahoma migrants were mostly illiterate and went to work in denims, and they didn’t know how to fight back. These days another group finds itself in the same position: but this one works in suits and is largely educated. So instead of taking redundancy manfully they attempt to crush the opposition.
One imagines the final dinosaurs with their walnut-sized brains lifting their heads to watch the asteroid that exploded in what is now the Gulf of Mexico and did not recognise that it was the end. Despite Johnny Rotten’s searing indictment of them (above) EMI bosses do not really have the same excuse.
From now on, the only people in the music business wearing suits will be orchestras in the pit, playing live. For most of human history musicians have composed to be heard live, and Mozart for one never received a penny for his recordings. It didn’t seem to stunt his output. The only way musicians will make a living is by playing to audiences. Some of their listeners may be familiar with the work through the media or recordings, but artistes will only go into the studio as a means of advertising, not as a way of making a profitable product. The Rolling Stones carry on touring and sell out stadia, yet they haven’t made a decent record in decades. The hits people want to hear them play are freely available second-hand, in mail-order collections, and fairly cheaply in record shops. Could it be that people willing pay more than the back catalogue costs to see them because that’s what matters?
Hello EMI. Goodbye.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:23 pm GMT
Thursday, September 11, 2003
Arteriosclerosis Sets In «
Surely can only be a matter of time before I retire to a hotel run by a stick-insect and battleaxe, with a liguistically challenged Spanish waiter. I had a letter published in the Torygraph yesterday. (But I forgot that the letters page is on the web.) I was even sad enough to email the readers I know to tell them: only one had found it spontaneously, and another left his office to buy a copy from the Student Union where it only costs 15p. (I suppose he is a struggling single parent, even if he is at the top of the academic pay scale and his ex-wife was a TV presenter.)
I think I should have worked in more about Bush’s minders having planned his embargo on the BBC before his election: and they were only looking for a convincing pretext, instead of leaving it hanging. No use regretting it now.
At the two-year anniversary of the attacks on Washington and New York, Fred Kaplan lists Bush’s Many Miscalculations.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:20 pm GMT
Legendary Pixies To Reunite For Tour, Album
[T]he announcement is one of the most unlikely and anticipated reunions in the history of indie rock.…
The band immediately gained a cult following and critical acclaim for their signature blend of screaming punk noise, surf influences and jagged guitar riffs mixed with impossible-to-ignore melodic hooks and Francis’ bizarre lyrics about space, sex, religion and mutilation.
Found on Crooked Timber.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:52 am GMT
Friday, September 12, 2003
Why New York? «
The New York Times recalls The Other Sept. 11, when General Augusto Pinochet staged his military coup in Chile. I don’t see the point: even the NYT concedes that
The United States did not directly participate in the coup, but it laid the groundwork for it and supported the plotters. Afterward, even as mass murder ensued, the Nixon administration secretly embraced Mr. Pinochet’s regime.
All this may be true, but these are slippery words. Saddam Hussein “supported” Palestinian suicide-bombers, but no more so than several other Middle Eastern states and he was never their sine qua non. I don’t think that the Nixon regime censured Pinochet, which I believe was the only moral reaction, but “secretly embraced”? I don’t know. If they’re alleging that al-Quaida somehow struck back for Pinochet’s victims, they’re so wide of the mark that I can’t begin to criticise.
I hope that I’m not blind to the faults in US foreign policy, but there seems to be no symmetry between what Chileans did with some help from outside and what was done to New York.
I’ve pondered a lot on the ‘what if?’ history of 9/11. Suppose the hijackers had attacked DC first? And why didn’t they?
I’m going to argue that there are two sorts of states, which I shall call ‘constitutional’ and ‘charismatic.’ I don’t like the “what-I-call-X” school of writing much — it’s pretty safe to assume that what follows is pure tinfoil hat ranting. But, at present, I can’t think of extant terms, so I’m forced to use my own.
What I call ‘charismatic’ covers states like Fascist Italy and Iraq under Saddam: there are pictures and statues celebrating the ‘cult of the individual’ everywhere, and a successful assassination of the leader would mark a major change in the state.
What I call ‘constitutional’ covers what we call “Western Democracies” — Kennedy’s assassination made little difference to US policy, and the symbol of the country remained the flag.
Now I think that al-Quaida attempted, in effect, two attacks that day. One was on the engine of the US: the economy through an attack on both the Financial district and the symbols of US success that the Twin Towers represented. The other was on the US state: an attack on the Capitol would have been an attempt to decapitate the government.
Now I’m still not sure what people would think had the attacks gone the other way. They would still be an outrage, but would people in Montana have collected money for the reconstruction as David Letterman said they did for New York?
I think that 9/11 was a crime, not an act of war — albeit for the rather pedantic reason that wars are declared between states. But I think that it was an odd kind of crime because crimes are usually egotistical or selfish (one steals for gain). This was carried out by crazed but altruistic young men. I concede that the attacks were committed in a military spirit, and with military planning. With each attack, it became more likely that the next one would be intercepted and shot down: nasty and frightening, and in any other week enough to saturate the news for a week, but insignificant compared to the horrors which were realised that day.
