Friday, 1 October 2004
I've Been Burned Before But »
I think Labour have won Hartlepool. Nothing, though, can explain this in the Guardian.
Perhaps riled by the Guardian’s declaration today for the Lib Dems, his press minder last night told this reporter: “There will be absolutely no cooperation with journalists writing a story at all. All we are concerned about is getting the Labour vote out, and if you turn up at the office you will be sent away with a flea in your ear and we won’t even tell you where the candidate is.”
My emphasis. Though I also find this from Iain Wright hard to forgive.
I think it’s absolutely fantastic that one of our own could be going to parliament on Thursday.
If John Prescott said that, I’d understand. If John Major had said that, I’d understand. If Edwina Currie, a woman, Jewish, and a science graduate had said that, I’d understand. If Dennis Skinner had said that [we get the point—Ed], if Diane Abbott … But Iain Wright appears to be an able-bodied, white, heterosexual male graduate. He’s from the North-East, so he speaks funny, but we don’t hold that against him. Actually, North East MPs, Blair, Mandelson, maybe there is some prejudice …
They’re about to call.
These 114 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:22am GMT Permanent link.
Recount »
Bleeding UKIP. They seem to have run the Tories so close that there’ll be a recount. Some of us need our beauty sleep (OK, in my case, sleep).
But, so help me, I despise Peter Hain. (He’s on BBC1/News24 or whatever it’s called, being smoothly upbeat about Labour’s haemorrhage of 17,000 odd votes.)
These 53 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:51am GMT Permanent link.
He's Short, He's Stupid »
Iain Wright won, and I’ve just turned off the most bitter and vindictive speech I’ve heard since … well Peter Mandleson’s “I’m a winner …” effort. Iain David Wright 12,x52? Jody Dunn 10,x19. (I can’t remember the exact figures.) Labour had a 15,000 vote majority last time. If I were still in the party, I’d be galvanised, and I wouldn’t sleep for a week. Bet they sit on their arses, and claim that a win is a win. It’s like watching the Harlem Globetrotters be replaced by the cast of “Dad’s Army” and Labour can’t even see what’s wrong. It’s like Lance Armstrong visiting some quack who tells him if his pee is clear then he doesn’t have “brain, lung and testicular” cancer. Everything is going to be fine.
These 129 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:25am GMT Permanent link.
Update »
Guacamoleville has the figures. Jody Dunn (Liberal Democrat)—10,719; Iain Wright (Labour)—12,752. 15,000 down to 2,033; I know there was a low turnout, but I think that may be Labour’s worst reverse ever. A lot of those interviewed on “Newsnight” said they’d always voted Labour. They didn’t acknowledge the Stepfordisation process. Can we have our party back now? Reminds me of Will.
For both Marx and Veblen labour is a dirty word, whereas work is not only life-saving but can be life enhancing.
And “liberal” (Reagan’s “l-word") and “democrat” are both whatever is the opposite of dirty words for me. To quote Morrissey, “I know it’s over …”
These 87 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:48am GMT Permanent link.
The Morning After The Debate Before »
Andrew Sullivan believes that the “honest as you can be” bloggers “lean toward arguing that Kerry won.” However, he agreed “more with Bush than Kerry. But from the very beginning, Kerry achieved something important. In tone and bearing, he seemed calm, authoritative, and, yes, presidential. I watched the C-SPAN version on a split screen, and in that context, it was particularly striking.” Sullivan observation of the day:
No president who has presided over Abu Ghraib should ever say he wants to put anyone on a leash. That’s all. Stay tuned.
Glenn Reynolds seems to be sitting on the fence. The closest he comes to a personal opinion is “About right, I’d say” in response to a Corner piece giving each candidate one plus and one minus. He has however found one blogger who discovered a Kerry hostage to fortune.
KERRY: With respect to Iran, the British, French, and Germans were the ones who initiated an effort without the United States, regrettably, to begin to try to move to curb the nuclear possibilities in Iran. I believe we could have done better. I think the United States should have offered the opportunity to provide the nuclear fuel, test them, see whether or not they were actually looking for it for peaceful purposes. If they weren’t willing to work a deal, then we could have put sanctions together. The president did nothing.
From the debate transcript (emphasis added). I admit it sounds like a gaffe, but the situation in Iran is tricky. It looks like the country is moving to a more democratic state, and we in the West should do all we can to encourage that. On the other hand, whatever kind of government it has, given its history and allies, an Iran equipped with nuclear weapons is scary. All the more reason to develop and oversee a civilian nuclear program. The more involvement we have, the easier inspection and control are. I’m with Kerry here.
Elsewhere, Matthew Yglesias: “While this was hardly a crushing victory to Kerry, it’s hard for me to see it as anything other than an unmitigated win.” As Matthew says, Julian Sanchez is a must read (and short).
Dan Drezner liveblogged the debate. He’s a star, and fair.
Bush keeps pronouncing “mullahs” as “mooolahs” — that can’t be correct, can it? UPDATE: Apparently it is — points for Bush.
Oh dear, has Dan been pronouncing the first syllable like the Scottish island? Never snark at someone’s pronunciation. And then on to matters of real import.
Dammit, the Yankees clinched the AL East.
Michael Bérubé thinks the last half hour “was a rout” for Kerry.
Man, nobody told me this Bush guy was so verbose, prolix, and also wordy.
But he saved the best for the update.
I thought they would stay and fight, but they didn’t, and now we’re fighting them now. I think that pretty much sums up Bush’s Iraq policy.
Abu Aardvark thinks “Kerry won, but not by a knockout.”
The only reaction commentary I’ve seen was 2 minutes on CNN, where Greenfield seemed quite upset to report that Kerry had actually done pretty well and quoted a “conservative blog”.
The “conservative blogs” I’ve seen are rather muted.
These 322 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38am GMT Permanent link.
Cheap Joke Time »
From the Grauniad: Millwall fans ‘stable’—this apparently refers to two lads who were stabbed in Budapest, not to a psychiatrist’s evaluation of the supporters’ mental state.
I hope they get well soon.
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:40pm GMT Permanent link.
And Another Thing You Really Need To Know »
Pete: If you look at his ducks, you see the eyes follow you around the room.
Dud: You noticed that?
Pete: Yer, when you see sixteen of his ducks, you see thirty-two little eyes follow you round the room.
Dud: No, you only see sixteen because they’re flying sideways and you can’t see the other eye on the other side. He never does a frontal duck.
Pete: No, but you get the impression, Dud, that the other eye is craning round the beak to look at you, don’t you. That’s a sign of a good painting, Dud.
…
Pete: The sign of a good painting when its people’s backs towards you is if the bottoms follow you around the room.
Mick Hartley, who “read Psychology and Philosophy at Oxford” according to his Normblog profile isn’t much impressed by recent psychological research.
As anyone who’s studied psychology will know, much of it involves restating the bleeding obvious, adding a spice of jargon to make it sound as though some important insight has been achieved.
Actually, I thought the methodology, far from being “incomprehensible” was rather neat.
Todd and his team found the mechanisms behind the visual effect by analyzing a 3-D picture of a human torso. Their study consisted of two phases.
First, the scientists used dots to mark near points and far points. Todd told Discovery News that those points referred to areas on the image that appear to be closer or farther away. The researchers mapped out different groupings of these points based on their observations of the image from a number of viewing angles.
Next, they placed a gauge figure over the torso — a computerized circle with a needle sticking out of it. At numerous places within the image, the researchers manipulated the gauge so that the needle would appear to be perpendicular to the surface of the torso. This provided information about perceived depth.
While the torso looked “squashed” when viewed from an angle, the researchers discovered that changes in viewing direction had little effect on how the observer saw it. …
He explained that the position of an individual’s pupils provides information about where he or she is looking. Paintings and photographs can manipulate human perception because viewers think they see figures in three dimensions on what is essentially a flat, two-dimensional surface.
Mick is, of course, right on the general principle, and a couple of minutes thought finds that last paragraph to be “bleeding obvious.”
These 56 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:09pm GMT Permanent link.
Fathers 4 Misogyny »
But there were ugly scenes as Mr Wright emerged from the polling station - the school he had attended as a youngster - when around 20 protesters from the Fathers4Justice group surrounded the candidate and heckled him with shouts of ‘how come you can see your daughter, but because of your government, I can’t see mine’.
Peter Cuthbertson, in Nick Barlow’s comments, confirms this, adding that he’d “put the number closer to thirty.”
Let’s see, dressing up as superheroes, showing contempt for the democratic process, and trying to humiliate a woman on national TV, not to mention the answer that I said Iain Wright should have given in the same thread as Peter’s remark, “because I’m not divorced on account of being a wife-beater, nor daft enough to scare small kids.” And they have to ask why they can’t see their children? The National Front gentleman is being a useless pillock in the picture, exactly as one would expect.
Photo from Guacamoleville.
These 109 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Never Mind, It's Bollocks »
Why is the Guardian so full of shit?
The site of punk’s battlefield is well trodden. There is an irony, therefore, in Malcolm McLaren’s remark that “history is for pissing on”. For few events in recent cultural history have maintained an equivalent seismic impact to punk, acquiring over the years not simply a mythic status, but an enduring legacy.
You could have fooled me.
Ought a movement of such targeted nihilism—beginning with a slogan such as “No Future"—allow itself to own a history? One feels the movement should have been booby-trapped by its own pioneers in order to repel the historians of the future. But we currently inhabit a postmodern environment of constant, simultaneous reclamations of pop cultural history.
Well, three-quarters of The Ramones have pegged it, as has Joe Strummer, and John Lydon is rather earnest with the “not giving a toss” business. Something should have been booby-trapped to repel the idiot who wrote this phoney crap.
But then, I’m not good with names, so I looked up Michael Bracewell in the Guardian’s own search box. And I came across What a state:
When Kenneth Tynan said “fuck” for the first time on British television, in 1965, my parents just sat there, stunned, mortified, bewildered. They had heard worse, of course, but never on the BBC. It was a joyous moment for a 12-year-old.
12 in 1965: born in 1953. That would make him 23 in 1976, and that struck me as odd as his view of punk.
Beyond its trickery, there was, of course, a political element to all of this. You could argue that punk styling made the implicit explicit — leading women to satirise their own appearance as commodified sexual objects, or men to present themselves as neurotic, gay or shambolic, thus undermining assertions of masculine authority.
Most punks were teenagers, they didn’t have “masculine authority.” Quite a few actually were “neurotic, gay or shambolic.” Mr Bracewell intellectualises with much the same control as Sid Vicious took heroin.
The lumpen shock factor of punk styling was, in fact, covert intelligence—intellectualism, mysticism even, conveyed through fashion’s equivalent of a story by Mikhail Bulgakov, William Burroughs or Quentin Crisp.
I googled Michael Bracewell. First page returned gives his Biography:
Writer, novelist and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell was born in London in 1958.
Very odd, even for the Guardian.
These 149 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:39pm GMT Permanent link.
The Bible Code »
Reading as is my wont, The Panda’s Thumb, I came across a link to the splendid Bible Code site.
In 2000, a nice lady from Louisiana, “Dee,” asked me if I had ever looked for my own name in the Torah. “There’s an idea,” I thought. What she really wanted was for me to look for her name in the Torah, but that didn’t come out till later. …
I resurrected my trusty code programs, and learned how to spell “David Thomas” in Hebrew. I launched the search, and found several instances of my name encoded in the Torah itself. One of these was located entirely within the first book, Genesis; this appears below. Here, the Hebrew letters spelling “DAVID THOMAS” run from bottom to top. [Illustration omitted.]
Of course, I didn’t stop with the Torah. I looked for myself in Charles Darwin’s classic Origin of Species, and found my name in there too! When I told Dee about that, she replied, “Maybe that’s just how Jesus says ‘Look, even here.’ ” I then told her about a Muslim who found coincidences with the number 19 in the Koran, and how he felt those proved that only the Koran is Divine. I told her I had found mysterious 19 coincidences, not in the Koran, but in Ted Kaczynski’s Unabomber Manifesto. I asked her how she would respond to my Muslim correspondent if he dismissed the Unabomber’s number-19 coincidences by simply claiming “It’s Allah’s way of saying ‘Look, even here.’” I don’t think I heard from her again after that.
Great stuff.
These 21 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:32pm GMT Permanent link.
The Essential Mr Sanchez »
I don’t like using the imperative voice, but go read Julian Sanchez’s latest. It’s short: a paragraph each from everyone’s favourite Eton lad and my favourite Oran ghetto kid made good. You’ll be quoting one or the other within a week, I tell ya.
These 44 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:23pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 2 October 2004
A Property Prices Post »
The rich are different from the rest of us. I like Evan Davis’s Why I’d like a house price crash. I would too. I don’t understand the property market: I get the ‘demand’ part; it’s what’s in demand that I don’t understand. I was walking home from the pub last night, and took a detour past the pub that I’d been told the night before in a different pub (sigh!) that Charlotte Church was (thinking of?) buying. My route from there took me past the awful-looking conversion of the old St David’s Hospital in which, again according to local rumour, both Ms Church and Billie Piper of Nick Barlow favourite, Dr Who, notoriety are buying apartments. (Can’t confirm a negative department: a Mr Chris Evans, erstwhile owner of Virgin FM, has, according to my dubious sources, never been seen in Cardiff.)
I don’t get it. The builder’s sign outside says “Prices from £249,000” (a lot round here). If I wanted a place to flop in Canton and I had a quarter of a million, I’d buy a solid three floor Victorian terraced house, preferably in the same street as the pub that Ms Church has her beady eye on. It’s close to a decent drinking establishment, a Platonic ideal of a 19th century park, and the city centre.
I’m guessing that there’s a chance that flash flats appreciate better than houses. Maybe so, but you have to live in them while they do, and I wouldn’t.
A quarter of a million buys different things in different places. This morning in my referrers, I found “crime in silverknowes,” and there can’t be many places called “Silverknowes.” (It’s where I grew up; and I can’t recall—if I ever knew—why it’s called that.) The estate was built a couple of years before my parents moved there, so I guess 1958, along the lines of Milton Keynes.
(If you’re an obsessive fan, there’s an ariel diagram here: our house is faces the ‘O’ on the school side; my parents bought from the guy who moved next door to the ‘R’ site, and looking at the difference in garden size, I can see why. I didn’t go to that school; no one I knew at the time did. A few guys in my secondary had though. If you want to understand, you should read this.
Knoxland is a grim housing estate not unadjacent, perhaps, to Silverknowes, where the four gloomy tower blocks are named after Scottish writers: Stevenson, Barrie, Scott and Burns. Inevitably (for Ian Rankin devotees) it will be the Stevenson block that has the major role to play in the crime.
It’s actually called Muirhouse, and the most famous block, renamed “Terror Tower” by the Sunday Post, was called Martello Court. Catchment areas had something to do with social class rather than proximity; I never understood it.)
I sold my father’s place nearly 10 years ago; my socialist tendencies made me feel that he’d be better cared for after a stroke by the NHS than in a nursing home, but the NHS and my subsequent experience disagreed. I haven’t been back since. I’ve no right to feel aggrieved, but the only place I can imagine that this development is, is on some farmland which ran parallel to the golf course from the dual carriageway down to the Firth of Forth. It’s not a big deal, but I’m glad that as a suburban kid, I at least saw cows and sheep regularly at a young age, and new houses on those fields means that kids in the same area may not.
So, on these new, expensive houses, life is good is it not? No. Man held on race charge after spitting claim. Laugh. It sounds trivial.
The businessman told how he had noticed spit on his BMW, but dismissed it as “car envy”. He said his second car, a Volkswagon Golf, which he also parks outside his house, had also been spat on. But the man said he started to fear for his safety when it became clear the spitting was happening nearly every day.
The spitter is a retired 50-year-old accountant. Oddly enough this is the Google cache of the National Front Guestbook of another house on the same estate. (To the poster’s credit, he calls this a “Racist disgrace.") I would like to return to Scotland. I’m ashamed of these idiots.
These 622 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:00am GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 4 October 2004
Light Blogging Ahead »
For reasons beyond my control, I’m feeling a lot less curmudgeonly than normal, and I may even going through a phase of gruntlement or even gruntledness. I don’t actually care whether John Kerry hid a cue card in his inside pocket, or whether George Bush wore an earpiece, so there may be days ahead when I have nothing whatever to say. Do try to cope during this difficult period.
In the meantime, here’s a little music, I mean a diverting quiz I found through Green Fairy.
I’m, um, alt.middle.
Even the simple act of reading a newspaper is fraught for you.
I don’t know who makes these things up but they got me largely right in the more alt.middles page.
Alt.middles are probably responsible for the weird blips in consumer tastes and sleeper hits, because they are hard to categorise and no one in marketing understands them. This is because their behaviour is driven more by reactions against something than towards it—no survey will ever ask people about that. They probably drove the rise in popularity of history programmes, because they were fed up with the decline in TV standards—they really can’t stand reality TV, and they may well have helped drive radio listenership up too. Of course one has to ask if this group’s constituents really have anything in common other than grumpiness.
Heh.
These 110 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 5 October 2004
Difficult Questions, Easy Answers »
You know those big universal philosophical problems beloved of three-year-olds and teenagers, and almost no one else? “Why am I here?” That sort of thing. Divining a gap in the religious/existential crisis web FAQ [Frequently Asked Questions] market, the Official God FAQ tells you all you need to know on this important subject.
The other pressing question of the day is, “Is being President hard work"? It’s something many of you may have asked given that the present holder of “Most Powerful Man On The Planet” nearly died eating a pretzel and can’t attend a debate without someone else telling him what to say. It’s Hard Work! gives the answers. (Christopher Hitchens may regard this as “dicking around, even “treasonous dicking around.” Fortunately Mr Hitchens’ column in Slate makes him an “independent, peer reviewed journalist,” which is to say, a journalist subject to peer review.)
As for the question I know you all want answered, “Is Claixto Bieito’s ENO production of Don Giovanni any good?” The critics think not, but Gert liked it.
These 173 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:59pm GMT Permanent link.
The Old Saddam-Bin Laden Link »
Even Donald Rumsfeld doesn’t believe that Saddam and al-Qaeda are connected.
“To my knowledge, I have not seen any strong, hard evidence that links the two,” he said.
What does he mean, “To my knowledge …"? Is he admitting that he’s senile? He’s Secretary of Defence, if any one saw the evidence of links, it must have been him.
Several hours after his appearance, Mr Rumsfeld issued a statement saying his comments had been “regrettably misunderstood” and that he had acknowledged there were ties between Osama Bin Laden and Iraq based upon CIA intelligence.
Just not intelligence he’d seen.
These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 6 October 2004
The Incompetence Of The Press Corps »
Yet again, I didn’t stay up all night to watch the debate, so all I know is what I caught on breakfast tv this morning, heard on Radio 4—and what I read in blogs. Brad DeLong says, “Wow! They Really Do Lie About Everything, Don’t They?” on Cheney’s comment that he’d never met Edwards before. Atrios has the photographic evidence.
It’s not almost pathological, it’s totally pathological—and based on an enormous confidence in the incompetence of the press corps.
