Tuesday, 1 June 2004
Grammar »
Brad Delong has some nits to pick with Eats, Shoots & Leaves by Lynne Truss. (Nit 1, Nit 2.) I’m a fussy old pedant on the second (the difference between “its” and “it’s”, though I’ve typed “it’s” more than once when I meant “its” — though not the other way round to my recollection), but I’m with him over the first. He objects to the title (which is, after all, just a joke).
The final comma in a list before the “and” or “or” is an important banisher of confusion, ambiguity, and general silliness.
One commenter, Treetop, disagrees, and supplies a counter-example.
“My heroes are my late father, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, and Cesar Chavez.”
The first time I read this, I thought “Archbishop Oscar Romero” was an appositive modifying “my late father,” i.e. that he had two heros: his late father Archbishop Romero and Cesar Chavez.
Well yes, but if I’d written that sentence, I’d have changed the word order. Duh. And reading it over, if that interpretation had been right, there would only have been two items in the list ("my late father, Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero”, “Cesar Chavez"), and hence no comma before the “and”. Think about it.
These 135 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:21pm GMT Permanent link.
Rationale Beings »
You can’t, as they say (in this case Mick Jagger and Keith Richards), always get what you want.
I had the thought of comparing ’Mad’ Melanie Phillips and Adam Yoshida, but, though Adam doesn’t acknowledge it, they’re singing from the same hymn sheet. I don’t know, there’s something about this, especially the reliance from intelligence from the Clinton administration, presented on FrontPage alongside anti-Hillary adverts that doesn’t feel right. And I get a sense that information which suits all three writers which comes from the CIA is fine, and any evidence which doesn’t reflects the agency’s incompetence.
Adam begins with the incomparable sentence:
The events of recent days have proven two important points beyond nearly any reasonable doubt.
Antic grammarian that I am, I wonder if that should be “nearly beyond” as in ‘not beyond at all’.
Anyway, I can’t say that there isn’t a connection between al-Qaeda and Iraq; it’s taken its time surfacing beside being looked for with greater effort than Hans Blix seemed to manage. (Though it seems those WMD weren’t there anyway.)
I can, however, say that that the Bush administration offered 23 different rationales. Devon Largio, who wrote her 212-page senior honors thesis (html page offering 3 different sized pdf downloads, from just the summary to the whole thing) said:
“I didn’t include this in my paper,” she said, “but I’m as torn now as I was when I started. I tend to accept the good intentions of the president, and it’s tempting to say that if they have 23 reasons for going to war, we probably should have gone. On the other hand, I find myself thinking that if they had to keep coming up with new reasons for going to war, we probably shouldn’t have done it. It’s almost like the decision came first, then the rationales.”
That’s how it looked over on this side of the pond, too.
These 212 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 2 June 2004
And Now, A Tabloid Story »
Found on PooterGeek , the New York Post story on sex bracelets. (Damien suggests that “You probably don’t want to waste five minutes of your own life reading the whole thing”, so I didn’t.)
“Megan Stecher, 11, a fifth-grader who sells the $1 bracelets to her classmates at Holy Child Jesus School in Richmond Hill, Queens, for $1.25 said her teachers are not aware of what they symbolize. …
’But when I found out, I was outraged. I sent her to Catholic school to avoid things like this.’”
As Damien cooly notes
It can only be that Michelle Stecher has never been within 10 miles of a Catholic school (or a Catholic girl) in her thirty-three years.
I love the name of the school. ‘Things like this’ are, apparently,
“A black bracelet indicates sexual intercourse, blue is oral sex, red is a lap dance or French kiss and white is a homosexual kiss…[g]reen represents having sex outside.”
It’s the ‘lap dance’ which scares me, the rest seem, as it were, ‘natural’, if precocious (and, as teens probably no longer say, “gross").
These 75 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:03am GMT Permanent link.
Rationale Beings, Part Deux »
Being better researchers than I am, and clearly blessed with better memories, The Editors cast doubt on the Saddam/Al Qaeda links story, and call it “a steaming turd of last year’s misinformation.” Also known as the article of Feith (warning: link contains image of Kevin Drum looking taller than a very tall person on stilts, may not be suitable for minors).
As Howard, in the comments, says,
And that’s the case here. Are we to believe that the Bush Administration, one year on, wouldn’t be trumpeting a Saddam-Al Qaeda connection? The single strongest proof that there isn’t one of substance is how little the backbone administration has to say about it.