So I think that they attacked New York first because the number of deaths and the physical destruction was their worst blow, and they knew this. Essentially, a democracy cannot be decapitated. We can depose Saddam, and Iraq changes overnight, but killing the President means business as usual. The Stars and Stripes would fly as it had flown the day before, and as it had under Clinton or Eisenhower.
Sisyphus Shrugged is reminded of his Favorite Political Joke.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:48 pm GMT
“The site owner said our caravan got hit by a low-flying cow.”
Cybersex blamed for half of divorces.
At the time, J Lindsey Short, Jr., president of the American Academy of Matrimonial Lawyers, had this to say: “While I don’t think you can say that the Internet is causing more divorces, it does make it easier to engage in the sorts of behaviours that traditionally lead to divorce.”
Something of a non-story then?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:06 pm GMT
Saturday, September 13, 2003
Baathtime for Bias and Sullivan «
Jack O’Toole takes issue with Andrew Sullivan’s slurs, the way it should be done: point-by-point. Gregory Djerejian insists that he’s normally a supporter of Sullivan’s, but deconstructs the Flypaper theory forensically, and, unlike Sullivan, with references to the real world. (I noticed that another blogger pointed out that Gregory was wrong to imply that the bombing in Beirut caused Clinton to pull out: it was, of course, Reagan. However, Opera seems to get a little confused when several tabs are open, and I can’t find the blog again. Sorry.) Ted Barlow and commentors on Crooked Timber rip into Sullivan’s stupidest slur yet.
My favourite at this moment is this slur. To appreciate the stupidity, you have to read this self-pat on the back, where Sully congratualates the Telegraph for following his “meme.” (I suspect that the initiative came from Conrad Black, the Telegraph’s owner, but never let the facts get in the way is Andrew’s motto elsewhere, and why change now? Sullivan is so confident of the value of his work on the open market that he has resorted to begging. Someone buy him a can of Special Brew.)
Sullivan clearly thinks that “Blair ‘overrode terror warnings’” is “Baathist” bias when it comes from the BBC. What does he think when it’s in the Telegraph?
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:16 pm GMT
Sunday, September 14, 2003
Reader, I Hated It «
Breathes there a book lover who does not thrill to a good “bad review”? I just have to share Roy Hattersley’s unputdownable put-down of Paul Bailey’s My Life As A Dog. According to Roy, the book is a dog (though the owner of Buster, the only dog so far to publish a book) would not appreciate the term. Make your own joke about bitches/bitchiness.
The Guardian, as always, offers the tome at a reduced price, and I suppose someone will buy it just to see if anything can be that bad. Two pounds off hardly seems fair given the kicking Hattersley gives it.
One quote should be enough to prove the reviewer right:
“The ever-practical David leapt after her… catching her by the scruff of the neck and slapping her until she yelped.”
It seems that Bailey didn’t punch David for abusing his dog. No friend of the animal, he.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:17 pm GMT
Monday, September 15, 2003
Making Amends «
Gregory Djerejian has posted a very courteous clarification of the wording of his rebuttal of the “flypaper theory”.
I’ve been meaning to start my own corrections department, specifically where I was wrong about the recent Iraq war. (Does it even have a name yet? Gulf War II anyone?) Mostly, I’m more pleased with my ambivalence than I expected to be. I was totally wrong about the fall of Baghdad during March, even though I quoted ostensibly ‘right-wing’ pundits including Boris Johnson and Simon Jenkins. I don’t think that way Baghdad fell made the war right, though this was a conflict as far from moral certainty as you can get, and I slid a couple of notches along from ‘doubter’ toward ‘believer.’ But only a couple, and it’s a very long scale. Doubtless I’ve been wrong about lots more, and should own up to those as and when I find them.
On a similar note, I’ve taken down the Iraq Civilian Body Count graphic as its days of effective protest (if they ever existed) are over. There are other battles.
Unqualified Offerings has a another superb debunking of the “flypaper theory”.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:53 am GMT
Tuesday, September 16, 2003
Dressed Like That You Must Be Living in a Different World «
And your mother doesn’t know why you can’t look like all the other girls Get Over You (O’Neill)
Matt offers one possible solution. Now that Carole Caplin has had her Downing Street swipe card revoked, perhaps Cherie Blair will start looking like a judge.
Caplin went with rather poor grace:
“I understand how that man Kelly felt,” Carole Caplin said yesterday, likening herself to the late weapons inspector as she tried to suggest that she had been hounded out of No 10.