Given the press corps are incompetent, did Cheney really have to recommend www.factcheck.com? (Apparently he meant www.factcheck.org, but those poor, easily confused hacks. Just hope they take down what they find.) Found through Kevin Drum. Perhaps Cheney has joined the shrill. And I was hoping to write something about him accusing Donald Rumsfeld of “pseudo-neo-conservatism,” after the Defence Secretary announced that there was no connection between Saddam and bin Laden.
These 130 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:54am GMT Permanent link.
The Book Racket »
It’s not only the press who get the facts wrong. ‘Tory’ blogger Matthew Turner alleges that it “appears William Hague is not at the conference, or he is not staying there …” only to be corrected in his comments.
Peter Cuthbertson, who ought to know, observes:
Hague was here yesterday signing books and is hosting a fringe meeting today at 1pm.
Ah yes, signing books. He clearly reads the Telegraph.
These 55 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:23am GMT Permanent link.
The Candid Candidate »
Not surprisingly, the Torygraph debate at the Bournemouth “drew an audience of 1,000 people for one of the biggest fringe meetings of the conference.” Five Telegraph columnists and Liam Fox formed the panel.
W F Deedes, who was greeted with particular affection, said: “The first thing the Tory Party’s got to do is cheer up a bit.” He declared that to return to power the Conservatives must concentrate on convincing people that they would govern in a “reliable” way, and should “go easy on promises”.
Bill is a heavyweight who conceals it well. Though I think Chris Brooke is right to say “there’s so little talent or experience in the Conservative parliamentary ranks now,” there is a lot of talent and experience willing to advise Michael Howard if he’s prepared to listen.
The Tories also have to get used to changing mores.
But Miss [Vicki] Woods warned that foxhunting was going to be banned because public opinion had turned decisively against it.
To illustrate changing attitudes to animals, she told a story about a householder in London who caught a rat in a shoe box with some cheese and released it on a neighbour’s doorstep rather than kill it.
Mr [Boris] Johnson said: “I do that with slugs. Throw them over the hedge.”
It’s not like Boris’s neighbours read the papers, is it?
These 100 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:54am GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 7 October 2004
National Poetry Day »
Nick notes that it’s National Poetry Day.
Christopher Hitchens says in Orwell’s Victory setting out the case for Orwell toryism, “He [Orwell] also preferred the country to the town, and poems that rhymed.” (P71) As do I. All of these are from memory, though I checked the punctuation of the Yeats.
My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hair be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damask’d, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks;
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath which from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her talk, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound;
I grant I never saw a goddess go:
My mistress when she walks, treads on the ground.
And yet, by heaven, I think my love more rare
Than any she belie with false compare.
I was going to talk about why that’s the best of the Sonnets, and perhaps the greatest lyric poem ever. The facts that it’s superbly about poetry, and deconstructs poetastery, and funny, and sincere, and that there are no obscure words—apart from the arguable exception of “damask’d”— and there are no words longer than two syllables, ought to be enough. It’s also great because it’s so clearly not written for awards or reputation. It’s for a far higher moral purpose than advancement—that of getting laid. (Updated to correct a stupidity.)
Having written that, I immediately think of The Scholars by Yeats.
Bald heads forgetful of their sins,
Old, learned, respectable bald heads
Edit and annotate the lines
That young men, tossing on their beds
Rhymed out in love’s despair
To flatter beauty’s ignorant ear.
All shuffle there; all cough in ink;
All wear the carpet with their shoes;
All think what other people think;
All know the man their neighbour knows.
Lord, what would they say
Did their Catullus walk that way?
Nietzsche, whom I read more as a poet than as anything else, also had it in for the academy. (Trans. Hollingdale.)
Hail, continual plodders, hail!
Lengthen out the tedious tale.
Dull, of humour not a trace,
Permanently commonplace
Pedant still in head and knee
Sans genie et sans espirie!
And while I’m at the rhyming stuff.
Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars,
Appeasing long-forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars.
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
Below, the boar-hound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before,
But reconciled among the stars.
(Eliot, Burnt Norton Canto II.) And finally, Auden.
Lay your sleeping head, my love
Human on my faithless arm.
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, And the grave
Proves the child ephemeral.
But in my arms till break of day,
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
These 176 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:26am GMT Permanent link.
National Poetry Day 2 »
Gawd, it’s like them advertisements for Pringles, you just can’t stop.
The sunbeam on the well-waxed oak,
In shape resembling not at all
The ragged chink through which it broke,
Into this darkened hall,
Swims round and golden over me,
The sun’s plenipotentiary.So may my love a chink find,
With such address to break
Into your grief-occluded mind
As you shall not mistake
But, rising, open to me for truth’s sake.
Robert Graves, The Chink (corrected, I had a couple of lines wrong when I posted this) which appeared in his Seven Days in New Crete. I can’t remember which collection this was in.
Maybe is not a monosyllable
So answer me
Monosyllablicly
At once, if you are able.
’No’ would be good,
’Yes’ even better,
Though longer by one letter.
Since The Chink was in a novel, I’m reminded of the poem in The Anti-Death League which may be Amis’s best ever, but I can’t find it on the web. I’ve got to go to the bank today to pay in a cheque. I can see myself buying some books on the way home.
These 86 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:17pm GMT Permanent link.
National Poetry Day 3 »
I’m hugely impressed with the fact-checking abilities of blog readers. Less than an hour after I wrote that I couldn’t find the poem in Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League, Anthony Wells sent it to me. Having committed loads of other junk to memory, I’d got the title wrong, as Anthony reminded me, it’s ‘To A Baby Born Without Limbs.’ I’d been looking for ‘child’ —but babies get born, not children. Duh. Thanks, Anthony.
This is just to show you whose boss around here.
It’ll keep you on your toes, so to speak,
Make you put your best foot forward, so to speak,
And give you something to turn your hand to, so to speak.
You can face up to it like a man,
Or snivvle and blubber like a baby.
That’s up to you. Nothing to do with Me.
If you take it in the right spirit,
You can have a bloody marvelous life,
With the great rewards courage brings,
And the beauty of accepting your LOT.
And think how much good it’ll do your Mum and Dad,
And your Grans and Gramps and the rest of the shower,
To be stopped being complacent.
Make sure they baptise you, though,
In case some murdering bastard
Decides to put you away quick,
Which would send you straight to LIMB-O, ha ha ha.
But just a word in your ear, if you’ve got one.
Mind you DO take this in the right spirit,
And keep a civil tongue in your head about Me.
Because if you DON’T,
I’ve got plenty of other stuff up My sleeve,
Such as Leukemia and polio,
(Which incidentally your welcome to any time,
Whatever spirit you take this in.)
I’ve given you one love-pat, right?
You don’t want another.
So watch it, Jack.
The spellings are intentional, as the poem appears anonymously in the novel.
These 85 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:32pm GMT Permanent link.
National Poetry Day 4 »
At some point the poetry will have to stop, and we’ll get back onto love poetry at some point.
I’m very impressed by others’ contributions. Iain J Coleman has "The Dream of the Rood", “an Anglo-Saxon mystical vision in which the story of the Crucifixion is told from the point of view of the Cross” in the original and translated. The Ex-Communicator posts her own translation of Sappho. Chris Bertram considers Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43 to be the best—and I suspect the comments will fill up with alternative suggestions.
For affecting, yet ostensibly simple, verse which lodges in the memory, you don’t get better than A.E. Housman. I can’t quite get over the parody with contained the verses:
What, still alive at twenty-two?
A fine, upstanding lad like you?
There’s an affectionate Orwell essay on Housman, and I find it easy to see why. Both are writers who take the time to express themselves as simply as they can.
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hug with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodlane ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
These 147 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:46pm GMT Permanent link.
National Poetry Day 5 »
“Something Nasty in the Bookshop” Kingsley Amis
Between the Gardening and the Cookery
Comes the brief Poetry shelf;
By the Nonesuch Donne, a thin anthology
Offers itself.Critical, and with nothing else to do,
I scan the Contents page,
Relieved to find the names are mostly new;
No one my age.Like all strangers, they divide by sex:
Landscape Near Parma
Interests a man, so does The Double Vortex,
So does Rilke and Buddha.“I travel, you see”, “I think” and “I can read"
These titles seem to say;
But I Remember You, Love is my Creed,
Poem for J.,The ladies’ choice, discountenance my patter
For several seconds;
From somewhere in this (as in any) matter
A moral beckons.Should poets bicycle-pump the human heart
Or squash it flat?
Man’s love is of man’s life a thing apart;
Girls aren’t like that.We men have got love well weighed up; our stuff
Can get by without it.
Women don’t seem to think that’s good enough;
They write about it.And the awful way their poems lay them open
Just doesn’t strike them.
Women are really much nicer than men:
No wonder we like them.Deciding this, we can forget those times
We stayed up half the night
Chock-full of love, crammed with bright thoughts, names, rhymes,
And couldn’t write.
These 7 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:03pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 9 October 2004
Treading Water »
This is to let you know that I’m still alive as much as anything else. I think that I once posted a comparison between lonely letters home from abroad and blogging; both only get written under a certain pressure.
I write when miserable.
At the moment, I’m bobbing like a helium balloon.
“US political blogger Glenn Reynolds” has a column in the Gruaniad. There is much I dislike about Instapundit. He’s glib and (seemingly) willing to accept emails without fact-checking. OTOH, he’s liberal in many ways (and the conservative habit of damning those they disagree with makes me shudder, and cross them off my Christmas-Card list).
I certainly don’t fit in with the religious right. I support gay marriage, drug legalisation and abortion rights. I am in favour of stem-cell research, and against prayer in school.
Spoken like a conservative, who’s read the Constitution.
Nevertheless, some people call me a conservative because I support President Bush’s war on terror, which is really (although Bush is too diplomatic to say so) a war on fundamentalist Islamist terror.
I don’t agree with “fundamentalist Islamist terror” but nor do I agree with the IRA or ETA. If you declare a “War on Terror” it has to mean an war on all of those. Bush could have declared a war on what Christopher Hitchens calls “Islamofascism.” But he didn’t. And while I know this may be trite, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. I can think of many “terrorists” — David ben Gurion, Thomas Jefferson, Jesus Christ(?) — the world is arguably better for. But Bush did not say that. He thinks that only the “bad guys” kill innocent children.
Kerry isn’t good (he’s a toff, and a Yank), but Bush is an imbecile. I apologise to any imbeciles reading this. I was going to compare his intellect to that of an amoeba, but there are more of them to get offended.
These 258 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:59pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 10 October 2004
Reflections On Terrorism »
Don’t follow leaders
Deleted. Utter crap. Sorry.
These 193 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:49am GMT Permanent link.
The Lash Goes On »
Deleted. Utter crap. Sorry.
These 157 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:32am GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 12 October 2004
The Tuesday Poem »
A seasonal effort by Ezra Pound.
Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop
And how the wind doth ramm!
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, tis why I am,
Goddamm.
So ‘gainst the winter’s balm
Sing Goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm
Sing Goddamm, sing Goddamm,
DAMM.
Too right, Ez. No wonder he left Chicago for Italy.
These 16 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Christopher Reeve »
Yeah, I know I’m a little late with this, but he was just an actor, you know? However, on the BBC site this morning, Bush praises Superman star Reeve (which is nice of him, given the deceased’s views on stem cell research and the Republican Party). It’s not the first time Bush has emerged as a better person that his netizen supporters. Apparently, comment was less generous on Free Republic (no link, look it up if you’re desperate), as excerpted by Digby (found through Michael Bérubé).
I’m more or less with Mick Hartley on the dullness of ‘Superman.’ “More or less” because Mick is wrong here:
At least Batman had a touch of camp comedy about him and Spiderman was kind of weird. The Silver Surfer was just cool.
Nope. Dull. Dull. And dull. But “de gustibus” as they say. The London News Review’s Popped Clog: Christopher Reeve does at least remind us that you don’t have to be stupid to like Superman (though it can’t hurt).
The richest Superman fan in the world is Jerry Seinfeld. In Jerry’s leisure time, the superhero comes second only to assembling silos full of vintage cars and swimming in Jacuzzis full of money.
Jerry even named his character’s father Kal (after the Kryptonian name Kal-El), and made sure that each episode had some reference to Superman tucked away somewhere. If you were bored or deranged, you could look out for them.
And they include the greatest of all ‘Superman’ references in the show:
ELAINE: Bizarro Jerry?
JERRY: Yeah, like Bizarro Superman, Superman’s exact opposite, who lives in the backwards Bizarro World. Up is down, down is up, he says hello when he leaves, goodbye when he arrives.
ELAINE: Shouldn’t he say badbye? Isn’t that the opposite of goodbye?
JERRY: No, it’s still goodbye.
ELAINE: Does he live underwater?
JERRY: No.
ELAINE: Is he black?
JERRY: Look, just forget the whole thing.
(Which reminds me, as an apologia for not blogging, here’s some useless information about Elaine.)
Well, whatever his detractors say — that he wasn’t a good actor (not necessary for Hollywood), that he was ‘selfish’ (but aren’t we all? and what would they rather have him do? kill himself—an act frequently scorned as ‘selfish’?), he used what he had been given, celebrity, and campaigned and may have given real hope (as opposed to the nasty Mother Theresa kind) to others. There are worse things to be remembered for.
These 244 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:59pm GMT Permanent link.
What Is Democracy? »
Damian is very funny and poignant, as are his wonts. I feel like a terrible fusty pedant here, but we didn’t invade Afghanistan for this, really. As Harry of the Place says:
Of course they didn’t invade Afghanistan due to the oppression of women. Has anyone ever seriously suggested they did?
The decent pro-war left (meaning here Harry and Comrades, Norman Geras, and Damian) have all along, it seems to me, supported the Afghan and Iraq campaigns on the strengths of the unintended consequences, rather than the declared ones of our government (rooting out al-Qaeda in Afghanistan—given Bali and Madrid, arguably a failure; and WMD in Iraq, except there weren’t any). I support those consequences, the Taliban were close to my idea of evil (ie things I hate even more than Peter Hain), and some of us have hated Saddam since we first heard of him. But what I know of Afghanistan is that the burkha is back, and as Jamie has found, the elections aren’t what we’d expected. I’ve no objection to women wearing the Burkha, just as I’ve no objection to them dressing like Britney. as long as they have the choice. (But, like most leftists, I find ‘choice’ loaded: just because some women where I live wrap themselves in black and conceal everything but their eyes, and others take fashion tips from the Fat Slags doesn’t mean that either is free to change roles, or even wear something else tomorrow.)
I’m not overly keen on Democracy here. If I lived in the States, I’d support Nader. As I live in the UK, I like the Loonies as much as anyone. Maybe I’m a cynic, but I think due process of law is more important that a five-yearly mandate. If I ever get arrested, I want legal representation. Can we give the Iraqis in Abu Ghraib that first, and contest the election later?
These 296 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:14pm GMT Permanent link.
Door Number 4 »
Ch-ch-changes … (Quicktime required; broadband preferred.)
Found through Ogged. Theory from the Shrill Professor.
These 14 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 13 October 2004
Christopher Reeve Is Dead, I Bring You The Superman »
Yet another lacuna in my patchy political knowledge exposed. I’d forgotten (if I ever knew) that Christopher Reeve had been heroic in real life. One can be heroic even without charisma, and given the brouhaha over Che Guevara, just as well.
Marc Cooper remembers Superman’s Greatest Moment: Defying Pinochet. Good lad. (I nearly typed ‘God lad.’ I suppose that’d be a ‘Nietzschean slip,’ well he’s dead now, innee?) Hat tip, the good lad himself.
These 74 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:47am GMT Permanent link.
Outsource This! »
On the subject of ‘Superman’ and political activism, check out Outsource This! (found through Atrios’s ads). OK, the link is very, very tenuous, because I know Sweet FA about the Man of Steel, so here’s a clue from Popped Clogs.
GEORGE: You know what this is to do with? The man in the cape. I bet you he is mixed up in this. I don’t trust men in capes.
JERRY: You can’t cast aspersions on someone just because they’re wearing a cape. Superman wore a cape. And I’ll be damned if I stand by and let you say anything bad about him…
GEORGE: Alright, Superman’s the exception.
These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:29am GMT Permanent link.
Dum De-Dum De-Dum De-Dum, Dum De-dum De Dee-dee »
We present the Archer, the saga of an everyday millionaire and Tory grandee who gets mixed up with mercenaries and an African coup plot.
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:50am GMT Permanent link.
O Tempora, O Mores! »
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly.
High Windows, Philip Larkin
Bill Deedes, aka “The thinking woman’s reactionary” has bad news for the glum fogeys of the blogosphere and the Daily Mail — today’s youth is no worse than in my day.
Their elders, too, draw quiet satisfaction from reading about the behaviour of yobs, and reckoning that things have run downhill since their day. Oh really? I can recall a very rough scene at Lord’s at the close of an Eton v Harrow match, when the youth of one school set about knocking in the top hats of youths at the other.
You could hardly describe the lads involved as yobs, because the Eton and Harrow match of those pre-war days was a very high-class affair, attracting a well-dressed crowd of upwards of 30,000; but it certainly bordered on yobbish behaviour and, if it had occurred outside the privileged walls of Lord’s, might well have attracted the attention of the police. My goodness, I squirm to think what Polly Toynbee of the Guardian would have had to say about it.
“Knocking in the top hats” sounds innocuous, until you consider the likely reaction, and the reaction to the reaction. I disagree with Bill further down though:
One needs to be careful here. Some youthful delinquency today is downright nasty. We may have knocked in each other’s top hats; but we didn’t carry knives as offensive weapons. Society has become more violent than it was, and young people are pushed towards adulthood faster than they were. Commerce has some responsibility. Like the newspapers, it sees new markets out there.
Knives were common in Scotland at the time of Bill’s youth, and probably in all industrial towns. The Krays carried knives in the 1960s. As for young people “pushed towards adulthood faster than they were,” leaving school at 12 or 14 seems premature to everyone now, but it used to be the norm for the working class. Larking around innocently was for the privileged. I fear Bill is comparing toffs and chavs and, not surprisingly, finding glaring differences in expectations.
Is the past another country? Do we do things differently now?
Then it was on to see the tiny child-rocker Avril Lavigne at Wembley, surrounded by a sea of screaming girls. It was a pretty asexual show, by rock standards, but in front of me was a girl proudly wearing a T-shirt reading “I humped the drummer”, while another said simply “Slut”. They both had angel faces and couldn’t have been more than 12.
Perhaps, ever since FCUK, these words no longer register with younger people as anything except mildly funny.
I don’t know why Andrew Marr goes to these things.
These 158 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:26pm GMT Permanent link.
October Surprise »
You don’t believe all you read on the interwebthing do you? Take Fafblog! which invites us to believe on the strength of an image taken from The Two Americas that somewhere in the USA is a statue of Vladimir Illyich Lenin. As a rational person, you of course know that Americans are much too busy being abused on London buses, or fined one million dollars for smoking Cuban cigars, or sharing cigars—Cuban or otherwise—with 22-year-old interns to find the time to erect statues to Russian Revolutionaries. Yet there it is, this clearly faked photograph, eager to lead the impressionable astray.
Americans are patrolling a front line in Afghanistan, where it would be impossible with 10 times the troop strength to protect all potential voters on Oct. 9 from Taliban/al-Qaida murder and sabotage. 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.
Christopher Hitchens on Monday, Sept. 27, 2004 (or, all of a fornight ago). And yet Giblets is sittin in the pumpkin patch waitin for Osama bin Laden. What a silly idea, how could those “hard-pressed soldiers of ours take time off to keep Osama Bin Laden in a secret cave"? How did those “hard-pressed soldiers take time off” to disappear “at least” 11 al-Qaeda suspects who include “Khalid Shaikh Muhammed, the alleged principal architect of the September 11 attacks; Abu Zubayda, reputedly a close aide of Osama bin Laden; Ramzi bin al-Shibh, who but for his failure to get a U.S. visa might have been one of the 9/11 hijackers; and Hambali, an alleged key al-Qaeda ally in Southeast Asia"? Clearly there is no way they could be holding Osama bin Laden in secret.
As Osama Surprise say:
Just look at what happened to George’s approval ratings when we caught Saddam Hussein. Now imagine the effect the capture of Osama Bin Laden, someone who actually did attack the US, might have on the upcoming election.
Bin Laden didn’t just attack the US, the US (and the West) would be safer with him gone. That’s in contrast to someone else.
Since You Asked — No, the United States is not safer with Saddam Hussein out of power.
Really people, it shouldn’t be that hard to state the crushingly obvious.
Why does Jim Henley hate America?
These 268 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:17pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 14 October 2004
You Cannot Petition The Lord With Prayer! »
When I was back there in seminary school
There was a person there
Who put forth the proposition
That you can petition the Lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
Petition the lord with prayer
You cannot petition the lord with prayer!
The Doors
Gene posts on yet another reason to hate George Bush. Not only has the US government spent $2.3M in research into the efficacy of prayer, but as Gene says:
Is he serious? Does he really consider prayer a realistic alternative to providing poor people with decent health care?
From the NY Times:
For another, not everyone sees God as one who does favors on request.
“There’s no way to put God to the test, and that’s exactly what you’re doing when you design a study to see if God answers your prayers,” said the Rev. Raymond J. Lawrence Jr., director of pastoral care at New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center. “This whole exercise cheapens religion, and promotes an infantile theology that God is out there ready to miraculously defy the laws of nature in answer to a prayer.”
Even as an atheist, I’m against this cheapening of religion. Their research methods are questionable.
In the experiments, the researchers did not know until the study was completed which patients were being prayed for. But experts say the two studies suffer from a similar weakness: the authors measured so many variables that some were likely to come up positive by chance. In effect, statisticians say, this method is like asking the same question over and over until you get the answer you want.
One of the banes of research in the behavioural sciences is that with increasingly powerful desktop computers it’s now very easy to run lots of statistical analyses, when once you had to wait for a slot on the university’s mainframe. But the more ways you crunch numbers, the more likely you are to find a confirmatory result.
Besides Francis Galton did it in 1872.
An inquiry of a somewhat similar nature may be made into the longevity of persons whose lives are prayed for; also that of the praying classes generally; and in both those cases we can easily obtain statistical facts. The public prayer for the sovereign of every state, Protestant and Catholic, is and has been in the spirit of our own, “Grant her in health long to live.” Now, as a simple matter of fact, has this prayer any efficacy? There is a memoir by Dr. Guy, in the (Vol. XXII. p.355), in which he compares the mean age of sovereigns with that of other classes of persons. …
The sovereigns are literally the shortest lived of all who have the advantage of affluence. The prayer has therefore no efficacy, unless the very questionable hypothesis be raised, that the conditions of royal life may naturally be yet more fatal, and that their influence is partly, though incompletely, neutralised by the effects of public prayers.
So either you cannot petition the Lord with prayer or
Le batard! Il n’exist pas!
These 122 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:26am GMT Permanent link.
Something Useful »
Rakastan eläimiä joten en syö niitä (I love animals, so I don’t eat them in Finnish). Vegetarian Phrases In Other Languages. Found through Green Fairy.
These 25 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:36am GMT Permanent link.
Not A 'Low Blow' »
Andrew Sullivan is worth quoting in full on Mary Cheney.
I keep getting emails asserting that Kerry’s mentioning of Mary Cheney is somehow offensive or gratuitous or a “low blow”. Huh? Mary Cheney is out of the closet and a member, with her partner, of the vice-president’s family. That’s a public fact. No one’s privacy is being invaded by mentioning this. When Kerry cites Bush’s wife or daughters, no one says it’s a “low blow.” The double standards are entirely a function of people’s lingering prejudice against gay people. And by mentioning it, Kerry showed something important. This issue is not an abstract one. It’s a concrete, human and real one. It affects many families, and Bush has decided to use this cynically as a divisive weapon in an election campaign. He deserves to be held to account for this - and how much more effective than showing a real person whose relationship and dignity he has attacked and minimized? Does this makes Bush’s base uncomfortable? Well, good. It’s about time they were made uncomfortable in their acquiescence to discrimination. Does it make Bush uncomfortable? Even better. His decision to bar gay couples from having any protections for their relationships in the constitution is not just a direct attack on the family member of the vice-president. It’s an attack on all families with gay members - and on the family as an institution. That’s a central issue in this campaign, a key indictment of Bush’s record and more than relevant to any debate. For four years, this president has tried to make gay people invisible, to avoid any mention of us, to pretend we don’t exist. Well, we do. Right in front of him.
Ogged thinks so too, taking time out from the essential business of replying to personal ads and considering the qualities of “the one".
These 33 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:29pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 15 October 2004
Totally Iconoclastic »
The Lone Star Iconoclast (BTW, how cool a name is that? only in America), the paper of Crawford, Texas (you have heard of it) lives up to its moniker.
Few Americans would have voted for George W. Bush four years ago if he had promised that, as President, he would:
- Empty the Social Security trust fund by $507 billion to help offset fiscal irresponsibility and at the same time slash Social Security benefits.
- Cut Medicare by 17 percent and reduce veterans’ benefits and military pay.
- Eliminate overtime pay for millions of Americans and raise oil prices by 50 percent.
- Give tax cuts to businesses that sent American jobs overseas, and, in fact, by policy encourage their departure.
- Give away billions of tax dollars in government contracts without competitive bids.
- Involve this country in a deadly and highly questionable war, and
- Take a budget surplus and turn it into the worst deficit in the history of the United States, creating a debt in just four years that will take generations to repay.
These were elements of a hidden agenda that surfaced only after he took office.
Whatever the Instahack usually says at this juncture. Found through Gary.
These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:14am GMT Permanent link.
I Should Never Ever Read Torygraph Leaders »
Nick Barlow posts some fond obits for Conrad Russell, the most poignant for me is from the Telegraph.
The following year, after Tony Blair claimed that he never gave money to beggars, Russell suggested in a letter to The Daily Telegraph that “he should remember that need may happen to anyone. Belisarius in his day was the best general in the Roman Empire, but ended up sitting at the gates of Rome chanting ‘give a ha’penny to Belisarius’. If, after Mr Blair has reformed the welfare state and gone out of office at the moment his pension fund goes broke, I find him at King’s Cross chanting ‘give a tenner to Tony’, I will give to him, even if my gorge rises at it”.
Too bad about the third leader today, The last Whig.
It is often said that the late Roy Jenkins was the last great Whig in Parliament.
But that is not true, as Lord Jenkins was really a Welsh bon viveur who showed no interest in the traditional Whig principle of upholding our constitutional settlement. The truest carrier of the Whig banner in Parliament was Earl Russell, who died yesterday.
Where to start? The contradiction of an unattributed — if ‘often said’ — statement, perhaps. The second paragraph defines the Torygraph conception of Whiggery, “the traditional Whig principle of upholding our constitutional settlement.” Fine, does one have to be a dour Scot, rather than a ‘Welsh bon viveur’ to do that? Whether one drinks claret or Coke seems as irrelevant as where one is born.
Conrad Russell was a descendant of Edward Russell, one of the five Whigs and two Tories who offered William of Orange the English throne in 1688.
In 1688, eh? That’s 316 years ago, call it 12 full generations. Assuming that the late Earl’s forebears didn’t intermarry, he had 4095 (212 -1) other ancestors around at the same time. Assuming, a little more loosely, that Edward Russell had two children and for the past 12 generations each of them had two children, there are, again, 4095 people around who could also claim to be an heir. One of them may be you. The point was?
He spent his life advocating the sort of classical liberal values that informed the Whigs, then the old Liberal Party, and that are now being taken up by young Lib Dems …
This is in the same paragraph as the previous sentence, yet it in no ways follows. One is an accident of birth, the other is called ‘character.’
… grown tired of Charles Kennedy’s flirtation with the Left.
Oh, I see where they were going now.
Whiggery has its disadvantages, but it is a particularly English creed and has the merit of being temperamentally averse to the abuse of power.
Ah, that’s why Woy wasn’t eligible. The Offa’s Dyke gap. Barbarians to the west, you know. Other English aren’t “temperamentally averse to the abuse of power” you say? Do you mean Toryism perchance?
Whether it was through his work as a historian of the Civil War, defending a young man wrongly accused of rape, scrutinising social security regulations or exhuming an ancient Lords procedure called Asperity of Speech to censure a rude government minister, Lord Russell was a chip off the old Whig block.
I think this is Oxbridge code for “good lad.”
Under the new rules, there will now be a by-election among Liberal peers, in which his heir, Nicholas, may stand. We hope he does.
In god’s name, why?
These 252 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Beating Around The Bush »
I’m going to be stuck to Jamie like the proverbial glue for a couple of posts at least, because he’s clearly smarter than I am, and he’s beaten me to the punch on a couple of issues. He brings up the Guardian’s world-view confirming poll which reveals world anger at Bush.
The poll, conducted by 10 of the world’s leading newspapers, including France’s Le Monde, Japan’s Asahi Shimbun, Canada’s La Presse, the Sydney Morning Herald and the Guardian, also shows that on balance world opinion does not believe that the war in Iraq has made a positive contribution to the fight against terror.
Well duh. ‘Terror’ here is a very flexible word, meaning shorthand for the ‘bad guys.’ The Turks persecute Kurds? That is their democratic right. Most of the September 11 hijackers and the alleged mastermind came from Saudi Arabia? Lets invade Iraq. And so on and so forth.
Sixty per cent of British voters say they don’t like Bush, rising to a startling 77% among those under 25.
This ‘Yankophobia’ (for want of a better word, and I do know that Bush is a ‘Texan’ and Yankees were northerners, it’s Bush’s phoniness, like Fettes boy Blair pretending to come from the North East, that gets me) extends to my Daily Newspaper of Choice.
Oh, we don’t hate Americans. At the risk of sounding hollowly PC, some of my best friends are Americans. (They’re all Democrats though, I have standards. I’m not prejudiced. I would touch a Republican with a bargepole, if it had been lethally sharpened.)
We Europeans are reported in the States as being anti-semitic, etc. There is confirmation from a commenter called Sally.
There is an elderly woman who spends many mornings outside Holborn tube station holding various anti-war banners.
Shortly after the madrid bombing she held up a sign connecting the bombing to Ramallah and to Iraq. Normally I would ignore such people but on this occasion I apporached her and said quietly “I think the Iraq was was a good thing” and walked away.
She shouted out after me … “You must be a Jew then”.
Nasty stuff. But before any Americans tut and consider this typical of Britain, look at this (big image, takes a while to download, worth it though, trust me).
Gene of Harry’s Place seems a fair and open-minded guy, and he’s the one who asks Is Bush mad at England?
One of the questions at Wednesday’s Presidential debate had to do with the sudden shortage of flu vaccine in the United States, due to possible contamination of almost half the expected supply.
President Bush began his response by saying, “We relied upon a company out of England.” (In fact it is an American-based company that produces the vaccine at a plant in England.)
Which is odd, because when I visited the States prior to “9/11” there was always someone with the the edge that I was the old enemy. Since then, with the poodle doing whatever it is that pointless, brainless showdogs do, there’s been something of an increase in love for Airstrip One the place all good Americans have ancestors.
All the other Americans over here report different experiences. I remember some serious psychologist in an article about the complexities of modern life who mentioned negotiating busy pavements (like Oxford Street). Most of us manage to get from one end to the other without bumping into anyone. If you collide with several people, perhaps it’s not bad luck, but you.
Jamie has a great post that I was going to excerpt, but every word is on the money.
I still have “warm, fuzzy feelings about the US” whenever I think of my current iTunes raves, Laurie Anderson or Steve Reich, or smart bloggers like TBogg (deserves a medal for suffering the fat-headed Southerner and the unfilmable scriptwriter), Matthew Yglesias, Jim Henley, Gary Farber, John Holbo and Belle Waring, Hemmingway, Twain, Scorcese, Lynch, Coppola, and all of that. Make Robert Altman, Iggy Pop, Hunter Thompson, or Dennis Hopper ‘Preznit for Life’ and I’d be an ally till I die. (Well, OK, almost certainly not: I’m a Scot and being disagreeable is my inheritance.)
And since Jamie mentioned self-hating Canadians, what about the Canuck who explained America to my youthful self? What a great country. Don’t let some inbred frat-boy fuck spoil it.
These 514 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 16 October 2004
May You Live In Decadent Times »
What is your aim in philosophy? To show the fly the way out of the fly-bottle.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
Jamie, him again, posts on Derrida. Like me, Jamie likes Rod Liddle. And, like me, he’s revised his opinion of Jaques.
When I was at college, the cachet involved in coming from a working class Northern background was waning fast, so I made the most of what was left by being as obnoxious as possible. Naturally, I hated Derrida and read as little as I could get away with. But now, the more the “valiant for truth brigade” (phrase stolen from here) go wanking on about truth and beauty and universal values, the more I think I missed something valuable.
As Rod Liddle (the man who derided hunting in the Guardian, and doesn’t like the PM, and his hair’s long, and he likes porn, all signs of a baddie, you’ll agree) says:
Because at the heart of Derrida’s philosophy was a laudable commitment to making mischief and, more than this, a fervent belief in the notion of doubt, something which is intrinsic to our conception of democracy. Without doubt, there’s no democracy.
I’ve struggled with Derrida, and not been that impressed. There is nothing that’s not in the (ahem, as I hate the idea) ‘greats’ like Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, but he had a sense of fun. Read these Quotations by Ludwig Wittgenstein if you doubt me. And then burn all ‘philosophy’ before Nietzsche.
Dear non-existent Bastard, do we need lardy Johann Hari?
If I wasn’t ridiculously intellectually self-confident (I got a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy, darling)
What does darling Johann dislike about Derrida?
I have friends who still awake weeping at 3am with nightmares about trying to understand Derrida in time for their final exams.
That’s because Kant and Plato are easy options.
It’s true his writing is wilfully obscure, and at times he lapses into gibberish.
Kant, Plato, yada, yada, yada.
But in fact, once you learn how to boil down his prose, his ideas are fairly simple — and pernicious.
Kant, Plato, yada, yada, yada. Plato, pernicious? Surely not. And simple? There are these perfect horse-like things, and, ah, it’s over to you, So-crates.
If I describe, say, Charles Manson as “mad”, many people would assume I was describing an objective state called “madness” that exists in the world. Derrida would say the idea of “madness” is just a floating concept, a “signifier”, that makes little sense except in relation to other words. The thing out there—the actual madness, the “signified” — is almost impossible to grasp; we are lost in a sea of words that prevent us from actually experiencing reality directly.
Derrida wants to break down the belief that there is an objective external reality connected to our words, a world “out there” that can be explored through language, science and rationality. There are, he said, no universal truths, no progress and ultimately no sense, only “decentred”, small stories that are often silenced by a search for rationality and consistency.
Rather tired Wittgenstein I’d have thought.
So the whole foundation our culture is built on — the absolutely fundamental assumptions we act on every day — are rotten.
Yawn. Yes Johann, you get it now.
Derrida was, in short, the mad axeman of Western philosophy. He tried to hack apart the very basis of our thought—language, reason and the attempt to tell big stories about how we became as we are. All we are left with—if we accept Derrida’s conclusions—is puzzled silence and irony. If reason is just another language game, if our words don’t match anything out there in the world—what can we do except sink into nihilism, or turn to the supernatural?
He hasn’t read Wittgenstein, who seriously attempts answers, has he? And ‘sink into nihilism’ doesn’t that suppose, possibly falsely, that there is an alternative? (If there is, Graduate First Class Hari doesn’t provide it.)
Compare that to postmodernist fiction, a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention. Look at the execrable novels of Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace, trapped in self-referential Derridan word-games and irrelevance while a world warms and wails outside their pages.
Does he mean books? I thought “a form of torture so heinous that it surely contravenes the Geneva Convention” described Johann’s posturings.
Now magnify that effect across the humanities: imagine this deflation happening in anthropology, sociology, philosophy … you get the idea.
Yep, I can. Go on.
The popularity of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence.
I like decadence. Wilde was ‘decadent.’ Nietzsche, though he railed against it, was of the Wagner period. Comparing Wilde to Johann Hari is like comparing Graham Norton to Mary Whitehouse.
Western intellect is so decayed that we all live longer. In a few years, we will have quantum computers, and, if I understand the principles, a form of teleportation and faster than light communication. (Forbidden, by, no less, Albert Einstein, in his his relativity theories; possible, according to no less, Albert Einstein, in the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen thought experiment.)
The Enlightenment —the 18th century tradition that gave us our notions of rationality and progress— is just another empty narrative, a sweet set of delusions.
I’m a little lost as to how a ‘tradition’ — especially one moored in the ‘18th century’ could ‘give’ us anything. Traditions ‘pass’ surely. The Enlightenment did far more than that. It started the death of philosophy. (Seen early by Nietzsche, soon there will be no Philosophy departments. ‘History of …’ maybe. Materialism won. There are no correlates for ethics in the material world. Some people think there is ‘evil’ but there are just things, and perhaps relations between them, though mathematics captures that better.)
Little Johann argues that “The popularity of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy among academics is hard to understand except as a symptom of decadence.” Yeah, we’re so decadent that even chavs carry Nokias with the memory of Palm Pilots at the turn of the millenium, and which were brick-like in the 80s. Thanks to philosophy graduates, like Mr Hari, Apple Computers have shrunk from table-crushing lumps to desktops. I live in a Victorian era house. The original owners didn’t have a proper kitchen or toilet. In 100 years (if anyone’s alive) they’ll look back on our poverty. As Mr Hari says, this progress, stimulated as all can see by Marxism and Philosophy departments, is to be scorned. Mr Hari tells us “I got a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy.” Pleasing to know. I thought that 20th philosophy was pushed forward by a Swiss patent clerk, Feynman, Godel, and other non-entities. The first of those couldn’t speak till he was three. Thank God for Johann Hari’s contributions, that silly lad, the one with the name like the commie film director, wasn’t as smart as an Independent columnist. Four papers in 1904! Any fool with a “a double first from King’s College, Cambridge specialising in philosophy” could have done that, they were just too posh.