The Telegraph called her A dangerous guru. Now she plans a book which may be hamstrung by the “confidentiality clause which prohibits any disclosure of information about her private dealings with the Prime Minister and his wife.” Now I’m no legal expert (unlike Ms Booth-Blair), but what if Ms Caplin decides to join her former boyfriend Peter Foster in Australia? It worked for Peter Wright.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:10 pm GMT
The Telegraph on the Hutton Enquiry. 45-min claim misleading — MI6 chief
The head of MI6 admitted yesterday that intelligence from his agency concerning Saddam Hussein’s ability to mount a biological or chemical attack in 45 minutes was given undue prominence in the Government’s September dossier on Iraq.
Now, at last, I know what “sexed-up” means.
Both Frank Johnson and Simon Hoggart invoke John le Carré in reporting yesterday’s proceedings. Though Hoggart also compares the use of “shocked” as used by Sir Richard Billing Dearlove to Claude Rains in Casablanca:
Rick Blaine: How can you close me up? On what grounds?
Captain Louis Renault: I’m shocked, shocked to find that gambling is going on in here!
[A croupier hands Renault a pile of money]
Croupier: Your winnings, sir.
(From the IMDB’s quotes from Casablanca.)
Frank Johnson says that he doesn’t know where it will end. But elsewhere the Telegraph reports: MP told BBC chairman Campbell was to blame.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:54 am GMT
Wednesday, September 17, 2003
Fuck Verisign «
Dean Allen on Verisign. Slashdot has the latest Verisign fiasco.
At least, there is a petition.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 4:37 pm GMT
Thursday, September 18, 2003
Oh Yarr? «
“If ye not be addin’ ‘yarr’ to most o’yer sentences, then ye be no more pirate than a scurvy KaZaA landlubber usin’ dialup.”
New Scientist be sayin’ Security standards [for PCs] could make anti-piracy easier. Typing with a hook be enough trouble already, mateys. Yarr!
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:46 pm GMT
Frank Johnson says that it’s far from easy getting every detail right, but the Independent picks over Gilligan’s claims. Of the two versions — and there as many out there as you like — I prefer Johnson. Gilligan seems to be mostly guilty of loose phrasing in the initial broadcast at 6:07am. Most errors of expression were corrected by 7:30, and even then their inclusion seems to have come from the perverse decision to have Gilligan interviewed by John Humphreys. It’s a shame that the Independent closes with this sloppy paragraph:
Mr Gilligan was wrong to have claimed that “most” people in intelligence were unhappy because it appears that only Dr Kelly and the DIS staff were concerned. There is no evidence that MI6, MI5 or GCHQ were unhappy. But we now know the DIS was worried by other aspects of the dossier. It was concerns about claims that Saddam Hussein continued to produce chemical and biological agents.
There is a difference between something being true and there being evidence. (The tree still falls if no one hears it.) Mr Gilligan did not, it seems, have any basis for claiming that “‘most’ people in intelligence were unhappy”: whether he was wrong or not is moot. Try as I might, I cannot parse that final sentence into anything like English.
The Gospel of Supply Side Jesus found on Hanging Day
H2G2 on irregular verbs (which I’ve wrongly attributed to Craig Brown in the past). Found on Crooked Timber.
HE GETS IT: if Bush can, why can’t Andrew Sullivan see how Iraq and 9/11 are not connected?
Jeffrey Zeldman on some paranoid theories about Microsoft and Eolas, and the problems with both companies.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:40 am GMT
Hans Blix (on Today):
In the Middle Ages, people believed in witches, and when they looked for them, they certainly found them.
Hmmm.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 9:09 am GMT
Friday, September 19, 2003
A Sensible Reactionary «
Oh, Lord. I never thought that I would agree with Peter Hitchens, but he talks a lot of sense in the Spectator this week. (As opposed to idiocy.)
I have my doubts about what Mr Hitchens means by either ‘liberal’ or ‘conservative.’
BBC people simply have not met and do not know any Conservatives, except for the Chris Patten types who are not really conservative at all.
The Conservatives (I have to use party-political points of reference, otherwise we would slip into “who I say is/is not one of us/them”) have won three out of the last five general elections, and enjoy about a third of the popular vote.The majority of newspapers sold are conservative (in every sense): the titles may seem to balance, but the Telegraph outsells the Guardian and the Independent, and the Sun is more popular than the Mirror. There is no liberal middle-market rival to the Express and the Mail. Despite this, does Mr Hitchens believe that it is possible to go through life and not meet conservatives? Are they such a dying breed?
The BBC now faces the intolerant fury of the Blair government, which regards anything short of cow-eyed devotion as raging hostility.
Those who would abolish the BBC also need to recognise that without a licence fee it is difficult to see who will pay for a broadcasting network, especially speech radio on which intelligent thought, good manners, culture and morality will get any sort of hearing at all.
Exactly. Many of the abolitionists and privatisers seem unaware that the BBC broadcasts anything apart from news. The other four BBC radio stations could be on Mars for all the attention they get.
Mr Hitchens is, at least, aware of Radio 1:
Can there be any justification for the programmes of Ms Sara Cox being financed by a poll-tax on the homes of the honest poor?