As we all know, there are no problems with philosophy. Plato was right about everything. The Sun goes round the Earth. Light travels in zero time. Light is particulate (as Newton said, dummy); I mean it’s wave-like (can that Young guy be right?) When my dad was at Sheffield, they didn’t teach the Periodic Table. so we have no right to expect that Johann’s “double first from King’s College” covered Godel, or Russel, or Whitehead. Just the old fairy stories, probably.
As we all know, nasty Mr Gödel was the mad axman of mathematics.
Although this theorem can be stated and proved in a rigorously mathematical way, what it seems to say is that rational thought can never penetrate to the final ultimate truth … But, paradoxically, to understand Gödel’s proof is to find a sort of liberation. For many logic students, the final breakthrough to full understanding of the incompleteness Theorem is practically a conversion experience. This is partly a by-product of the potent mystique Gödel’s name carries. But, more profoundly, to understand the essentially labyrinthine nature of the castle is, somehow, to be free of it.
Oh dear. Constipated newspaper columnists proved irrelevant. Mr Hari thinks we’re “decadent.” Apart from my opera cloak and cane, I don’t answer to that description. We live in an age when lasers (invented or discovered — according to taste — the year before I was born) now can correct astigmatism and read music on CD players. Our cars emit fewer (and less) greenhouse gases. We have probes leaving the solar system which are now further from Earth than Isaac Newton thought anything was. Your children’s children may see the stars. They may be as good as immortal.
When I studied Physics ‘O’ Level the set book was called ‘Nat Phil 3’ (for Natural Philosophy 3rd Year). There is only one ‘Natural Philosophy’ now, and it’s blooming. People are getting rich. You can see it. Once only a few precious Yuppies had cellphones, now every burglar has at least one mobile.
Johann would never say “Philosophy is a load of crap.” And they gave him a well-deserved first. DNA. Johann “Wassat?” Lasers. Johann “Wassat?” FTL. Johann “Wassat?”
I said this when I was at university, “If you’re not studying science, get out.” Harsh, but true.
These 791 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:23am GMT Permanent link.
How Convenient »
Augusto Pinochet has been diagnosed with moderate dementia.
A dementia diagnosis helped Mr Pinochet escape prosecution in 2000, while he was detained in London on the orders of Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon.
He miraculously recovered from that. Perhaps his people prayed for him or something. Anyone else reminded of Ernest Saunders?
These 27 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:13pm GMT Permanent link.
I Could Have Been Wrong About Bush »
The wonderfully monikered ‘Free Lover of Freedom and Free Liberty’ in this Kevin Drum thread puts the case for divine intervention in the Presidential campaign.
He [Kerry]’s also a coward. So what, he ran in the jungle into enemy fire and actually shot people. Big deal. Color me unimpressed. Show me a man who can trade on his family connections and rise despite a lack of achievement. That’s moxie. That’s The Lord working for you, selecting you. That’s our President. That’s why we’re safe. I feel safe. I also feel free.
I’m very close to being persuaded. Sadly other commenters refer to Mr Liberty (perhaps that’s Mr Free Liberty, it’s hard to tell with that sort of name) as a ‘troll.’ ‘Wise, wise man’ would be closer.
These 61 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:50pm GMT Permanent link.
But Then Again, Too Few To Mention »
Insert Joke Here (splendid name) has linked to me, perhaps because I’m said to drink and post a lot. (Oh, OK. I do drink and post a lot.) For some reason a poster on Democratic Underground has linked to one of my more spectacular crash-and-burn efforts. Hak Mao emailed me the following day to ask if I was drunk, and I had to send a one word reply to the affirmative.
Boris Johnson has apologised on his blog for this Spectator leader. (Reg required, use Email: splatterbox@mailinator.com Password: splatter Thanks to a commenter and www.bugmenot.com.) Except that it’s a damn fine article. “Calm down, calm down.” I wonder if Harry Enfield gets death threats for that?
Maybe I’ll regret this; maybe I won’t: The UK Independence Party.
Everyone seems to be blogging about a guy I’ve never heard of on a political show I’ve never heard of. Watch the full video (tip-off from The Editors). Be very very glad for Paxman and Humphreys.
These 163 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:44pm GMT Permanent link.
Boris, Mark, And Kenneth »
Did Mark Steyn write that Spectator leader? (Reg required, use Email: splatterbox@mailinator.com Password: splatter Thanks to a commenter and www.bugmenot.com.) He wasn’t in his usual place in the Torygraph on Tuesday.
Today, for the first time in all my years with the Telegraph Group, I had a column pulled. The editor expressed concerns about certain passages and we were unable to reach agreement, so on this Tuesday something else will be in my space.
It’s on his own site, as The Quality Of Mersey.
None of us can know for certain how we would behave in his circumstances, and very few of us will ever face them. But, if I had to choose in advance the very last words I’d utter in this life, “Tony Blair has not done enough for me” would not be high up on the list.
And in the Spectator:
None of us can say with perfect confidence how we would behave in such circumstances, and facing such psychological pressures, but in so far as Mr Bigley chose to blame Tony Blair or the British government, he was wrong. Only those who killed him have blood on their hands.
This is going to be my “Harry’s Place” type moment. Here’s a comment on the BBC site.
I think Boris has missed the point regarding Ken Bigley. Surely the grief of Liverpudlians and everyone else comes from the fact that we watched day after day as this man stewed in an Iraqi hidey-hole and nothing was done to help him. It put the futility of the Iraq war into stark focus. I certainly don’t think anyone is wallowing in anything, they are having a compassionate reaction to a horrible event.
And here’s one on Boris’s site.
I do think though that one of the more endearing characteristics of Liverpool is that incidents like these affect the populace in the same way as, for example, a murder in a small village might — the collective ‘grief’ expressed is not a result of self-pity, but a genuine feeling of community which most big cities simply don’t have. Unfortunately, the flip-side of this is that Liverpudlians tend to have long memories, and bear grudges far too easily. Hillsborough, in particular, is a sore-point, but the article merely suggests that other factors than errors on the police’s part played a role in the tragedy, which is surely fair enough.
Well, ’Two Failed Attempts Made to Rescue Kenneth Bigley’ aren’t nothing.
Crack US troops made two failed attempts to rescue hostage Kenneth Bigley and the two Americans he was held captive with, it emerged today.
If “doing nothing” means not giving in to kidnappers’ demands, doing nothing is the right thing. A “genuine feeling of community"? Very few of these people can have known him.
The truth is that Ken Bigley sought to make a living by undertaking work in one of the most dangerous areas on the planet. He went there against the express advice of the Foreign Office. He chose to live with a pair of Americans and seemed unconcerned about his personal security. His motives and misjudgments do not lessen the horror and injustice of his death; but they should, without lessening our sympathy for him and his family, temper the outpouring of sentimentality in which many have engaged for him.
Who expressed a sense of community by trying to rescue Mr Bigley? US troops. Who tried to help him? The Foreign Office. None of this is the authorities’ fault.
Sentimentality, if it is appropriate, should be aimed at US personnel. Blame, which is appropriate, should be laid on Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Last words to Mr Steyn (I’m now convinced that he’s the author).
There had been a two-minute silence for Mr Bigley that same morning in Liverpool, according him the same respect offered annually to the million-and-a-half British servicemen who have died for their country since 1914.
No one can make light of the appalling fate suffered by the hostage. His imprisonment, his witnessing of the shocking murders of his two fellow hostages and his own hideous decapitation by the psychopathic criminals who kidnapped him provide an object lesson in human depravity and barbarity. But we have lost our sense of proportion about such things. There have, as a correspondent to the Daily Telegraph pointed out this week, been no such outbreaks of national mourning whenever one of our brave soldiers is killed serving his country in Iraq.
These 172 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:19pm GMT Permanent link.
The Nation, I Fear, Is Heartless »
Ach, there was something I wanted to put in that last post and forgot. Charles Moore, one of my least favourite Telegraph contributors, possibly least favourite after Mark Steyn is entertaining today on funerals, It is amazing what you can get away with if you love someone.
He’s still annoying.
But precisely because a funeral is so fundamental a part of human civilisation — of our need to give death its due in the process of life — it is necessarily somewhat impersonal. The most comforting words — “I am the resurrection and the life”, “Lord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace” etc — are the same for everyone.
I want to hit him for that. Not all of us are religious, and not all of those who are, are Christians.
It is amazing what you can get away with if you love someone. One of the best entries is about Ann Fleming, married, third time unlucky, to Ian, creator of James Bond. She was a famous hostess and even more famous troublemaker. Noel Annan, her eulogist, says that, “Of the difference between right and wrong, she had virtually no understanding.” If she’d been alive, libel lawyers could have got some money for her out of that, yet in her friend Annan’s hands, the words are almost praise — evidence of her untamed, force-of-nature personality.
I must admit, though, to enjoying also the eulogies where one suspects that the speaker has his reservations about the person praised. This often happens when speaker and subject are in the same trade. One gets the feeling, for example, that Alan Bennett found Peter Cook a bit of a nuisance, and that Alec Guinness thought Laurence Olivier overblown and cruel. Those who analyse things so well themselves harbour some resentment against those who excel with much more instinctive gifts.
And some people just cannot help centring everything they say on themselves. The late, brilliant, ludicrous philosopher A J Ayer, when told of the death of his friend Philip Toynbee, exclaimed: “Oh dear. He admired me so much.” That is the half-spoken thought in some tributes.
I don’t find A J Ayer at all ludicrous; I think that Language, Truth, and Logic is a splendid book, but all the same, you have to laugh.
Try to avoid the following phrases: … “he lived life to the full” (this usually means he was a drunken lecher, deeply in debt), and the meaninglessly subjective ("In the end, Dave was just, uniquely, Dave").
Has he been reading my mail, or what?
And never say, as one person does in this book, “The nation’s heart goes out to Doreen.” The nation, I fear, is heartless.
Ain’t that the truth?
These 113 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:01pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 17 October 2004
Iain M Banks »
Not a great deal to say tonight. I commented on Inveresk Street about Iain Banks, so I’ve spent some of today reading Look to Windward (Warning! I’ve not finished it yet, though I’m about three-quarters of the way through; but the summary here tells more about how various threads tie up than I want to know). It’s not at all bad, it’s better than Excession, which disappointed me in its second half, and put me off Iain M Banks: the McGuffin didn’t get resolved in a manner proportional to its build-up and there were all these space-battles that were over in microseconds - yawn yawn yawn. The humour’s good. I feel almost sorry for Iain Banks, he wants to explore ideas about egalitarianism, and yet he wants to break out of standard sci-fi mode, so there are all these overheard conversations which owe something to Joyce as much as anyone. If my cat hadn’t fallen asleep in my lap, I’d quote a few of the revealing passages. I very much like the idea that humans in the ‘Culture’ live for around 400 years, yet only produce about one child each, so each child is very spoilt by the adults around, and, it seems, largely free of neurosis (if not cretinism), as a result.
And then Banks, like all good science-fiction writers, riles against his Utopia. One of the flaws is the Banks-by-numbers hierarchical society with gratuitous violence toward to lower orders. Banks’s description of this is a mixture of disgust and relish which might be familiar to Guiness drinkers. It might also be the position of any well-off socialist to the lower orders.
I still think that Iain Banks is a good science-fiction writer, but I prefer The Wasp Factory over everything else I’ve read. Not because it’s a nice book; it’s not. But it’s a cathartic book, and you feel better for having read it than you do for reading it.
I’ll finish it tonight. I meant to post on the West Wing. Ah well, and ‘QI’ which I missed on Friday has justed started on BBC2 Wales, so I’ll stop typing now.
These 354 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:07pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 18 October 2004
Cut Off From The Main »
It’s been a while since I read any Iain M Banks, because I was disappointed by Excession, and Look to Windward is a very readable book, but, at the same time, it’s a mess.
As in Excession, there’s a character who chooses live alone, away from the company of his peers anyway. Actually, there are three; two come to nasty ends (one of them has two nasty ends), and the third finds better company. This might be Banks jolting himself back from the solitary writing life with a moral tale about no man being an island.
There’s a very touching (to me, anyway) meditation on love and sexual love in particular, which Banks throws a lot of what I assume are personal experiences into. There’s a less successful one on suicide because of guilt or bereavement, which as Banks like to take titles from ‘The Waste Land’ may have been lifted from the Sybil story in the epigraph — or from one of Isaac Asimov’s ‘Multivac’ stories.
As for the plot, it’s mostly a taut thriller, made tauter by all the distractions of small-talk and messing about with technology which Banks does well. That is, right up to the end, when one strand of plot is intentionally thrown away (it was just a red herring) and the resolution comes more or less by miracle. It is explained, but I wasn’t convinced, and felt cheated.
Good science fiction ideas (love, freedom, death). Definitely a page-turner. But too much of a “we was robbed” feeling on finishing. I still think he’s a good lad, but his early stuff is better.
These 268 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:11pm GMT Permanent link.
Spam »
As Nick posted about an email scammer, I’ll squeeze out my spam complaint. Why do I get so much stuff about Rolexes just now? And who makes up these name? — Accident V Monolithic, Ambitions L Mainland, Caliphs E. Diffuseness (whose subject line was FWD:Novice but naughty Bi female pants), Fawkes I. Urbanity, Peril Schoffstall, and, last and my favourite, Stigmatize V. Floorboard.
There are some names you look at twice and wonder if you know them. And there are some you just don’t. Pulling random words for a dictionary is most unconvincing.
These 93 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:45pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 19 October 2004
Taking The Blame »
Read this:
We had a firestorm because we had an editorial in the magazine that was frankly incendiary, and I have no one to blame but myself.
I am the editor. I put it there. I must now take responsibility for enraging my party leader, alienating the people of a great city, and incurring the anger of not a few of The Spectator’s readers.
“Put"? Not, note, “wrote.” As Nick Barlow notes:
There were actually 96 deaths at Hillsborough (a fact that can be discovered in about 2 seconds with Google) and it seems to me that only knowing that the death toll was in the high double figures is more consistent with Steyn, rather than Johnson or one of the British writes at the Spectator, being the author.
That being the case, the rest of Boris’s statement is a little odd.
I will tell you the genesis of the piece. I was driving a child to a football match, and we were listening on the radio to the start of the England-Wales game, where it was the intention to hold a minute’s silence in memory of Ken Bigley.
I listened with mounting disbelief and disgust; because instead of keeping silent—as the people of Liverpool kept silent—the crowd started to jabber. Then they started to swear, and jeer, and catcall.
After what seemed like barely twenty or thirty seconds the ref was so embarrassed that he gave up, and blew the whistle for the start of the game. The following day I looked in the papers for an account of this disgrace, and found nothing, and thought we should have a piece on it.
I brooded on the causes. How could people behave so thuggishly, when called upon to hold a minute’s silence?
It occurred to me that the crowd’s reaction showed there was something by definition false in the decision to hold the minute’s silence. The ceremony required people to show an emotion that—manifestly, alas—they did not all feel.
Suppose a British crowd had been asked to hold a minute’s silence for those who died in the second world war. Or suppose that they were asked to commemorate all the British soldiers who have died in Iraq, or the victims of some IRA atrocity.
I don’t believe that silence would have been interrupted by anything more than a cough.
So it struck me that a large part of the crowd was in a sense rebelling against an imposed sentiment; and that made me think about a leader on the difficulties of the culture of sentimentality in modern Britain. No doubt I shall be strongly criticized for saying this, but I still believe that the underlying point of that editorial was serious, and was worth pondering.
Where the editorial contained sweeping condemnation of Liverpool, it was impolitic and silly. The offence generated seems out of all proportion to what Mark Steyn wrote. The response reminded me of the Gary Larson cartoon “What dogs hear” as if the antennae of Liverpudlian good taste twitched at as mention of the city, and evaluated it as good or bad.
The more serious issue got forgotten.
I still think it worth saying that it is a sad truth that tumultuous displays of grief, like those we saw for Ken Bigley, will tend to encourage the Islamic terrorists, because they increase the political value of each kidnapping and murder.
Those displays of grief also happen to be insincere. If we cared about loss of life in Iraq, which goes on every day, we’d have silences before every football match — for our own troops at least. Celebrating Kenneth Bigley’s victimhood is demented. Supporting the troops is the right thing to do; and if one of your family gets into a jam, solidarity is the only policy likely to prove effective. Paul Bigley’s accusations undermined his brother’s chances. Boris concludes:
I repeat that in so far as the leader made a serious point about risk and sentimentality, and the culture of blame, I stick by it. In so far as it imposed an outdated stereotype on the whole of Liverpool, and thereby caused offence, I sincerely apologise.
’Wibbler’ of Boriswatch in Boris—The Aftermath:
In the current politically correct climate, can Boris continue to ride two horses with one arse? I hope he can—but this has made it just that little bit more difficult.
With such a safe majority in the Commons, Labour could do with a few MPs prepared to “ride two horses with one arse.” I suppose Anne Clwyd was both MP and advocate for the Kurds—but those two roles have merged, and there aren’t any others.
These 220 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:41pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 20 October 2004
Torture »
Ted Barlow of ‘Crooked Timber’ posts on outsourcing torture, and quotes Katherine R of ‘Obsidian Wings’:
It had occurred to me that even if one accepted that torture was good policy, it did not make much sense to rely on countries like Syria and Egypt to interrogate suspects under torture for us and faithfully describe their confessions. At a minimum, they were likely to exploit it to harm domestic opponents as well as dangerous terrorists.
I think she’s right, so much so, in fact that I made a similar point six days earlier in the comments of Harry’s Place. (I’ve amended the grammar a little for clarity.)
It’s not just the moral high ground we’re toppling from.
First, we have to assume that these prisoners really are terrorists. (Something we can’t be certain of.)
Second, that they ‘break’ under torture, and give their torturers useful information, rather than just saying what they think the torturers want to hear.
Third, that this information is still current; these people have been held for some time, and are known to have been captured. If you were a terrorist and you knew one of your fellows who knew important stuff had been arrested, what would you do?
Fourth, that the countries to which we hand them over tell us what they learned, rather than what will help them, for instance, giving us false intelligence which points at an enemy.
If the moral case won’t persuade everyone, perhaps the practical case will.
Can we just accept that there is no case to be made for torture, whatever the suspects may have done or may plan to do? Can we turn around at head back to the moral high ground?
These 85 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:36pm GMT Permanent link.
Paul Bigley Makes Me Sick »
Regular readers will know that I’m somewhat fond of future Tory leader Boris Johnson. Boris plays the bluff idiot which many talented Tories are adept at: Willie Whitelaw, Bill Deedes, Ken Clarke. The readiness to play the fool, “to know more than thou showest” to quote Lear, shows intellectual confidence. I heard some of Mr Bigley’s attack on our Boris on C4 News tonight, but I’ve yet to track a transcript down. This is the man who said that “Blair has blood on his hands.” I agree with that — over the bombing campaign last spring. However, Tony Blair did everything he could to save Ken Bigley, and still preserve the tenuous safety of engineers and aid workers in Iraq. The Scotsman:
Mr Bigley said: “The power of your comments are such that nobody in the public eye wants to see you again. You are a self-centred, pompous twit.”