Skip the emotive and loaded use of ‘honest,’ and consider this:
[Charles Moore, the editor of the Daily Telegraph] was mocked this week by the Guardian for his new campaign against the licence fee. They pointed out that commercial radio and satellite TV were unlikely to be heard or seen very much in the cultured and elevated Moore household, and they were partly right to do so — but only partly.
Why should the ‘honest poor’ pay for Mr Moore’s pleasures without some representation of their tastes? I too find Ms Cox offensive (on the rare occassions when I am so unfortunate as to hear her show), but there seems no tide of outrage against her. Audience figures seem to indicate that a lot of licence-fee payers listen to her. I consider that a justification.
Now for my moment of outrageous snobbery. I doubt that Mr Moore or Mr Hitchens watch very much television. I suspect that, like myself, the hours they watch per week is well below the average of the ‘honest poor’ — and the output of ‘quality programmes’ reflects this.
[Regional accents], and the increasing use of slang and crude words on respectable programmes, is a sign that the BBC’s attempt to combine moral and political radicalism with cultural conservatism is starting to fail.
This is perhaps the only point I have serious issue with Mr Hitchens. People talk differently these days (or ‘different’ if they work for Apple). More announcers like Brian Perkins (who is not only regional, but colonial, coming as he does from New Zealand) would make Radio 4 more pleasant and easier to understand. I am one of those listeners who
frequently find themselves shouting at their radios in impotent rage
but mostly on matters of pronunciation. I think there is a place for the demotic, and many instances where a ‘crude’ word or phrase is the mot juste. I see far more coarseness in the bear-baiting type of reality television than if the occasional Kenneth Tynan, Philip Larkin, or Tony Harrison uses the word ‘fuck’ some time after the watershed.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 2:09 pm GMT
“Why don’t we try to destroy tropical cyclones by nuking them?”
Apart from the fact that this might not even alter the storm, this approach neglects the problem that the released radioactive fallout would fairly quickly move with the tradewinds to affect land areas and cause devastating environmental problems. Needless to say, this is not a good idea.
Provocative common sense by Robert Clayton Dean in Samizdata:
If there were real terrorists in Britain or the USA, then they wouldn’t need WMDs. They could drive either country into a blue shivering funk by randomly suicide-machinegunning a few crowded malls, while screaming “allahu akbar!” Far more bang for the buck. There’s nothing effectual preventing them. They haven’t. They don’t exist.
Needless to say, a lot of correspondents object to this view.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:31 pm GMT
Saturday, September 20, 2003
Rolling RSS «
Jeffrey Zeldman rolls his own RSS. So do I. There is a certain advantage to this: most Movable Type feeds stick to the formula of the first few words (the default is 15, but that is configurable) stripped of all tags. I certainly prefer the brevity of this to the sorts of feeds (and you know who you are) which contain the whole post. All I want to know is whether to visit the site or not.
Compare Zeldman’s RSS:
Best Flash intro ever Histology-World is the Citizen Kane of Flash intros about histology. Histology was never so exciting! Please enjoy Histology-World, and don’t leave before the exciting finale.
with the Daily Report
Best Flash intro ever
Histology-World {{ WARNING: Epileptics, do not follow this link as it could induce seizure }} is the Citizen Kane of Flash intros about histology. Histology was never so exciting! Please enjoy Histology-World, and don’t leave before the exciting finale. Hat tip: David Simmer.
that isn’t the best example because the Daily Report text changed from the version when I first read it: however, although I can imagine an algorithm for getting from the Report to the RSS (ignore tags and anything in brackets — while s/\([^()]*\)//g (Perl) or ereg_replace("\(.*\)", "", $blog_text) (PHP) — I don’t imagine that’s how it’s done. (I used it because I thought the example was funny.) So look at this from the RSS:
Following up Microsoft not a monopoly after all! Plus: ISC moves to defeat Verisign’s blood-drinking evil.
and this from the Daily Report
Following up
Following up on issues raised in yesterday’s Report:
The not-for-profit Internet Software Consortium (ISC) has issued a patch to cut off Verisign’s…
I now think that a good pithy sentence is the best way forward for my RSS feed. I wouldn’t have known that if I hadn’t been experimenting for months.
Which brings me to my point. When I started this blog (and its anniversary is less than two months away now), I said that I would get round to working on my own system. I’m glad that I left it so long. I’ve found the best way to get archived monthly files into the order I want (starting on the first of the month), and I know now that I need an extra field for the RSS. All that remains now is the best way to name posts. While the body of each post should be in a database, each one should have a file of its own, and the best way to label them seems to be to have a directory for year (i.e. 2003), with a subdirectory for month (i.e. 09), and then either (and this is where it gets more complex — i.e. another reason for procrastination) an further sub-directory for day, with individuals entries, which seems like an excessive number of directories, and Google seems to have a prejudice against deep sites, or simply numbered days. At present I’m leaning against individual pages for each post: rather a page per day with internal links to each post, something like 2002/09/20.html#first and 2002/09/20.html#second but with the names taken from the titles.