I doubt that I count as being in the ‘public eye’ but I want to see Boris again. Mr P Bigley can sink through a hole in the ground for all I care. He should have shut up when his brother was kidnapped and co-operated with the only people working to free him. Taking sides with the terrorists got your brother killed, Paul. He may have died anyway, but that wouldn’t have been Blair’s fault. And where were you in spring last year? There are people you’re siding with now whom you were unreservedly slagging off on the terraces last week. My beard has deeper roots than your principles.
These 232 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:45pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 21 October 2004
A Sort Of Patriotism »
As “Liverpudlianism” is in the news, when everyone and his Everton-supporting brother claims to be from “Calm down, calm down, calm down” slave city, I thought I might draw attention to the New Yorker’s consideration of my home town. It makes me feel stupid, so it does. I’ve never read Adam Smith (I started economics with “Capital” (the Everyman edition) at 16, and got put off very quickly). The other guys though, Boswell, Hume are my heroes. (Liverpool worships Kenny Dalgleish. Shame he’s from God’s own country, and Glasgow at that.)
I love the term “English Empiricists.” That means Locke (Scottish), Berkeley (Irish), and Hume (Scottish). You’re reading this and not being weighed against a duck because of some very brave and intelligent people. The Enlightenment. (OK, there were some frogs too, that’s why Voltaire’s in the Turner gallery and why Rousseau is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery.) Look at what the Taliban was like, and wonder why you’re not under it. The answer is simple. We held off the Italians too, if you ever wondered what Hadrian’s Wall was about.
Update: edited for taste.
Update 2: John Band emailed to ask me if Locke was born in Bristol. John Locke was born in Wrington, a village in Somerset, on August 29, 1632. So there you go, I was talking bollocks.
These 200 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:01am GMT Permanent link.
Journals Of The Improbable »
[Courtney] Love admits guilt over gig fracas.
Courtney Love has pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct after hitting a man on the head with a microphone stand during a gig in New York.
I must be getting old.
Mr Burgett needed three staples in his head to close the wound after the incident during Ms Love’s show.
Hang on, she’s a girl, and she hit you with a microphone stand. Are you paying your way through college, perhaps? To recap: a girls hits you. And you sue? I think I’m soft, but if a woman hit me, I’d thump her back, not go weeping to the authorities.
These 62 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:19am GMT Permanent link.
Cartoon For John B And Norm »
Made me laugh anyway.
These 5 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:02am GMT Permanent link.
Cool »
These ads are so totally cool. Done in the style of this commercial which, like, rocks. (Requires QuickTime; broadband helps.) I don’t believe in objective evil, but Republicans and Windows suck. Found through Matthew Yglesias, who says, “This one speaks to me the most, and it has a cute chick in it …” Like Matthew, I think this one with the Marine may be the most persuasive. If the Bush campaign strike back, maybe they could make their own version, featuring Adam Yoshida …
These 84 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:42am GMT Permanent link.
I Want One »
Inventor Rejoices as TVs Go Dark
Altman said he prefers to ask people to turn off TVs. The problem is places where there’s a captive audience and no one is available to respond to requests, like the Laundromat or the airport. Altman said he has turned off sets at his local laundries and at airports around the Pacific Rim.
The European model, which uses different codes from the American-Asian one, was field-tested at EuroDisney, where anti-TV activist and computer programmer David Burke was waiting with his 6-year-old daughter to get on a ride called Honey I Shrunk the Kids. A wall of TVs in the waiting room showed a loop of constant Kodak ads. Burke had prototypes in his bag and made a bank of screens go off with one click. …
Altman said people who hear about TV-B-Gone start thinking about other nuisances. Friends have asked for ways to jam cell phones, shut down vehicle subwoofers and kill car alarms.
Four devices which can make the world a better place. Splendid. Found through Mick Hartley. I’d quite like something which can kill personal music players when you can hear someone else’s music. I don’t care if they go deaf, just don’t get anywhere near me with that tickety-tickety-tick shit.
I seem to remember Schopenhauer complaining that his neighbours were idiots because they allowed their dog to bark. Good job he’s dead.
tvbgone.com, when I visited it had exceeded its daily bandwith, which suggests other people feel the same way.
These 95 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:21pm GMT Permanent link.
I Know Nothing »
John Band had corrected me concerning the birthplace of John Locke. (I always thought he was Scottish; maybe I had him muddled with John Knox.) Whatever, I’ve duly noted this error in this post.
If you want to read someone smart, try Philosoraptor on Suskind’s Bush Aide is Not a Relativist.
What did the aide mean? I’ll be you large amounts of money that he didn’t mean anything very precise at all. Few people who speak like this have a very clear idea of what they are trying to say. For example, very few people believe in a clear and carefully thought-out way that reality is dependent on our representations of it (our beliefs about it, claims about it, etc.). Most people who say seemingly relativistic things like this hold some vague and/or ambiguous, half-understood thesis. For example, leftists who argue that moral obligations are culturally relative really have little idea what they are saying; they are usually just trying, in a vague and stumbling way, to urge people to respect other cultures. Again: it’s not that such people have a clear thesis in mind but express it unclearly, it’s that they don’t have a clear thesis in mind.
I’m so glad that I didn’t add my own thoughts on the “reality-based community.”
These 65 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Draft Draft Drafty McDraft! »
Enjoy the draft found through Pandagon.
Fafnir scotches draft rumours:
That’s crazy talk from crazy people! Ha ha! Like the president being an alien! Or the president wearing a wire to the debates! Or creating a half-trillion dollar deficit! Ha.
He (she? it?) then goes on to explain why a draft is ridiculous.
Of course not! There are lots of ways we could invade Iran that don’t involve a draft! We could for example involve powerful robots.
I’m so glad that Tony Blair’s friends have such excellent plans. Powerful robots would not only defeat the Iranian nuclear programme, they would also be incredibly cool.
Fafnir is good enough to link to U.S. Has Contingency Plans for a Draft of Medical Workers in the New York Times (FRRYYY), which has an alarming euphemism.
In a confidential report this summer, a contractor hired by the agency described how such a draft might work, how to secure compliance and how to mold public opinion and communicate with health care professionals, whose lives could be disrupted.
That’s ‘disrupted’ as in ‘ended.’
These 84 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 22 October 2004
Why I Read Crooked Timber »
First, curse you John Holbo!. Thanks to you, I visited, the Flaming Lips’ homepage, and because of that I bought the fucking album (a snip at £7.99, without the bonus track though, from the splendid Spillers Records in central Cardiff—which claims to be the first such shop in the world).
Second, Ted Barlow’s transcendentally wonderful Mickey Kaus post. Would I be syndicated if I hid behind the alias ‘Donald Fuck’? No? Thought not.
I believe that I owe Chris Bertram an apology for referring to Jean-Jaques Rousseau as a ‘Frog.’ I like the French, really I do. Nothing puts me off the war on terror thing as much as the Francophobia which accompanies it. Fear needs an “enemy within” as well as an “enemy without” and the French have provided it in Europe. Yes, you can fill a book with instances of French anti-Semitism—the Dreyfus case for example. But the reason that was so celebrated is because it was fought. Emile Zola was and is far more typical of the educated French than Dreyfus’ persecutors. Every country has similarly guilty anti-Semites, not least the UK and the US. (Jamie has an excellent post on the virtues of Chirac. I quoted a friend of mine at the time.)
Crooked Timber has made some enemies, as is inevitable with strong positions. I’m not interested in fetid “real left” versus “pseudo left” posturing. Like Jonathan Derbyshire, I’m disappointed at the tendentious opinions which “first class honours graduates” get paid for. I am pleased by the quality of thought which some people offer for free. There may not be any such thing as a free lunch, but some first class writing is available gratis.
These 280 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:30am GMT Permanent link.
Spreading Democracy »
Jonathan Derbyshire starts an unreservedly excellent post with “Not much time to blog this properly, as deadlines are pressing, …” and then blogs as well as anyone can. Jonathan links to the New Republic (as he says, not available to non-subscribers), and agrees with it, well so far at least:
The first thing to say is that the authors start from a premise that I accept, and that is the following …
What the New Republic says is this:
There was a time, in the aftermath of September 11, when this magazine liked what it heard from George W. Bush. He said America was at war—not merely with an organization, but with a totalitarian ideology. And he pledged to defeat Islamist totalitarianism the same way we defeated European totalitarianism, by spreading democracy. For a publication that has long believed in the marriage of liberalism and American power, this was the right analysis. And its correctness mattered more than the limitations of the man from which it came.
For myself, I agree with the first sentence: I thought Bush was tough, and toughness was demanded. The rest, though, is bullshit. America is a thing and an ideology is also a thing, but they’re different kinds of thingness. I don’t believe in any such war. We defeated Hitler by having more bombs than he had. Hitler was elected, as was Mussolini. To that extent, they supported democracy, far more than our ally, Joe Stalin, ever did. I’d go to the gallows for what we call ‘democracy’ now, but I loathe other things by that name, ancient Athens, the Roman Republic, what the founding fathers of America understood as right, etc. For all we know, what we call ‘democracy’— racial equality, the prohibition of slavery, franchise of women—may be as lasting as chalk on a blackboard.
I was in the pub earlier tonight with a friend who was disturbed by a cuddly Alsatian at the bar. I said something about Konrad Lorenz, who thought that we must have descended from vegetarians, and something about how carnivores all have their eyes at the front (cats, dogs, us, etc.) while creatures we consider stupid (cows, sheep) like other prey, have eyes to the side. (Dolphins, the second most intelligent species on the planet, are carnivores (piscivores if you’re pedantic), but have eyes on the side of their heads, but we like ‘em anyway.)
The planet has been around for four-and-half billion years. Some self-important scum has crawled around for perhaps seven million of that. For seventy or eighty of those, very limited patches of Earth have answered to civilised. I have as much hope of the neo-cons attempts at conversion-to-democracy as I had at the Crusaders’ plans to convert sensible Muslims to thin-blooded Christianity. Our democracy is a fashion. Something else will come along in time. Plato, though I hate him, knew that much.
Updated for clarity and sense.
These 419 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:36am GMT Permanent link.
Wisdom »
Following on from my last post,
“In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.”
And
…Man had always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much… the wheel, New York, wars, and so on, whilst all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely the dolphins believed themselves to be more intelligent than man for precisely the same reasons.
And
There is a theory which states that if ever anyone discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarrely inexeplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.
And
What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer.
All from here. There are people who get upset at Jeremy Paxman’s quite reasonable question to Tony Blair “Do you pray with that moron?” Paxo didn’t ask that, exactly, but he might as well have.
These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:01am GMT Permanent link.
She Said 'Booker' »
Found through Matt: how could anyone reject this sexy beast?
Look at that sexy beast. Why would any woman prefer someone like the liberal degenerate below? (William Blake-quoting, Indian grave-visiting, anti-war hippy, poetry-writing, nancy boy. And genius.)
Women just love time-ravaged older men, in the way that I’d kick Cameron Diaz out of bed in favour of Elizabeth Taylor. Devouring time, thou wert never so sexy …
She said ‘Booker’
Heh heh heh heh heh heh heh
These 79 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:55am GMT Permanent link.
Campaign For The Re-Election Of The President »
The bit I missed from the last post:
You’re so fucking special
But I’m a creep
I’m a weirdo
What the hell am I doing here?
I don’t belong here
I don’t care if it hurts
Updated for brevity.
Irony, what irony? I am a good citizen of Airstrip One, I think what other people think.
These 127 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:27am GMT Permanent link.
Everyone To Lastminute.com »
As Kevin Drum says, the New York Public Library has a fascinating exhibit dedicated to Isaac Newton.
Newton himself, who was, to put it bluntly, something of a ruthless, misanthropic bastard. True, he’s also the most influential human being yet to walk the earth, but he was still a shithead. It seems odd to avoid that in a major exhibit, even if Newton the man isn’t its major focus.
I suppose it depends on what you mean by “something of a ruthless, misanthropic bastard.” You’re reading this because of Newton. In Star Trek, when he was playing poker with Data, Einstein, and Stephen Hawking, he declared that he “invented physics.” He was right too. He was also “the most influential human being yet to walk the earth.” I’d like to nominate Einstein, especially after we get to grips with quantum entanglement, but that’s beyond my life span, and Newton started it. Quantum quirk may give objects mass. Newton pulled us from the Slough of superstition, and we should be very grateful.
These 120 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:13am GMT Permanent link.
Boris Pulls It Off »
I’m sorry I caused offence to Liverpool. Good lad.
I was able to say sorry for causing offence, and sorry for any hurt done to the Bigley family, and sorry for having reopened old wounds over Hillsborough, and that, in so far as we inaccurately represented the characteristics of the Liverpudlians, by resorting to some tired old stereotypes, I was sorry for that, too.
But, as I said on the radio, as I said on the street to a bunch of trainee nurses, as I said to everyone I met, this was only a partial and qualified apology. Michael Howard had called The Spectator’s leading article, “Nonsense from beginning to end.”
Well, I know of no doctrine that means members of the shadow front bench have to see eye to eye about every article that appears in the press, and in my view Michael is wrong on that. My view of our piece is that it spoke a lot of good sense, vitiated by tastelessness and inaccuracy.
There are some who say that it was outrageous that Johnson the editor should have been ordered to eat humble pie by Michael Howard. But they miss the point, that I was already consuming large quantities of humble pie before Michael made his suggestion, that any editor would have felt obliged to make some amends for that article - in view of the outrage that was provoked - and that, in any event, Johnson the politician apologises for and refuses to apologise for exactly the same things as Johnson the editor.
Most of the comments are affectionate.
I’ve just listened to Paul Bigley’s radio comments, and I was surprised by how senseless his comments were. He didn’t say why he thought the editorial was offensive, or to take issue with the potentially offensive points to him:
1) Ken Bigley knowingly took a risk
2) To say the PM had ‘blood on his hands’ was incorrect.
Perhaps he didn’t argue these because they are manifestly true.
Posted by ‘Aidan.’ And they stick up for his character.
I shall not repeat the other points I made elsewhere, but I will repeat what I said about your character, as observed at first hand at Oxford. Far from being ‘pompous’ you continued to talk to people and be equally friendly AFTER you had reached the top of the Oxford Union greasy pole. Most unusual behaviour.
It is also a tribute to your character that you have not thrown the actual author of the editorial oh so subtly to the wolves, which many others would have done, in the hope that some for the wolves would go for him rather then you.
Posted by Simon Forbes.
I was the 992nd person to sign the Boris Johnson for PM! petition. Michael Howard wasn’t looking all that good last week, and by calling the editorial “Nonsense from beginning to end” he’s made himself look worse.
Matthew Turner in the comments to this post suggests that Simon Heffer, and not Mark Steyn, wrote the offending article. Boris has been very good at not throwing anyone to the wolves, but now might be a good time for whoever it was to own up.
These 112 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 23 October 2004
Text Game Theory »
Let’s play a coordination game: You and I are each asked a single question, either “Do you like cats?” or “Do you like dogs?”. Our questions are determined by independent coin flips. We both win if our answers differ, unless we’re both asked about dogs, in which case we both win if our answers match.
Here’s a pretty good strategy we could agree on in advance: We’ll contrive to always differ. Whatever we’re asked, I’ll say yes and you say no. That way we win 3/4 of the time.
Can we do any better? No, if we live in the boring old telecoms world. Yes, if we have “text messaging” and a mobile phone each. Text messaging or “texting” has taken off in Germany and the United Kingdom, but languishes in the USA and France.
If I get the cat question, I send a message or “text” to you using the keys on my mobile phone. The number ‘2’ covers the letters ‘a’, ‘b’, and ‘c’ — one press for ‘a’, 2 for ‘b’ and so on. One you get the hang of it, texting can be very quick and efficient, and texts are much cheaper than mobile calls. I may for instance tell you that I have the cat question by selecting “Messages” from the menu, then “Create message” from the sub-menu, and then type “c” (’2’ key, three times) “a” (’2’ key once, after a short pause) and “t” (’8’ key once). I then select send, and find your number in memory.
This method suggested itself to me after reading Quantum Game Theory by Steve Landsburg. Mr Lansburg suggested communication using entangled particles, but the setup looks off-puttingly complex to me. ("I’ll measure my particle’s spin (which is either up or down) and answer “yes” or “no” accordingly. If I get the dog question, I’ll do the same thing, but first I’ll rotate my measuring apparatus by 90 degrees. You do the same, but start with your measuring apparatus rotated 45 degrees from mine.") My solution uses devices available to most of the population of the developed world, and whose mode of operation is easily explained; it also ought to work 100% of the time, unless you haven’t paid your bill or run out of credit, in which case, tough. I can’t explain why anyone would wish to play this game. I would have thought that my attempts at catblogging would tell you all you need to know, and what kind of moron thinks asking “Do you like cats?” over and over is conversation? I’m the sort of person who answers, “Depends on the cat,” anyway.
If I get a message from you which reads “Going 2 the pub 4 a drink?” I will reply “U R A CHAV” and refuse to play any more. Texting has its own etiquette. Useful in many ways, there are circumstances when it is de rigeur to phone. When one is on the train, in a cinema, in a library, the beeping noises which some handsets make may be offputting. Therefore one must dial the person you wish to speak to and tell them where you are in the voice you would use to a deaf foreigner across the street in a hurricane. You can’t be too careful with new technology.
(Thanks are due to Steve Landsburg (whom I stole the opening paragraphs from), Daniel Davies, Scott Burgess, and the good people of Orange, who make upgrading so seamlessly complex. ("You’ll need a new phone.” “I’ve got a phone. I don’t want a new one.” “You’ll need a new number.” “I’ve got a number. I don’t want a new one.") Sigh.
Update: oh sod, I’ve just noticed that Steve Landsburg write in the comments of Daniel Davies’ CT thread that he "quite disagree[s]" with the assertion that "the EPR effect constitutes a transfer of information." He is welcome to this view, but it seems to me that after checking my quantum device, I would know something which I did not know before, and a "transfer of information" is the only explanation.
These 609 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:41am GMT Permanent link.
Rising To The Bait »
I’ve just seen the ’Wolves’ ad. (I’m not familiar with the protocols of political advertising in the US, but when George Bush’s voiceover claims “I’m George W Bush, and I approve this message” why is he shown talking on the phone and looking at his feet? It just seems like the wrong image to me.) The Bush site provides some background “facts.” They don’t convince Fred Kaplan.
But these were not cuts in the sense that the term is usually understood. Certainly none of the amendments would have resulted in a cut—much less a “slash"—in “America’s intelligence operations,” as the ad puts it.
Here’s the background: In the early-to-mid ‘90s, the National Reconnaissance Office—the branch of the U.S. intelligence community that controls spy satellites—had come under investigation for serious financial malfeasance. The probe found vast waste, extravagance, and hoarding. In one instance, the NRO canceled the launching of a highly expensive spy satellite, didn’t tell Congress (or any federal agency) about it, and kept the money.
So, Congress voted to cut the budget—not to curtail intelligence operations, but simply to retrieve money that was never spent. As I put it at the time, “[I]t’s as if Kerry had once filed for a personal tax refund—and Bush accused him of raiding the Treasury.”
That’s not the only distortion.
We are NOT terrorists. We do not associate with terrorists … and FRANKLY, we don’t even like terrorists!
We were tricked by George W. Bush.
Too many smart people, Will Rubbish, Matthew Turner, and Paul at Explananda have posted on Hitchen’s Why I’m (Slightly) for Bush to get away from it. John Major one commented on the limited options available when one’s back is to the wall, so here goes. Matthew approves of at least one sentence.
The Kerry camp also rightly excoriates the President and his Cabinet for their near-impeachable irresponsibility in the matter of postwar planning in Iraq.
I find “near-impeachable” as applied to “the President and his Cabinet” to be gutless disapproval. Matthew is right about the seriousness of impeachment, of course, but Hitchens can’t be suggesting that he means it—he’s endorsing Bush, not burying him. What is a “near-impeachment"? a nothing. And who should be “near-impeached” the President or some expendable cabinet colleague?
Paul of Explananda “wasted five minutes” and is less impressed by rhetorical flourishes.
The amazing thing is not the literalness with which “Anybody but Bush” is chanted—because it is never chanted literally—but rather the literalness that is projected on it it by disingenuous, grub street half-wits that have no business taking up space in the only publication that touches the inside of my mailbox each week.
He doesn’t sound happy.
I have sympathized with the “prisoners’ dilemma” that faces liberals and leftists every four years. The shady term “lesser evil” was evolved to deal with this very trap. Should you endorse a Democrat in whom you don’t really believe? Is it time for that deep-breath third-party vote, or even angry abstention, of the sort that has tortured some Nation readers ever since they just couldn’t take Humphrey over Nixon?
I studied the Prisoner’s Dilemma for my final year thesis at university. (Serves me right for reading the Economist when I should have been swotting for my year 2 exams.) I can’t see any similarity between PD theory and voting for someone “in whom you don’t really believe.” (Isn’t the lack of real belief true of every voter for every politician?)
But absent from this triangular calculation is the irony of history. Do you know anybody who really, deeply wishes that Carter had been re-elected, or that Dukakis had won? Implicit but unstated, in the desire of the prisoner to escape, is the banal, unexciting assumption of our two-party oligopoly: Sometimes it’s objectively not so bad that the “other” party actually wins.
Prisoner’s don’t escape in the Prisoner’s Dilemma: they may be released; they may not. And, yes, me! I really, deeply wish that Carter had been re-elected. No Reagan would have meant no ‘Special Relationship’ and a weaker Margaret Thatcher. Perhaps when the Argentine Junta invaded the Falklands we wouldn’t have had to deal with a US whose policy came down to “Let’s be vague, we’ll send Al Haig.” Perhaps Carter wouldn’t have backed the Taliban in Afghanistan the way Reagan did. Perhaps they might have behaved better over AIDS, or funded research which might have kept Reagan from getting any more senile. Few alternative histories are likely to be as appealing as “The West Wing” but a Carter second-term comes close.
Given my underlying stipulation, which is that this is a single-issue election and that that is a good and necessary thing, I have no formal quarrel with the Kerry/Edwards platform.
My underlying stipulation is that single-issue elections are a betrayal of democracy. If Tony Blair had been re-elected in 2001 on the single issue of his continuing foreign intervention, what of raising the minimum wage, sorting out pensions, banning fox-hunting, or much else in the manifesto? Politics are complicated, and the reasons for voting should reflect that.
I can’t wait to see President Kerry discover which corporation, aside from Halliburton, should after all have got the contract to reconstruct Iraq’s oil industry.
It’s not which corporation should have got the contract, that isn’t up to Kerry to decide. The contract should have been up for tender, like any spending of taxpayers’ money.
I look forward to seeing him eat his Jesse Helms-like words, about the false antithesis between spending money abroad and “at home” (as if this war, sponsored from abroad, hadn’t broken out “at home").
I contend that the “War on Terrorism” — that is the attempt to capture Osama bin Laden — is entirely separate from the conflict in Iraq. Hitchens conflates the two in the parentheses.
I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi’s existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America’s part.
He’s probably right here, but I think Kerry is aware of the “more dangerous and better-organized foe” bit already, as he, at least, reads intelligence reports. But let John Quiggin tell you all about him.
I am glad to have seen the day when a British Tory leader is repudiated by the White House.
The White House wasn’t too kind back in 1982 over a small territorial issue; they just had better manners in those days.
I could obviously take refuge in saying that I was a Blair supporter rather than a Bush endorser …
Since you haven’t domiciled on these islands for a while, you’d better not.
The President, notwithstanding his shortcomings of intellect …
That’s not what Tony Blair thinks.
The President, notwithstanding his shortcomings of intellect, has been able to say, repeatedly and even repetitively, the essential thing: that we are involved in this war without apology and without remorse. He should go further, and admit the evident possibility of defeat—which might concentrate a few minds—while abjuring any notion of capitulation. Senator Kerry is also capable of saying this, but not without cheapening it or qualifying it, so that, in the Nation prisoners’ dilemma, he is offering you the worst of both worlds.
“Senator Kerry is also capable of saying this” or has he actually said it? If he’s hasn’t said it, how does Hitchens know that Kerry is capable of saying it, other than in the sense that he is also capable of saying “How now brown cow"? Again if he hasn’t said it, how does the forthright journalist know that he would “cheapen” or “qualify” it? If he has done so, an example wouldn’t hurt.
These 657 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:32pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 24 October 2004
Necessary Murder »
To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death,
The conscious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder;
To-day the expending of powers
On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting.
Norm disapproves of murder:
Except calling for a person’s murder isn’t OK: not in jest, not in general, and not - in particular - in the times we’re living through, where there are people who think there are political justifications for murder and others who make excuses for them.
Quite right too. Updated.
These 22 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:49am GMT Permanent link.
Hero Worship »
(NB. I’m drunk. This may make no sense.)
There is an episode in “Crime and Punishment” when the young Raskolnikov is traumatised by the brutality of a peasant toward his horse. (There is a similar scene in Camus’ “L’Etranger.") An early fan shared Dostoevsky’s sensitivities.
On the morning of January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche experienced a mental breakdown which left him an invalid for the rest of his life. Upon witnessing a horse being whipped by a coachman at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around the horse’s neck and collapsed, never to return to full sanity. Some argue that Nietzsche was afflicted with a syphilitic infection (this was the original diagnosis of the doctors in Basel and Jena) contracted either while he was a student or while he was serving as a hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War; some claim that Nietzsche’s use of chloral hydrate, a drug which he had been using as a sedative, deteriorated his already-weakened nervous system; some speculate that Nietzsche’s collapse was due to a brain disease he inherited from his father; some maintain that a mental illness gradually drove him insane. The exact cause of Nietzsche’s incapacitation still remains unclear. That Nietzsche had an extraordinarily sensitive nervous constitution and took an assortment of medications is well-documented as a more general fact.
I want to see Sideways. I read a review yesterday (which I can’t find today) which suggested that one character was ‘Apollonian’ and the other was ‘Dionysian.’ I’d forgotten those terms, and if anything, I want this blog to be the latter (perhaps that’s a subconscious reason for blogging drunk so often; no that’s bollocks). Look to the disclaimer. And then read Mark Kaplan.
May I take this oppertunity [sic] to state: a blog article should not (in my opinion) be written as if it were to be published in tommorow’s newspaper. Occasionally, such a piece may be suitable. Personally, my blog pieces are, frequently, experiments, calculated provokations, ways of ‘testing’ random thoughts — the pipes and wiring of what might, elsewhere, appear in a suitably polished form. There is frequently something ludic, ironic, provisional, taking place here. And this is not to disclaim responsibility for anything I have written, but rather to allow it properly to be read. May I also say that, to my mind some of the best blogs have this quality, loosed as they are from the demands of accountability and finality, loosed also from the rules and self-censorship of professional writing, they open a space in which new thoughts might breath.
I like that. (I quite like the guy with the cave thing too. Let’s hope there’s no afterlife, else Fred will never forgive me.) I may be “intellectually dishonest"; I may be merely “ludic” here. I just hope that, if I see an animal maltreated, I have the courage to intervene.
These 160 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:13am GMT Permanent link.
I Was So Wrong About Kerry, Chris Hitchens Please Forgive Me »
Thanks to The Poor Man.
These 7 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:09am GMT Permanent link.
A Cunning Trap »
Bush nodded his head several times as he said this, and waited for Rumsfeld to say “How?” or “Bush, you couldn’t!” or something helpful of that sort, but Rumsfeld said nothing. The fact was Rumsfeld was wishing that he had thought about it first.
“I shall do it,” said Bush, after waiting a little longer, “by means of a trap. And it must be a Cunning Trap, so you will have to help me, Rumsfeld.”
“Bush,” said Rumsfeld, feeling quite happy again now, “I will.” And then he said,
“How shall we do it?” and Bush said, “That’s just it. How?” And then they sat down together to think it out.
Bush’s first idea was that they should dig a Very Deep Pit, and then the Heffalump would come along and fall into the Pit, and——"Why?” said Rumsfeld.
“Why what?” said Bush.
“Why would he fall in?”
Bush rubbed his nose with his paw, and said that the Heffalump might be walking along, humming a little song, and looking up at the sky, wondering if it would rain, and so he wouldn’t see the Very Deep Pit until he was half-way down, when it would be too late.
Rumsfeld said that this was a very good Trap, but supposing it were raining already?
Bush rubbed his nose again, and said that he hadn’t thought of that. And then he brightened up, and said that, if it were raining already, the Heffalump would be looking at the sky wondering if it would clear up, and so he wouldn’t see the Very Deep Pit until he was half-way down. … When it would be too late.
It can’t fail.
These 277 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:25am GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 25 October 2004
Anti-Americanism Again »
In yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph Philip Bobbit reviewed the collection of Alistair Cooke’s “Letters from America.” (Not online, sadly. I can’t help noticing that the price is given as £25, but available from the Telegraph for the bargain price of £23 + £2:25 p & p.) Cooke’s remit — describing the character of the US was impossibly broad — so he sidestepped it.
“Enough is happening in America at any one time … that almost anything you can say about the United States is true.”
(Ellipsis in review.) I mention this because I think that James Hamilton is, while not wrong, not entirely right when he says:
What we lack and what the USA has, is a viable ideological counterweight to excessive drinking and the sexualisation of society.
Actually many Americans distrust Hollywood because they blame it for “the sexualisation of society,” — this is the country which gave the world Britney Spears and Paris Hilton — and, perhaps I read too much, but American literary life is hardly short of famous drunks. In his last TV appearance, Jack Kerouac (I know he was Canadian) barely managed to make less of a fool of himself than our own dearly beloved Tracey Emin. There’s always Hemmingway, Faulkner, and friends.
I agree with the rest of James’s post more than I do with John Band though I’m normally somewhat libertarian on these matters.
James read the same Sunday Telegraph front page article I did; here’s Tessa Jowell:
“There’s a whiff of snobbery in some of the opposition to new casinos: people who think they should remain the preserve of the rich; others that find them gaudy and in poor taste; others that don’t want the big investment that will come from the United States.
“They are entitled to those views, but they are not entitled to force them on others.”
I don’t care where the “big investment” comes from; I consider it an iron law of capitalism that where investment comes from, profits go back to. They may put money in; but they take more out. If investors contributed useful things, like roads or hospitals, so we had something of lasting value I wouldn’t object.
In an interview with The Telegraph, Ms Jowell suggested that elitism and anti-American sentiment were the true motives of some campaigners against the Gambling Bill.
The rest of the campaigners, we may infer, had arguments.
Lord Hattersley, the former Labour deputy leader, has said that the Gambling Bill betrays the values of the party’s founding fathers who, he said, were “men of high moral standing”.
Ms Jowell suggested, however, that many of the critics of her reforms were acting out of more than a moral opposition to gambling. …
Frank Field, the former Labour welfare minister who opposes Ms Jowell’s proposed reforms, said her comments were crass. “I think this whole New Labour line that you insult people rather than engage in argument is deeply disturbing,” he said.
When Ms Jowell refers to “anti-Americanism” she forgets that gambling is prohibited in 48 of the States. The anti-Americanism of Americans never fails to astound me.
These 292 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:31am GMT Permanent link.
Birth Of A Pebble »
Middle Aged Curmudgeon John finds that “I cannot be a father to a pebble” originated not with The Kid, but was Sam Schulman (not Sam Seaborn). At least, Mr Schulman showed that he wasn’t a political infant.
Let us begin by admiring the case for gay marriage. Unlike the case for completely unrestricted abortion, which has come to be something of an embarrassment even to those who advance it, the case for gay marriage enjoys the decided advantage of appealing to our better moral natures as well as to our reason. It deploys two arguments. The first centers on principles of justice and fairness and may be thought of as the civil-rights argument. The second is at once more personal and more utilitarian, emphasizing the degradation and unhappiness attendant upon the denial of gay marriage and, conversely, the human and social happiness that will flow from its legal establishment.
Mr Schulman goes on to quote “the apt words of a letter-writer in Commentary in 1996":
[H]omosexual marriage … preserves and promotes a set of moral values that are essential to civilized society. Like heterosexual marriage, it sanctions loyalty, unselfishness, and sexual fidelity; it rejects the promiscuous, the self-serving, the transitory relationship. Given the choice between building family units and preventing them, any conservative should favor the former.
I don’t recall Peter taking much notice of these arguments; the second is undoubtedly conservative, and I’ve heard similar statements from P.J. O’Rourke. Instead Peter treats all arguments “in favour of single-sex marriage” as “left-wing.” I suspect lefties are moved by the “civil rights” analogy, and conservatives by the “civilized society” appeal.
Mr Schulman’s piece is more informed and balanced than its most notorious passage would suggest.
However much I might wish to, I cannot be a father to a pebble—I cannot be a brother to a puppy—I cannot make my horse my consul. Just so, I cannot, and should not be able to, marry a man. If I want to be a brother to a puppy, are you abridging my rights by not permitting it? I may say what I please; saying it does not mean that it can be.
John treats this the way it deserves to be treated.
These 130 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:33pm GMT Permanent link.
Faint Praise »
You may consider me stinting somewhat in my praise if I call someone more level-headed than the the New York Times ombudsman, but that’s what I feel about Harry of the Place. In Email bombing, Harry sets out the case against posting someone else’s personal email address. In the comments I pointed out that Johann Hari had done just that. Harry, further down the same thread, replied:
Good spot Dave but I did delete that section of Johann’s post as soon as I saw it.
Good for him. Rogers Cadenhead is unimpressed by NY Times ombudsman Daniel Okrent (who, unlike Harry, was acting in his professional capacity).
That’s what a coward named Steve Schwenk, from San Francisco, wrote to national political correspondent Adam Nagourney several days ago because Nagourney wrote something Schwenk considered (if such a person is capable of consideration) pro-Bush.
I’d blank out Mr Schwenk’s name here, but as it appears on both Mr Cadenhead’s site and Brad DeLong’s (where I found the link), there seems little point. True, Mr Okrent didn’t divulge Mr Schwenk’s email address, but he hardly needed to. (NB Professor DeLong quotes Mr Cadenhead’s original blog entry, which refers to Mr Schwenk, incorrectly, as a blogger; he isn’t.) Mr Cadenhead wrote a letter to the Times.
I don’t think a readers’ representative should ridicule his readers. Readers need to know that the ombudsman is on their side. If he adopts the same “us against them” bunker mentality as other journalists, he should find another position.
Mr Cadenhead’s blog entry shows him to be highly (and rightly IMO) dissatisified by the right-of-reply Mr Okrent gives himself at the end of the letters page.
I was going to comment on Matthew Ygeslias’ find of another shrill newspaper, but as so many papers are coming out for Kerry (while the polls look static), I’m taking this as evidence of an ‘"us against them” bunker mentality’ among journalists beyond the NYT.
These 231 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:22pm GMT Permanent link.
And Can You Blame Me? »
As Damian Counsell says “even people who object heartily to The Telegraph’s politics and are embarrassed by its other readers take it because it is still a good newspaper.” He meant, inter alia, me.
I don’t know that it “just gets better and better” but nor do I entirely agree with Chris Brooke who thinks, “The Telegraph was less good under Charles Moore than it was under Max Hastings, and has been less good under Moore’s successor (whatever his name is or was) than under Moore.” I think it’s swimming in circles, like a one-legged duck.
I’ve held off commenting on "Operation Clark County" because I learned about it through the filter of the reaction. Link goes to Gary Farber, who quotes Antonia Fraser.
Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie … ?
Why art thou so different from Venus?
And why do thou and I have so few interests in common between us?
These sentiments on the subject of duty, so brilliantly expressed by Ogden Nash, may well be yours, dear Unknown, when I, a national of another country, urge you to do your duty and vote in your coming presidential election.
[…]
First of all, if you back Kerry, you will be voting against a savage militaristic foreign policy of pre-emptive killing which has stained the great name of the US so hideously in recent times.
Gary asks laconically, “This sort of thing is apt to be awfully persuasive, don’t you think?” Ian Katz, G2’s editor, clearly thinks it is more persuasive than not.
Or, as Sharon Manitta, spokeswoman in Britain for Democrats Abroad, put it with preternatural confidence: “This will certainly garner more votes for George Bush.” Yikes.
Note the raised eyebrow signalled by “preternatural confidence.” He’s not an impartial witness, but Mark Steyn on Karl Rove in yesterday’s Sunday Telegraph, sides with Gary on the “persuasiveness” of Lady Antonia’s missive.
Within an hour of The Guardian publishing its pro-Kerry letter from Lady Antonia Fraser to the swing voters of Clark County, Ohio, I received an e-mail from an American howling with laughter and insisting that this “Lady Antonia” figure was an obvious Karl Rove plant.
Having read as I much of it as I could stomach, I wanted to believe it was. Back to unflappable Mr Katz.
We set out to get people talking and thinking about the impact of the US election on citizens of other countries, and that is what we have done. For the Guardian to have experienced such a backlash to an editorial project is extraordinary, but the number of complaints are thoroughly outdone by the number of people who engaged positively with the project.
What’s a few lynchings compared to a good time had by so many? (Image and comparison are intended to be offensive.)
There are instances, and this is one, where the insult done to a few outweighs the pleasure of the many.
You have to read Gary, who reads the Guardian and other British media daily, to get an idea of how pissed he is. He’s not some backwoods, isolationist ignoramus, and he’s not tickled pink either. He calls the “reader’s editor” (his scare quotes, but come to think of it, I’m not sure what the title means), Ian Mayes, “not very much less stupid and stubborn” before hitting “the sane part.”