I don’t know why I’ve blogged all this.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 7:01 pm GMT
Sunday, September 21, 2003
Catch A Tiger By The Tail «
Metafilter has a long discussion about US soldier kills rare tiger.
I’ve just finished The Life of Pi, so the story (along with this one about meerkittens) seems especially poignant.
The MeFi discussion covers most aspects of the story: if the soldier who was mauled had died would he have been nominated for a Darwin award, and would it have been funny? Yes and yes. Tigers are dangerous, everyone knows that. Still, it is also true that, as klaruz says,
… if you put a few hundred thousand men and women in the middle of a shitty situation away from their family and friends you’re going to have some random acts of stupidity.
Interestingly, another poster (Space Coyote) remembers the Lion of Kabul. The symmetry of the stories is remarkable:
Among his reported exploits are killing and eating a Taleban fighter who climbed into his enclosure to prove his bravery.
The man’s brother attacked the lion with a grenade in revenge, leaving it lame and blind in one eye.
Strange how memory plays tricks: I remembered only that a grenade was thrown at the animal. I just assumed that the Taleban were cruel thugs, who, when not smashing others’ religious monuments, tortured animals. Prejudice is a terrible thing, even, perhaps especially, when it based on fact.
The Galileo space probe will crash into Jupiter not long after I post this. Scientists believe there is a slim chance that there may be some sort of life on Europa, and Galileo was not irradiated to kill off all microbes before take off. Who says that our morals have not advanced since the days when we thought that all life was there for our exploitation. Now if we seek out new life, we seek to preserve it.
Of course, some might say that the likelihood of life elsewhere is very slim. (Too many possible links to pick one in particular. It does seem that life of some sort is likely to spontaneously start — given the right conditions, but no one yet knows how broad those are.) If you’re sufficiently cynical, the hunt for life elsewhere can look like NASA scientists creating work to keep themselves employed. (I don’t buy this: but I do concede that it is at the edge of science where there is no real data.) There was a time when Carl Sagan posited life on Jupiter. Since no one seems bothered about infecting that planet, we can assume that idea has been quietly forgotten.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:35 pm GMT
Monday, September 22, 2003
This Fish Cashed In Its Chips «
One of the differences between us and the US is the latter’s greater moral prudishness. (See this BBC story on Reagan’s “sex angst”. Another reason to prefer Clinton.) At first I thought that this Snopes piece on FCUK was a modern myth itself, but then I’d just come back in from a shopping trip on my bike and had passed at least three FCUK shirt-wearers in Bute Park alone.
But we British have our own hang-ups. Trevor Beattie, the man behind the FCUK slogan, and the owner of an ex-goldfish found out when the Broadcasting Advertising Clearance Centre (BACC) saw his script for an Advert for McCains chips. I’m glad that we’re a nation of animal-lovers, and don’t wile away our hours tossing grenades at defenceless lions, but fewer rules and more sense would be nice too.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:29 pm GMT
I was sounded out for a couple of jobs last week. Both were in England and far enough away (one in Reading; one in High Wycombe) to make commuting near impossible. I’d feel I was in the Four Yorkshiremen sketch, and having to rise to travel to work before I went to bed. A temporary move looks like the only solution. I can’t see why so many jobs cleave to the South East. Most programming can be done anywhere, which is why so much of it is now done on the Indian Sub-Continent, and if I can’t stay in Wales, I’d far rather live in the North than near London. I’ve lived there before and apart from the Tate, the subsidised theatres, getting the odd film a week earlier, and Hampstead Heath, I can’t see the attraction. (I couldn’t live in the Midlands either; apart from the accents, the beer is nearly undrinkable.) Give me somewhere that’s returned a Labour member since 1900 and I think I’ll fit in. Parts of inner London are OK on that measure — Islington has some nice pubs, all the safer for knowing that you’d sooner have seen the late Queen Mother with a pint in her hand than Blair or Mandelson.
Living away part-time has two worries for me: who feeds the cats, and now that Plaid Cymru are back on the attack, returning to find my house burnt down. There ought to be some protection in that I live in a terrace, but my neighbour on one side is a Londoner, and the family on the other are Japanese, so you can’t be sure.
I wouldn’t say Plaid are daft but Ieuan Wyn Jones told its conference
Wales has all the attributes of being a fully-fledged nation, apart from one: It does not have its own government. It cannot settle its own destiny
And the rest of the world can, I suppose? Maybe Mr Jones has yet to discover the reach of Brussels and Washington and the decline in influence of Big Government. But those are realpolitik, which even more than the Lib Dems, Plaid has been protected from having to think about.
I’m happy to say that I voted against the Assembly, even though I had to put up with some strange abuse, including being told that, as a Scot, I shouldn’t have had a vote at all. I now can’t think of anyone who thinks the Assembly is worth a snake’s fart.