In a poll I conducted among Guardian staff who had been following the story, of 71 respondents, 13 thought it a legitimate and worthwhile exercise, 14 were undecided and 44 were against it. Among the reasons given by the latter, reflecting complaints coming from the US, were that intervention in the democratic processes of another country was not “legitimate newspaper behaviour"; and that it was arrogant and self-aggrandising.
Ian Katz called the exercise “a quixotic idea dreamed up last month in a north London pub” — journalese for “We wuz drunk.” He should have polled colleagues then.
I came up with the title of this post with my Telegraph habit in mind, but just to give it a double meaning.
The Guardian published a strange apology and withdrew Charlie Booker’s column from their website. (Cached copy found through Scott Burgess.)
The final sentence of a column in The Guide on Saturday caused offence to some readers. The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer.
“Charlie Brooker apologises for any offence caused by his comments relating to President Bush in his TV column, Screen Burn. The views expressed in this column are not those of the Guardian. Although flippant and tasteless, his closing comments were intended as an ironic joke, not as a call to action — an intention he believed regular readers of his humorous column would understand. He deplores violence of any kind.”
This is strange in two ways. First “The Guardian associates itself with the following statement from the writer.” It’s purely Charlie’s fault you see. Boris Johnson may not have thrown to the wolves the anonymous editorialist who got him ticked off by Michael Howard, but the Guardian editors are in no way responsible for copy. Second, I’ve read Mr Brooker whenever I’ve bought the Saturday Grauniad. This is the first time he’s written about himself in the third person.
These 470 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 26 October 2004
Someone Had Blundered »
These 2 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:13am GMT Permanent link.
Radio Station Taken Back From Voice Of Moderation »
Darn. Moe Lane quits Obsidian Wings.
It was becoming clear that Moe wasn’t happy, and he was one huge grouch in this thread.
A loss to the blogosphere.
These 28 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:33pm GMT Permanent link.
There's Always Good News Somewhere »
This will mean nothing to almost all of you, but the Scottish Patient reports the reformation of the Fire Engines, and Alister Black has news of Edinburgh punk band The Prats who “have made it big 25 years after they split up.”
So, it’s not all doom and gloom, eh?
These 50 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:03pm GMT Permanent link.
John Peel, R.I.P. »
First via John Band, then through Harry, Chris Bertram, The Grauniad, BBC Online, the Torygraph, and Jonathan Derbyshire: John Peel is dead. To quote Jonathan:
James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers has it right: “He was a lifeline to hearing music [you] would never have heard otherwise. He was a portal to a whole new world.”
He was more than that. He also made making music and being listened too seem possible in a way that it wasn’t elsewhere. This was the man who allowed The Prats (see previous post), then aged 12–15, to record a couple of Radio 1 sessions. He’ll be missed.
These 73 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:21pm GMT Permanent link.
The People's Disc Jockey »
We are today a nation, in Britain, in a state of shock, in mourning, in grief that is so deeply painful for us.
Oh, sorry, that was this one. Nice to know that you’re “genuinely saddened” and wouldn’t dream of milking it for political capital.
These 25 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:38pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 27 October 2004
Coming Out For Kerry »
Gene of Harry’s Place finds that Christopher Hitchens has changed his mind, and has lined up along with the rest of the Slate staff: At this magazine, it’s Kerry by a landslide! You have to read him, I don’t have a damn clue what he’s on about. He still thinks it’s a single-issue election — and I still think that’s a profound misunderstanding of representative democracy. (Things were much, much worse in this country during the Blitz, but life went on, there was post to be delivered, the price of fish still mattered, children still had to go to school, old people went into hospital for reasons other than schrapnel and blast wounds. I can’t see why the important things governments handle — education, economic control, health care — be subservient to one terrorist attack and a skirmish on the other side of the world, or indeed to anything, ever.)
It’s not so long ago that Hitchens was for Bush.
I take pleasure in advance in the discovery that he [Kerry] will have to make, that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is a more dangerous and better-organized foe than Osama bin Laden, and that Zarqawi’s existence is a product of jihadism plus Saddamism, and not of any error of tact on America’s part.
Perhaps I’m always looking for hidden agendas in Hitchens’ prose, but there are unspoken ideological assumptions lurking behind the adjectives (especially his favourite, “great") and skulking under each “obviously” or “self-evident.” I read this as saying “So what if GWB hasn’t caught Osama, that’s because he doesn’t really matter. If Kerry wants to bring him to trial, Kerry is a fool.” When anyone says that bin Laden isn’t important, I’m minded of the “mendacious populism of Michael Moore” who dared to suggest that there were connections between the bin Laden and the Bush family. Al-Zarqawi may have been in Iraq, but inside the no-fly zone, so I fail to see how Saddam could have been much of an ally.
David Bradley Kenner, an intern, is for Bush.
I’m voting for Bush. I don’t want, or find it necessary, to defend every piece of his record. The simple fact is that he is the only candidate who has had the courage to envision a long-term solution to the danger of terrorism—the liberalization and democratization of the Middle East. John Kerry, on the other hand, cannot manage to think beyond the next political obstacle. Only one candidate has the courage to keep America safe in these dangerous days. Four more years!
He neatly puts my anti-Bush case better than I can. Oh, to be young and believe in grand plans and great men. Now I think the only thing worse than short-termism is long-termism. Politics and life are like tennis, you just play the balls as the come.
Steven Landsburg, Economic writer, quantum teleports in his support for Bush.
Duke thinks it’s imperative to protect white jobs from black competition. Edwards thinks it’s imperative to protect American jobs from foreign competition. There’s not a dime’s worth of moral difference there. While Duke would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of skin color, Edwards would discriminate on the arbitrary basis of birthplace. Either way, bigotry is bigotry, and appeals to base instincts should always be repudiated.
Amazingly, I’ve always understood that Lincoln (a Republican) was talking about “Government of the (American) people, for the (American) people, by the (American) people.” Mr Landsburg understands old Abe as referring to the “people of the world.” He may be right. Where’s my vote then?
Finally, a far more important thinker, Jim Henley, comes out for Kerry.
[Bush] implies that by “staying on the offensive” (forever?) we can make “terror” — a tactic that has been around for some long number of decades or centuries depending how loose you want to play with your definitions — vanish utterly from the face of the earth. When certain progressives sought beforetimes to “end war,” real conservatives laughed out their asses at the naivete.
I’ve been trying — much less eloquently — to say the same thing. Bush and his cronies are playing fast and loose with the word “terror” — now it means “Islamofascism”, now it means “rogue states”, and now (very rarely) it means “terror” of the Timothy McVeigh, IRA, ETA, etc. variety. If you can’t tell the common cold from ‘flu’ from Bubonic Plague how are you ever going to develop vaccines?
The American Revolution would have been derided as “terrorist” by the Bushies. “Look at those thugs destroying our tea — and our profits!” Only through world-wide surveillance and an eternally-vigilant Thought Police can terrorism, like crime, be eliminated. That’s too high a price.
These 516 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:53am GMT Permanent link.
Whatever, It'll Be Bush »
Despite my last post, I think Bush will win. I think Chris Lightfoot has it right.
There are about as many Republicans as there are Democrats, and the difference between the number of each party is almost certainly smaller than the margin of error of a US election.
I wrote yesterday that I thought that journalists were becoming cut off from public opinion and the Kerry landslide piece rather confirms that. I did think that the lost explosives story might swing a few voters against Bush, but John Cole calls it a A Failed October Surprise, and I fear that he’s right.
In his next post though, John accuses Andrew Sullivan of ‘incoherence’ and being ‘officially irrelevant.’ Hell may have no fury like a woman scorned, but John Cole comes close.
So Bush. I don’t know by how much, but more than last time, which his side will claim as a sweeping endorsement, no matter how large the fall from September three years ago.
These 132 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:34am GMT Permanent link.
It Gets Nasty »
Ah, for the good ol’ days, when Jeff Jarvis was a regular linkee of the InstantOne. Now, he gets this kind of thing.
Talk about strange bedfellows. You [Jeff Jarvis], Sulli [Andrew Sullivan], Michael Moore, George Soros, MoveOn, Jacques Chirac, Kofi Annan and now the “moolah’s” are all in agreement — Kerry for President!
I found that looking for the comment which Oliver Willis linked to:
Part of me hopes Kerry is elected and NY or other major cities are utterly devastated by terrorists. No tears then, you stupid bastards deserve it.
(Jeff Jarvis lives in New York.) Utterly devastated, huh? Not “My country right or wrong” but “My country elects a guy I don’t like … them townies deserve to die.” An interesting take on patriotism and defending one’s country. To be fair, the next comment (which Oliver didn’t mention) reads:
Joel, can you at least TRY to appear civilized? Based on that comment you have issues that go way beyond this election, and you clearly need help. Please seek help, and please refrain from posting that sort of hateful garbage.
Andrew Sullivan endorses Kerry For President and Lileks blogs drunk, starting here.
(Note: it’s very late, and I can either edit this for sanity and clarity, or post it and watch some TV. You know where I stand on THAT issue. Bale if you must; I’m extra cranky tonight. Here we go.)
I know, it takes one to know one. How can I tell? I think “Coexistance” and “dasn’t be” along with the stream-of-consciousness give him away.
Andrew returns fire. (He’s not the only one to notice that it’s all phlegm directed at the Senator, with nary a mention of the President.)
Non-partisan moment. Why I believe in our president.
These 155 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:53pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 28 October 2004
Just A One-Fingered Victory Salute »
And stop telling him what to do.
These 8 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:32am GMT Permanent link.
Joy In The Morning »
I meant to blog the other week that I got a new Labour Party membership card in the post. I thought I’d cancelled my direct debit, but clearly I hadn’t.
Needless to say, I cancelled it straightaway.
Also needless to say, they were premature in sending it out.
This morning I got a plaintive letter, with this at the top URGENT - your bank has cancelled your Direct Debit and:
Paying your Labour Party membership by Direct Debit saves £5 a year which we can spend on campaigning to keep Labour in government.
Unfortunately we have been informed by your bank that they have cancelled your Direct Debit instruction because
- You have cancelled your Direct Debit.
…
Don’t let your membership slip away—act now to reinstate your payment, or your membership may lapse.
May lapse? It bloody better lapse.
See previous post for my opinion put succinctly.
These 98 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:40am GMT Permanent link.
There's Always Bad News Somewhere »
Organisers of the 2005 Tour de France are set to announce changes when the route is unveiled on Thursday.
It is rumoured only one time trial and three mountain finishes will feature, as opposed to the customary two trials and four to six high-altitude finales.
I’m not so keen on the time-trials, but I’m sure they’re better than the peloton flashing past for live spectators. The mountain stages are Le Tour. They’re only doing this to spite Lance, the unsporting bastards.
These 38 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38am GMT Permanent link.
He Hates Music, Football, And Sex, And He Is No Fun At All »
Harry Hutton is out-ironied by the ironic irony of Christopher Hitchens.
If I’ve got this right, the subjective votes and the objective votes cancel each other out, but Kerry wins on some kind of ironic level. You would need a fucking PhD in Irony Studies to make any sense of this.
As luck would have it, my nephew is in the third year of an Ironic Degree at Oxford. He explains: “There are several layers of irony here, most of which you will be too dim to perceive. His endorsement of Bush a few days ago is best interpreted as some kind of sophisticated double-bluff irony feinting manoeuvre, rendering today’s support for Kerry even wittier than it already would have been.
Others have taken it literally.
Jamie finds a real journalist, one who’s been on the Campaign Trail, and whose prose is like a window pane.
BULLETIN: KERRY WINS GONZO ENDORSEMENT; DR THOMPSON JOINS DEMOCRAT IN CALLING BUSH “THE SYPHILIS PRESIDENT”.
“Four more years of George Bush will be like four more years of syphilis,” the famed author said yesterday at a hastily called press conference near his home in Woody Creek, Colorado.
“Only a fool or a sucker would vote for a dangerous loser like Bush. He hates everything we stand for, and he knows we will vote against him in November.” Thompson, well known for the eerie accuracy of his political instincts, went on to denounce Ralph Nader as “a worthless Judas goat with no moral compass.”
“I endorsed John Kerry a long time ago,” he said, “and I will do everything in my power, short of roaming the streets with a meat hammer, to help him be the next president of the United States.”
Which is true. I said all those things, and I will say them again. Of course I will vote for John Kerry. I have known him for 30 years as a good man with a brave heart—which is more than even the President’s friends will tell you about George W Bush, who is also an old acquaintance from the white-knuckle days of yesteryear. He is hated all over the world, including large parts of Texas, and he is taking us all down with him. Bush is a natural-born loser with a filthy-rich daddy who pimped his son out to rich oil-mongers. He hates music, football and sex, and he is no fun at all.
Norman Mailer, mostly a novelist of course, but one who has dabbled in political candidacy and journalism once said:
I don’t think there’s a man writing English today who can’t learn how to write a little better by reading his [George Orwell’s] essays.
Someone’s been reading his Orwell. Perhaps Christopher Hitchens could give those essays a shot.
Some people still support Bush. Me, I doubt I’ll ever vote Labour again.
These 82 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Embryonic Stem-cell Research Is Evil, Remember? »
But cloning isn’t? Spotted on Pharyngula, but Tim Ireland has a screenshot and a blown-up version.
James of Insert Joke Here links to the Eminem video also on Pharyngula. I’m largely with The Editors on Marshall Mathers’ talents, but it’s not so bad. And this is a first for this site—a link to Fox 24 News: Record Number of GI’s Going AWOL. Backs up the ‘Mosh’ video, surprisingly.
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Proper Blogging »
TBogg may exaggerate when he asks if Roger Simon’s blog was designed as flypaper for loonies. But preferring the Washington Times (not the Woodward and Bernstein Post) over the NYT is a little weird, despite some of the vagaries of the latter publication.
However, the New York paper (the one whose building Ann Coulter wished that Timothy McVeigh had bombed) redeems itself somewhat with an article on the essense of blogging. Some facts may a little skew-whiff — one interviewee says:
I think the reporter, Daniel Terdiman (who also writes for Wired News) did a good job (despite saying I have been blogging for three months, when actually I have been blogging for ten) …
But it covers the important thing, and caused this to happen.
Pictured, Gordon and a bottle, the latter to be opened should Jamie be right. (Otherwise at Christmas.)
If cats aren’t your thing, there’s always pies.
These 118 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:29pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 29 October 2004
Where There's Life, There's Hope »
Visualize winning. (Found through Bloggerheads.)
These 5 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:29pm GMT Permanent link.
Where There's Life, There's Hope, Part 2 »
Whisper who dares. (In the words of Graham Parker, “Don’t get excited.")
I’m a bit late with this, but Americans, don’t you just hate foreigners telling you how they’d vote?
But we like it when Americans say nice things about Limey wimps.
Just think, if you lived in Afghanistan, you could have voted several times. That’s real democracy. Of a sort.
The rain it raineth on the just
And also on the unjust fella;
But chiefly on the just, because
The unjust steals the just’s umbrella.
(Sam Ervin.)
These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:54pm GMT Permanent link.
I Have This Hunch »
Saying that Bush is wearing a wire isn’t paranoid. Thinking that he’s an alien lizard and that’s his supply of carbon monoxide and lead, that’s paranoid. (Image from Salon.)
When they told George Bush that the Boss would be here today, he thought they meant Dick Cheney.
He meant, of course, a songwriter who’d been writing “about America for 30 years.” I know that Harry thinks we don’t need the opinions of pop stars. It depends on the pop star, I suppose. If this introduction isn’t ‘left-wing,’ what the hell is?
These 74 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:36pm GMT Permanent link.
Bwah-hah-hah-ha-ha! »
It’s in the Grauniad, so can you believe it? Someone doesn’t look happy.
See here and here (as I said yesterday.)
Image from Bob Harris. Found through Atrios. (I linked to the video here.)
These 35 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Not Looking Back »
Earlier, I blogged Bruce Springsteen’s introduction for Senator John Kerry (I’d like to add “the next you-know-what … ” but I don’t want to jinx anything). This is the best transcript I can type.
Thank you. As a songwriter, I’ve written about America for 30 years. I’ve tried to write about what we are, what we stand for, what we fight for, and I believe that these essential ideas of American identity are what’s at stake on November 2nd. The human principles of economic justice, healing the sick, health care, feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, a living wage, so folks don’t have to break their backs and still not make ends meet. The, uh, protection of our environment, and responsible foreign policy, civil rights, and the safeguarding and protection of our precious democracy here at home.
Sentimental, moving stuff. But what I joined the Labour Party for. Oliver Kamm says here that he’ll vote Labour in the next election, and here that he wishes for the President’s re-election. I’ve left the Labour Party, and I’m not looking back.
These 76 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:20pm GMT Permanent link.
If It's On The Internet ... »
Jeremy Clarkson on QI
Every one of the 247,000,000,000 facts on the internet is wrong.
Ludwig Wittgenstein
The world is the totality of facts, not of things.
These 6 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Orwell, Revisited »
It’s a bit of a cliche to assert that George Orwell would have supported this or this action. It’s also a cliche to report that he was both a radical and a conservative. Like old Eric, I like “warm beer,” old maids, and all the rest of that.
George W. Bush has come to embody a politics that is antithetical to almost any kind of thoughtful conservatism. His international policies have been based on the hopelessly naïve belief that foreign peoples are eager to be liberated by American armies —a notion more grounded in Leon Trotsky’s concept of global revolution than any sort of conservative statecraft. His immigration policies—temporarily put on hold while he runs for re-election—are just as extreme. A re-elected President Bush would be committed to bringing in millions of low-wage immigrants to do jobs Americans “won’t do.” This election is all about George W. Bush, and those issues are enough to render him unworthy of any conservative support.
I discover that I’m a conservative. You may discover that you’re not. If you find that you’re not a conservative but a Trot, sorry but I can’t send you my pearl-handled revolver before the election. Are there any tall buildings near you?
These 90 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:27pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 30 October 2004
War Hero To President »
We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats’ feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar
Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;
Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death’s other Kingdom
Remember us — if at all — not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.
Or from Cambodia to District of Columbia. The rightful President was in Cambodia. I can’t see even Fox showing the crucified, or the Einsteinian slaughter of innocent cattle on Network TV though.
Mistah Bush — he stupid!
For some reason—which will doubtless be apparent when I wake up—I can’t find any stills of that scene which mirrors the statue pulling down in ‘October’ where the figure of Peter the Great is pulled down by the rioters and Eisenstein intercuts the footage with the brutal slaughter of a cow. (This may be why I’m a vegetarian.) You know the one: Martin Sheen enters with machete to do what Harrison Ford told him to do nearly three hours ago; Marlon reads Eliot (ironic as the poem he reads has his character’s death as an epigraph). Sheen follows orders as a cow is ritually slaughtered. It would be beautiful if death were anything but crass.
Were Colonel Kurtz in the army, I’d sign up.