Still it’s better here than the Smoke, so, as Kingsley Amis signed some of his letters, Cymru Am Byth.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 3:44 pm GMT
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
Young At Heart «
Another good ’un gone: Hugo Young. The Guardian has an obituary. I thought that the Samizdata boys would sneer, but Andy Duncan posts a moving tribute.
Elsewhere, Samizdata attacks The bogus ‘duty’ to have ID cards, but, for my money, the BBC say it better with When the British fought off ID cards (note the choice of words). Samizdata’s Johnathan Pearce makes a good point when he says
if X is such a grand idea then it should not be necessary to compel citizens to have X.
(He means for the state to compel: he has no problems with banks requiring ID — like cheque cards; and neither have I.) Of course, most of us carry some form of ID all the time, in the form of credit cards, and drivers’ licences. The issue is one of compulsion, and who can look at it. I’d quite like a photo and a thumbprint to go with my cards, but that’s a different matter. I’m far from sure that ID cards issued centrally will help. And here the BBC piece has the killer facts:
Lord Chief Justice Goddard said the continuation of the wartime ID card scheme was an “annoyance” to much of the public and “tended to turn law-abiding subjects into law breakers”
The cards were presumably a laughable hurdle to the forgers employed by the Nazis in Germany or blackmarketeers at home. Indeed, the failings of the ID system allowed many thousands of military deserters to roam the UK, according to a new book, An Underworld at War, by Donald Thomas.
However, it might not have been concerns about security shortcomings, civil liberties or Clarence Willcock which prompted Winston Churchill’s 1952 government to end ID cards. The system was expensive and difficult to administer, and offered few benefits.
I’m sympathetic to David Aaronovich in the Guardian
In France, where the ID card is not compulsory, 90% of the population carry it all the time anyway, because it is convenient and — so far — the French have managed to stave off a collapse into 1984-style totalitarianism.
However, he misses the point that the key word is ‘compulsory.’ The BBC story gets this: it’s not having the damn thing; it’s who can make you show it and why. It may very well be a good thing in your bank; but how the hell does it help the state?
This reminds me of two nice replies to the Guardian’s Weekend Magazine regular Q&A by Tony Mitchell:
How did you vote in the last election? For Labour, I thought, but apparently not.
Which living person do you most despise? David Blunkett, for making Jack Straw seem so reasonable a bloke.
The Sun has attracted condemnation for its ‘Bonkers Bruno’ story. Restores your faith in the public, it does.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:26 pm GMT [2 comments]
Wednesday, September 24, 2003
Oh, Oh, Oh, It’s Magic «
Tom Coates has a good old grouse about David Blaine. He’s good on the British, less so on Blaine; but I’m indifferent to the stunt by now. If there were even a teeny hint of illusion about the whole thing, if some 3am girl reported catching him at the Ivy while the great unwashed chucked their eggs at his box, I might tune in.
The Telegraph does magic: somehow you read the obituary of Hugo Young and it turns into a hagiography of Margaret Thatcher! Incredible. I want to read it again in slow motion. (To be fair, the second half concerns itself with the management of the Guardian since the mid-90s, and its only fault is the omission of the phrase “steep downward slide.”)
Not that the Torygraph is alone in, ah, different, reportage. Last week, Stephen Pollard reminisced about his little triumph a few years ago against the Grauniad.
All good stuff. Except for one, small problem. It was total and utter bollocks. Not a word of truth in the story about me, my girlfriend, Mr Blair and the River Café.
Now I buy the Guardian intermittently, and I confess to sharing many of its prejudices — especially the unconscious ones. I admit that I regard the far-right as more dangerous than the far-left, and am more ready to see their members as violent or thuggish. However, Andrew Osborn’s report on Per-Olof Svensson, the man who allegedly stabbed Anna Lindh, stuck in my craw:
That he flirted with Sweden’s shadowy far-right is strongly believed by police. Although there is nothing on paper police sources say he associated with some of the country’s “most notorious neo-Nazis”.
My eye jammed on that first sentence when I read it in print: it’s hard to parse, and seemingly because it’s trying to pass off innuendo as fact. Mr Svensson may not be my ideal dinner companion, but the police have released him and made a new arrest.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 5:19 pm GMT [No comments]
Thursday, September 25, 2003
Time, Time, Time «
Scott Rosenberg referees a “dust-up” between Josh Marshall and Glenn Reynolds. Nicely done.
It’s not often that the word ‘irony’ is used correctly, but here’s a fine example:
Still what fuels the argument and suspicion of the Bush administration is the fact that by last March the French and the Germans in the Council were saying in the face of American derision, “Give them more time, give them more time.”
And now only the other day, with no irony at all, the great warrior Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld cried, “There are 600 sites to examine, we’ve looked at only 200. Give us more time, give us more time.”
And what does the Commander-in-Chief, George W, say? Amazingly little about the missing weapons and chemicals.
Alistair Cooke, Letter from America, Were we misled into war? Monday, 30 June, 2003. [Date is that given on website; it was probably written a few days earlier and first broadcast the previous Friday.]
CheeseWeasle calls “Time’s up”
I like the argument of this email to Andrew Sullivan, who, as I suppose is his right, posts a reply and recalls his own February article A Just War. This is about as lucid as Sullivan gets, and shows why he wields such influence. (I think he’s wrong on several counts: specifically proving a negative, and I seem to remember that, however belatedly, Iraq did supply the required documentation. Hans Blix now seems adamant that there were no WMD, although I don’t recall him being so forthright earlier in the year, and David Kelly was not convinced. Sullivan also skips the question of why, given all the well-known human-rights crimes of the regime, Saddam was allowed to continue in power. But read him anyway and decide for yourself.) Hugo Young believed that we were committed to war with or without WMD.
Kelly family QC Jeremy Gompertz accused Geoff Hoon of a “cynical abuse of power which deserves the strongest possible condemnation”
Hurriedly scribbled @ 8:48 pm GMT [No comments]
Saturday, September 27, 2003
Doing It With Style «
Two stories in yesterday’s Telegraph that made me smile.
Pamela Anderson, vice-president of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, is hostess of the Lycra British Style Awards. Sadly, the organisers failed to realise that these may prove incompatible. Pammy refuses to wear fur, or patronise designers who use it.
“They are a disgrace and I’m shocked that any British designers still use fur. Britain is a nation of animal lovers and Stella [McCartney]’s beautiful clothes prove that you can have a look that kills without killing animals.”
Pammy just found herself a new fan.
In Rome, a prince married a socialist actress in a ceremony “criticised in Italy for being more appropriate for a footballer than a prince”:
In a newspaper interview published yesterday, Emmanuel-Filiberto, 32, lashed out at critics of his bride. “First of all, Clotilde is not a communist,” he said. Then referring to sniggers about her film career, he said: “Secondly, let any actress today who has not appeared in a film with her tits in the breeze, please raise her hand.”
Sensible fellow. Just when you thought that all Italians had fallen into step behind Burlesquoni. I have no idea what the problem with footballers’ weddings is supposed to be.
Safety Nazi department. Slashdot story on the recall of the Segway is just an excuse to revisit this famous crash.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 1:30 pm GMT [No comments]
Sunday, September 28, 2003
Shot By Both Sides «
In the early 1980s, the campaign slogan of the Conservative Party was Forward With Britain. Not an especially meaningful slogan, but an apparently successful one, and innocuous-looking. I forget which photographer saw something new in it, but one of the great images of the time was Margaret Thatcher at the 1982 conference backed by the word ‘war’ in block capitals.
Tony Blair has learned many things from the 18 years that Labour was in opposition, and one of them seems to be that succesfully prosecuting a war is a route to electoral success. I was going to start this piece with that very assumption, but the example of Winston Churchill (who no-one would gainsay as a great war leader) losing the 1945 election kept bothering me. The more I thought, the less successful war seems to have been for political leaders. Churchill is just one example. Anthony Eden was hurt by Suez. (Vietnam seems to be an exception: Lyndon Johnson lost to the even-keener on Vietnam Nixon, and Nixon was himself re-elected.) George HW Bush lost the 1992 election after winning the first Gulf War. I don’t doubt that readers can provide more examples and counter-examples.
Martin Walker in The Spectator (link not available) argues that Bush’s advisors are looking for a scapegoat for the President’s declining popularity — and Blair fits the bill. From the left, the Guardian’s anonymous leader-writer cries that Blair needs humility.
The core reason for Mr Blair’s unpopularity is that he took the country prematurely and unnecessarily to war alongside the worst US administration in modern history. He has not been forgiven for putting George Bush before the British and European people and the repercussions of that awful decision have continued to haunt him ever since.
Both leaders should begin the hunt for the citizens who are also dangerous Individuals Reluctant to Kill for an Abstraction.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 6:57 pm GMT [No comments]
Monday, September 29, 2003
What Shall I Cry? «
We demand a committee, a representative committee, a committee of investigation
RESIGN RESIGN RESIGN
T.S. Eliot, Coriolan
Many things have come out in the Hutton enquiry. Andrew Gilligan is a freelance, so he can’t resign from his job. Not so Geoff Hoon, but for him to do so would require — what’s the word? what Lord Carrington had during the Falklands — integrity, that’s the chappie. Not very New Labour.
Other things came out as the press pack scoured No 10 and BBC for scandal. This has always been a complex story, one which should make for one thick considered book, but will probably result in several tawdry, rushed-out hack jobs. Alastair Campbell’s humour was one of the surprises. Another, despite his superficial reputation as a bully, were his qualities as a boss: his loyalty and support to his immediate staff.