Kurtz : I’ve seen horrors… horrors that you’ve seen. But you have no right to call me a murderer. You have a right to kill me. You have a right to do that… but you have no right to judge me. It’s impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face… and you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends. If they are not then they are enemies to be feared. They are truly enemies. I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate the children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember… I… I… I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget. And then I realized… like I was shot… like I was shot with a diamond… a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God… the genius of that. The genius. The will to do that. Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that these were not monsters. These were men… trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love… but they had the strength… the strength… to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral… and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling… without passion… without judgment… without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.
What was it he said? “The horror, the horror.” He wasn’t talking about Elaine’s choice of hats either.
Perhaps there’s ‘eternal recurrence’ and there are kids’ arms being chopped off forever. That’s in the past. The future is in your hands. Vote Kerry.
These 206 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:47am GMT Permanent link.
I Want To Be The First ... »
… to say that this is not funny at all. Does he know that if it weren’t for our Americans friends he’d be writing so-called humour in German. David Hasselhoff is not to be mocked and calling an important show — the sort of thing which made the US great — “a corny load of old toss” — well words just can’t express my feelings.
All good Americans should write to the Guardian, and if they can’t do that leave comments on any old Guardian blog, it doesn’t matter which one, they’re all spineless Limey surrender-monkeys.
Anyone who points out that David Hasselhoff can speak German will be made to watch the bin Laden broadcast again.
These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:07pm GMT Permanent link.
The Consistency Of Mark Steyn »
Mark Steyn, National Review, June 21st 2004:
What if that happened to the broader jihad? Already, there’s a palpable longing to make the Islamists just a regular common-or-garden terrorist movement, like the IRA or the Baader-Meinhof Gang. Mo Mowlam, formerly Britain’s Northern Ireland Secretary, oversaw the process by which the IRA’s Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness became Ministers of a Crown they decline to recognize. And she figures, if you can pull that off, what’s the big deal with al-Qaeda? Earlier this year, she called for Osama bin Laden to be invited to “the negotiating table"—a difficult trick: what’s left of the late Osama would fit in the salt cellar. But, putting such technicalities aside, Ms Mowlam’s main point was that the whole “war on terror” approach was all wrong. “If you go in with guns and bombs, you act as a recruitment officer for the terrorists,” she said.
SteynOnline home page today:
BREAKING! BIN LADEN ENDORSES KERRY! (and does an excellent Michael Moore impression)
He doesn’t miss a beat does he?
These 18 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Why, Oh Why, Are We Ruled By These Idiots? »
So bin Laden is back. We’ll be needing ID cards, new powers for police, pre-emptive trials after all.
Meanwhile, you have to love this.
I’m not saying Osama bin Laden is a genius of any sort. I suspect that he’s smarter than Fathers 4 Misogyny and a handful of Hooray Henries, though, mostly because it’s hard not to be.
Why, oh why, are we ruled by these idiots?
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:26pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 31 October 2004
Cherie, Darling »
I’m not happy about either of these stories. BBC: Cherie accused of attacking Bush; Scotsman:Cherie Blair lambasts Bush over human rights.
Cherie Blair has been accused of criticising George W Bush’s policies in a private address she gave during a United States lecture tour.
The prime minister’s wife is said to have praised the Supreme Court for overruling the White House on the legal rights of Guantanamo Bay detainees.
The Tories said she broke a convention that British political figures do not act in a partisan way when abroad.
Not the passive voice in the first two sentences, and the unnamed “Tories” in the third. If a Tory said something to someone, he or she ought to be identified. If they’re reduced to briefing off the record against the Prime Minister’s wife, they should shut up and crawl back under a rock.
The Scotsman is not much better.
The controversial speech was seen as flying in the face of long-held tradition that British political figures, and those close to them, do not criticise other countries during foreign visits.
That’s seen by whom? And the article starts equally badly.
CHERIE Blair has criticised the policies of the US President George W Bush, attacking his stance on terrorist prisoners and gay rights.
The Prime Minister’s wife was condemned by supporters of the US President, after a speech to Harvard law students which contained a stinging rebuke to Bush, while on a lecture tour of the United States.
She attacked the manner in which the White House has dealt with the human rights of UK citizens detained at the US-run Camp X-Ray prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.
Blair said the decision by the US Supreme Court, fiercely opposed by Bush’s government, to give legal protection to two of the Britons detained at the camp was “profoundly important” and a “significant victory for human rights and the international rule of law”.
Did Mrs Blair act in a “partisan way"? She praised the Supreme Court, which is composed of both Democrat and Republican judges. She made a political speech, but, importantly, not a party political speech.
I’ve just heard Christine Hamilton on “Boadcasting House” criticising Mrs Blair for going on a lecture tour now. I had the impression that guest speaking gigs at Harvard were booked well in advance. She’s a human rights lawyer, what did they expect that she would talk about? This ‘controversy’ strikes me as having been scripted well in advance.
Title suggested by a forgettable Bruce Sprinsteen single.
These 190 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:45am GMT Permanent link.
Money For Nothing »
I’ve been turning and turning in the widening gyre like the proverbial hearing-impaired falcon over Tessa Jowell’s gambling reforms. I put my initial reaction in a comment on James Hamilton’s post on Gambling in the UK.
I agree with Jamie here, and I think John [Band, in an earlier comment] shoots himself in the foot by pointing out that “Britain already has plenty of horrid, seedy casinos in which people throw away their last few quid”. As Jamie says, “Libertarian arguments won’t do for this one.”
Ms Jowell claims, correctly, “We have the lowest rates of problem gambling in the world.” I’m not convinced that will remain true if we allow super-casinos. This may be a “a man cannot give birth to a pebble analogy” but it’s off the top of my head - just because your local school has very low rates of drug users, doesn’t mean you should invite pushers to hang around the school gates.
Casinos are weird places. They’re expensive to run, as they have to have plenty of security (to prevent cheating as much as attempts at robbery), and lots of staff (most of the jobs Ms Jowell vaunts are McJobs, not careers; I want better from a Labour government), and they have to pay the bank loans and make the owners rich. Over and above that, they pay taxes. That means that despite their protests to the contrary money crosses the tables overwhelmingly in one direction. I wouldn’t be adverse to American investment in a bicycle factory, they could take their profits, and at least we might have real jobs and bicycles, but gambling is a swindle, and there’s no evidence of burgeoning demand.
John Band agrees with Tessa Jowell, though he added an update which read
… Ms Jowell’s suggestion that casino opponents are motivated chiefly by anti-Americanism is extremely silly. For a start, outside of Nevada, Atlantic City and Indian reservations, gambling is far less legal in the US than it is in the UK…
Then Chris Dillow (whom I ought to add to the sidebar) weighs in also on the deregulation and libertarian side.
However, countless transactions exploit people’s weakness. Tesco exploit my weakness for salt and vinegar Pringles, every investor who buys a share he believes to be cheap is exploiting the perceived intellectual weakness of others, WH Smith exploit people’s weakness for reading the Spectator. And so on. If we allow regulation whenever an organisation exploits people’s weakness, we will rapidly lose all economic freedom.
I think that this uses a special understanding of the word “weakness” — he’d be on safer ground if he argued that gambling were a rational economic activity like any other, not that all economic activity is some form of exploitation. He then lists three reasons for regulating alcohol sales more tightly than gambling.
1) Alcohol use imposes a bigger external cost onto others. The Home Office estimates that there are 1.2 million cases of alcohol-related violence a year. Sure, many of these are on other drunks, and “related” doesn’t imply causality. Even so, an innocent person is much more likely to be assaulted because someone has gotten drunk than because someone has gambled. And this is not to mention the possible role alcohol plays in increasing other crimes, such as burglary.
Up to “causality” he’s on solid ground (though the Home Office estimate may be wildly incorrect; and drink-fuelled fighting may be like alcohol-related sex — something people are going to do anyway, just a little easier after shedding an inhibition or two). Without figures (even estimated ones) can we really say with any certainty that there are fewer case of gambling-related violence than alcohol-related? Gambling could also be an cause of burglary.
2) It’s easier to slip into alcohol addiction than gambling addiction. A heavy social drinker is a good bloke, one of the lads. It’s easy for some people to slip from this into alcoholism. There’s no such social convention which encourages the first steps into gambling addiction.
It’s too long since I studied addictions for me to say much to refute this. The logic looks good, but there’s a memory somewhere that gambling may be very highly addictive for some people. The last sentence is actually a plank in my argument for the rejection of liberalisation here.
3) Alcoholism is physiologically more damaging than gambling addiction. 6000 people a year die directly as a result of alcohol. And this is not to mention the cost to the NHS of treating alcohol-induced illnesses. Also, it’s probably tougher to kick an alcohol addiction than a gambling addiction.
All true, bar the last sentence, which falls apart with the ‘probably.’ (I’m being hard on Chris here, his other posts, such as Sexism, potential and New Labour are really very good. He also makes the point that governments are inclined to over-estimate the weakness of the general populace—a point I’d be inclined to agree on in most circumstances, but the appropriate model here is the one which casinos themselves use, and I’m claiming that they’re predicated on exploiting weaknesses in a way which WH Smiths isn’t.)
Tessa Jowell granted an interview, of sorts, to Michael White.
Gambling is growing by 3.5% a year in Britain, 71% have gambled and millions regard it as “a legitimate leisure time activity”.
And gambling is being measured how? By gross receipt probably, so 3.5% growth is largely in line with inflation. I regard gambling as “a legitimate leisure time activity.” As Matthwew Yglesias has found, Texas Hold ‘Em “involves talking to other human beings and some math that is actually rather hard, as I’ve learned to my chagrin playing at a table with several people who do statistical analyses for a living.” Nothing wrong with that, IMO. Nothing wrong with betting on horses, either, provided you don’t take advice from Stephen Pollard, punting about his horse “Catsmeat” and take the opportunity to view the beasts being paraded and make up your own mind.
If Ms Jowell is so upset at being misrepresented, why did she call her critics snobs and anti-American?
Jenny McCartney in today’s Torygraph wonders about that too.
In an interview with this newspaper, Miss Jowell detected “the whiff of snobbery in some of the opposition to new casinos”. Much of it, she said, was from those who think that the casinos “should remain the preserve of the rich” or “find them gaudy” or “don’t want the big investment that will come from the United States”.
All three objections seem perfectly sensible. Rich people have more money to waste; Las Vegas-style casinos are gaudy; and few of us can understand why American companies should be encouraged to mine vast profits from a British losing streak. Where’s the snobbery in that?
Talking to Michael White, Ms Jowell admitted that “a new generation of 20 to 40 (’that figure is the market assessment made by the industry’) of big casinos to add to, or eclipse, the current 120-plus.” Now if the big casinos “eclipse” the current ones doesn’t that mean that “American companies” will “mine vast profits from a British losing streak” to the detriment of extant British companies? (I’m biased toward keeping the small casinos we have: my running club is sponsored by a casino, hence the name. I still think casinos are for mugs.)
Lately, however, there have been a lot of people saying very silly, dangerous things about the Government. They have been pointing out that Miss Jowell, Mr Clarke and Miss Hodge all went to expensive private schools themselves, and enjoyed their university education at the taxpayer’s expense.
These people have been whispering about how the ministers live in big houses and eat in lovely restaurants that the ordinary person couldn’t afford. Some of them have suggested that Miss Jowell wouldn’t like it very much if an enormous American casino opened right next door to her, and she had to watch all the young mothers and unemployed men shuffling past to pump money they can ill spare into the one-armed bandits.
Ignore the people who say these things. They’re basically snobs, all of them. And, frankly, not the sort you would ever want to ask round for dinner.
I find that I’ve come back to my gut instinct position: this government is all for liberalisation if it makes someone they like very rich. I do understand that certain types of offshore internet gambling are growing — and that it’s clearly very stupid to give your credit card number to some dodgy bookie in the Cayman Islands. I can’t see how increasing the supply of casinos is going to address that; the qualitative difference looks huge from where I’m standing.
Bill Deedes, not a natural supporter of the government or an unbiased observer, still sees the point of it all.
We should examine the Gambling Bill, therefore, for what it tells us about the state of this Government’s finances and the outlook for taxpayers. Gordon Brown will strive to avoid increases in even stealthy taxation between now and the election. The casinos may raise enough to help fill the gap.
Title suggested by a forgettable Dire Straits single.
These 684 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Money For Something »
Gary Farber reproduces the first two emails from an exchange between Roger Ebert and Conrad Black. (The latter is also known as Lord Black in the British Commonwealth, and as the most recent ex-owner of the Telegraph Group.) Mr Black, as he is doubtless known in the egalitarian colonies, scores one palpable hit.
I vividly recall your avaricious negotiating techniques through your lawyer, replete with threats to quit, and your generous treatment from David Radler, which yielded you an income of over $500,000 per year from us, plus options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your own Web site at the company’s expense.
Mr Ebert wrote to his proprietor (through John Cruikshank, the Chicago Sun-Times’ publisher) to advise him that he would go on strike with his colleagues if a strike were called. I’ll admit to a fascination with the predicament (that’s probably the wrong word) of the extremely well-off (like Alex Ferguson) who claim to be ‘socialist’ or ‘left-wing.’ Gary is less impressed by Mr Ebert’s riposte than I am, which I reproduce in full partly because it defies excerption, and partly to raise the tone round here.
One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind. I am not at all surprised by your letter to me, because I would assume that is how you would feel; what is refreshing is that you say so.
Let me just say in response that I have never complained about my salary at the Sun-Times, but to describe my lawyer as “avaricious” is a bit much; he engaged in spirited negotiations, as he should have, and he and you settled on a contract. It goes without saying that any contract negotiation includes the possibility that either party might choose to leave rather than to sign. I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself. Since you have made my salary public, let me say that when I learned that Barbara [Amiel, Black’s wife and an unimpressive Telegraph columnist] received $300,000 a year from the paper for duties described as reading the paper and discussing it with you, I did not feel overpaid.
Although it is true I now have my own Web site, you make it sound as if the Web site was some kind of present from the company. For years my reviews and other writings have represented more than half the total hits on the Sun-Times Web site, and presumably more than half of the paper’s income from it. I am the most-read film critic on the Web. The elegant new Web site, rogerebert.com [which is just a forwarding address to a sub-domain of the Sun-Times site], has been an astonishing success. Since it is a joint venture, presumably both the paper and I will benefit from its success.
I enjoyed immensely those times when I had dinner or conversation with you and Barbara, and with David and Rona. You are all charming, witty, and intelligent. You can imagine my dismay when I read auditor’s reports indicating the company was run as a “kleptocracy,” and that, between you, you allegedly pocketed 97 percent of Hollinger’s profits. This while the escalators in the building were actually turned off to save on electricity and maintenance. It is hard to believe that the departing millions were not somehow related to compensation levels at the Sun-Times, since management pleaded poverty in its negotiations.
I recall the friendly dinner we had on the day you bought the paper. I observed, “Well, there’s one thing for sure. You can’t get to the right of the Tribune.” You exchanged an amused look with Barbara. You did indeed position the paper to the right of the Tribune, in an overwhelmingly Democratic city and marginally Democratic state, trumping my proletarian posturing with your own aristocratic, not to say medieval, persuasion. But I admire you for sticking to your ideological guns in the face of the common sense which cries out that the Sun-Times naturally, obviously and by tradition belongs in the center. If you had been as forthright about your finances as about your politics, we might not be having this correspondence.
I’m fond of the old Torygraph, and very glad that Black was forced to sell it. I’m a contributor to those Sun-Times hits — I regularly read Ebert on films not released here yet. I’ve been a fan of Ebert’s since I first saw the Siskel & Ebert show on US tv. It was something I’d heard of, and I was prepared to sneer or cringe as two low-brows reduced films to thumbs up or down and was delighted to find a programme which featured unselfconscious intelligent discussion.
These 227 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:56pm GMT Permanent link.
So Farewell, John Peel »
Is it possible to call for a fatwa on Kevin Myers?
I chanced onto John Peel’s radio programme Top Gear only a couple of times. It was mesmerisingly dire, an irrefutable argument against open access to the airwaves for amateurs who imagine themselves talented. How many regions in Britain were rendered utterly uninhabitable by groups of teenagers in garages rehearsing their tapes for Top Gear? How many congenitally unmusical youngsters were seduced into thinking they were congenital geniuses by Peel’s enthusiastic, sinusitic, cod-Liverpudlian encouragement? And how many of them continued to torment everyone within earshot for another year or two before they finally realised they were not the new Beatles or, better still, were axed to death by their neighbours? …
Most people usually take rock music seriously for but a brief period, perhaps from late adolescence to early adulthood. For anyone still to be besotted by it in his sixties bespeaks a truly weird dedication to teenage culture, wherein almost nothing of importance is ever done or said. Yet instead of being a figure of fun — as he might well have been — he became a national treasure. Even The Daily Telegraph gave over much of its front page to his photograph on Wednesday, though I doubt if any of its editorial staff could ever have listened to five minutes of Top Gear without hurling their transistor through the window, open or shut.
It’s reassuring to know that the Groan doesn’t have the monopoly on obtuse scribes. What does he mean “teenage culture, wherein almost nothing of importance is ever done or said"? The word “teenage” itself suggests “Teenage Kicks” perhaps the best 45rpm recording ever cut. (Did no one but me vote for the Undertones in the rock’n’ roll poll?)
Mr Myers doesn’t even read his fellow Telegraph journos.
Moreover, for all his tales of his youthful priapism in Texas, I imagine John Peel was more platonically than pelvically popular with girls: the eternal uncle in the kitchen, on whose understanding shoulders they would tell of their desire for another.
That is how he across the on the radio, but the Telegraph obituary quotes him saying:
“I was suddenly confronted by this succession of teenage girls who didn’t want to know anything about me at all. All they wanted me to do was to abuse them, sexually, which of course I was only too happy to do.”
The obit also mentions his usually forgotten first marriage to a 15-year-old, and his continence elsewhere.
Despite the hallucinogenic overtones, Peel himself refrained from indulging ("I never even saw him smoke a joint,” recalled Germaine Greer), and his affinities with hippie culture stemmed mostly from a strong idealistic streak in his character; he was well known as an easy touch for aspiring bands looking to fund the purchase of an amplifier, instruments or even a van.
I’ve tried to imagine how Germaine Greer and John Peel could possibly have known each other, and failed miserably every time.
In the Guardian Mark Lawson is more considered than I was here.
For this reason, it would have been politically astute to have stayed out of the Peel eulogies; but Blair was in a bind because (I suspect) he, like many of his generation, was genuinely moved. But, anticipating scepticism, he tried to deflect it by emphasising the reality of his sadness.
That actually makes me feel rather bad; not that I can help being sceptical when it comes to anything Blair says now.
Today’s Telegraph includes extracts from an interview he gave to the Liverpool University alumni magazine Insight (ST piece not online; I haven’t looked for Insight though).
When we discussed politics, however, his tone was more serious. I think he felt let down by New Labour. “All the kow-towing to the Bush regime, I couldn’t in all conscience vote Labour now.” He had had high hopes for the party and had campaigned briefly for John Prescott.
A good lad.
These 195 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:47pm GMT Permanent link.