This isn’t true for the politicos. As Hutton closes the evidence stage of the inquiry into Dr David Kelly’s death, the Washington Post reveals that the White House applied its own pressure onto another drudge whose main crime was the desire to serve his country aligned with the ability to think critically. CIA Agent’s Identity Was Leaked to Media.
The operative’s identity was published in July after her husband, former U.S. ambassador Joseph C. Wilson IV, publicly challenged President Bush’s claim that Iraq had tried to buy “yellowcake” uranium ore from Africa for possible use in nuclear weapons. Bush later backed away from the claim.
The intentional disclosure of a covert operative’s identity is a violation of federal law.
The story certainly irks Daniel Drezner and Crooked Timber proves to be a forum for the mixed (but mostly nakedly joyous) feelings aroused. I especially like this from Paul Gottlieb:
I think what some bloggers feel triumphant about is that their assessments of the character of Bush’s White House has been dramatically vindicated. Some of us, Paul Krugman for one, my modest self for another, have felt all along that Bush’s piety, patriotism, and air of bluff honesty were a total fraud. That behind that faux-populist facade was the complete absence of any moral center — an absence of anything other then the desire to win.
Did someone say “ditto for Blair”? For shame. Those nice Bambi eyes. That relentless Oxford logic: If I were a liar, I would have resigned. I haven’t resigned, so I’m not a liar. That smile. How we love him.
I’ve been unimpressed with the alternative candidates for the 2004 election, especially Wesley Clark, characterised by Andrew Sullivan as a waffler, and his judgement condemned by General Sir Michael Rose. I’m still not sure that he should be the top guy, but Christopher Lydon Interviews Wesley Clark persuaded me that he has something to say.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 12:03 pm GMT [1 comment]
Tuesday, September 30, 2003
Put The Blame On Plame, Boys «
The Poor Man asks Why would master do this? — and links to every right-wing apologist going. Actually, the story makes my brainses feel all swirly and bad! It’s a very odd act of revenge.
The timing of the story could not be better — or worse, depending on your angle. If it had run alongside Kelly and Hutton, discussion would have all been on the “compare-and-contrast” model. As it was, Hutton, gave the WMD case a good going over. And now they’re doing it again in the States.
It feels paranoid to admit it, but with the Plame affair, I’m more convinced now that Hugo Young was right about our being committed to war anyway. And Kelly and Plame have this in common: politicos looking for “reasons” come up with WMD sources. Actual spooks, or intelligence people anyway, doubt these claims.
There are good reasons for Dr Kelly and his fellows to dig their heels in against going with single-sourced rumours. It’s not very scientific, and the source may be motivated by money. The source may, more importantly, be double-crossing the spooks.
I’m also sick and tired of Sullivan and his satellites accusing of the anti-war movement as being pro-Saddam. The right make enough noise about North Korea being fascist. I’m on the left and I’ll come out and say it: from what I know, North Korea wins this decade’s award for A-Society-Most-Like-Nineteen-Eighty-Four. I see no articles, by say, Michael Ledeen, calling for an invasion. Zimbabwe seems pretty bad too. Not to mention Ethiopia, which is poor and wretched mostly through civil war and bad government. The conservatives like to condemn Castro as a Stalinist. Yet there is, a lot nearer than the middle east, puffing on his cigars. Unmolested. Incredible. Not a peep of calling for war. Could these silent voices be tacit Castro supporters? Don’t answer that.
Red Dan sets out some excellent reasons why regime change will fail in posts to Tacitus.
I really have to study the history of Bush Senior’s Gulf War, and pick over why we didn’t depose Saddam last time. It’s the story no one seems to examine. And it’s the key to all of this.
Speaking of keys, BBC2 finished The Key tonight. In one of those bizarre reverse-polarity incidents, the Telegraph seemed to love it, and the Guardian hated it. But it was about women in society and there was no meaningless sex with pretty beasts and shopping for shoes. Instead there was old Play For Today style grit, the-way-real-people-speak humour, and something shocking: a moral core. Too-brief summary: three generations of women in Glasgow, each with their own struggles for some sort of emancipation. The grandmother spends the series remembering her fling with an engineer in the factory she worked in during the Great War; he is killed in the trenches. By 1997 (skipping almost all the other plotlines) she has had a stroke and is in a state nursing home with not enough (read no) properly trained staff, which is about to be bought by property developers from the New Labour council. Her granddaughter is standing as the local New Labour candidate, and having been attacked in a council meeting on the state of the place, her minders have the bright idea of a using the old woman’s birthday as a press conference. The grandmother drowns in the bath while her carer tries to cope with another oldie peeing himself. Not a Manolo Ballsup shoe in sight. No wonder the Grauniad hated it.
Unintended Double Meanings Department:
“I just coded the Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence. Bill Gates made it famous.” The implication wasn’t intentional, but the look on Bill’s face was priceless.
Yes, David Bradley at IBM came up with the Ctrl-Alt-Del sequence. And in 1980, he appeared in a video with Bill Gates.
Hurriedly scribbled @ 11:52 pm GMT [No comments]
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