Well, I do remember that at the start of the war, Sully ran an ariel photograph of a parade on an aircraft carrier which spelled out “9/11”. It convinced me.
David, in Kevin’s comments accuses him thus:
[Y]our questionable reasoning allows you to ignore news of a long relationship between Saddam and al Qaeda — news that doesn’t agree with your world view.
To which tristero asks:
What, pray tell, is Kevin’s “world view"? I assume you don’t mean his propensity for staring at the cats on his porch.
Alas no more! Where do we have to go for cat-blogging now? Don’t even ask. Heh.
These 125 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:39am GMT Permanent link.
England United »
What was it Jim Henley said about the Ultimate Godwin’s Law Violation? If you don’t know, Goodwin’s Law is one for UseNet discussions, which states that the first person to say “Nazi” has lost the argument. Generally, it’s unwise to use that sort of language on the interwebnet.
Chris Lightfoot published a complaint from Steve Uncles about his altogether useful European Election manifestoes post, in which he dismissed the English Democrats as “[they] appear to be some sort of quasi-fascist mob; they’re anti-immigration and believers in victims’ justice. I read about two pages of their manifesto before giving up in disgust.” Note the “appear to be” and “quasi"; also Chris gives reasons why they appear to be so. As Chris Brooke points out, “quasi” reinforces the “appear to be”. He isn’t calling them fascists, just saying that he thinks, from the part of the manifesto he read, that they resemble fascists. He also provides a link to their site, so the reader is free to make up her own mind. (The BBC considers the European Election manifestoes impartially, and a little superficially.)
As Anthony Wells points out, “a political party cannot sue.”
Chris Brooke notes:
Moral support for Chris has come from Lib Dem Nick and Tory Anthony, making the slagging-off of the English Democrats a genuinely cross-party effort.
In the comments Steve Uncles retracts his threat of a lawsuit:
I think that your latest Posting gives a far more ‘Balanced’ view of the situation, and we will not now be taking any sort of action against you.
But the latest posting isn’t more “balanced”. Instead, Chris (correctly to my knowledge) asserts that he can’t be sued. This one of those situations in which the best way to concede defeat is to simply give up, not attempt to spin your way out with the appearance of magnanimity. Mr Uncles then said two things which irritated me. First:
A fascist according to the Dictionary is ‘Anti-Parliamentary’ — as our main policy is an ‘English Parliament’…
I may be given to typos: I notice that in my reply I’ve misspelled ‘government’ and ‘your’ (and on Chris B’s comments, I’ve written ‘but’ when I meant ‘by’: I have no explanation for that one), but I try to use the right word wherever possible, so I keep a dictionary beside my computer. In the end, I looked up three; none gave the definition Mr Uncles suggests. Then he added a patronising valediction:
Hope you can get your head around all that — maybe your Mum could buy you a dictionary for Christmas.
At this point, I should declare my personal interest. Chris is the support guy at Mythic Beasts, who host this site (and a couple of others of mine). He’s put up with an unreasonable amount of stupidity from me with great patience and forebearance, and — given that he once replied to me at 2 in the morning — lack of sleep.
I think I’ve said all I want to say in the comments on other sites. I get the impression that, whatever their policies (and “right wing” and “authoritarian” are among the adjectives I’d choose), the English Democrats have a style which is abrasive and patronising. Suddenly ‘Phoney Tony’ looks a lot more attractive. It seems they’ve decided that this is a fight they can’t win.
Doonesbury contains the n-word, but is still funny. And Boondocks may be outright racist, but is even funnier.
As I was writing this, three ‘election communications’ fell through my letter box. A bilingual effort from Plaid Werdd (the Green Party to you), the neon colours of the UKIP, suggestive of a radioactive banana and raspberry milkshake, and (expletives deleted) one from the (expletives deleted) British (expletives deleted) National (expletives deleted) Party.
These 540 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 3 June 2004
New Look »
No, I’m not sure about it either.
I’ve been meaning to play with the look for a while. I meant to change the colours and use this old photo in the sidebar, but it’s much redder than I remembered it, so that’s not going to work.
I fiddled with the stylesheet while I waited for the massive OpenOffice.Org to download (2 hours 40, and I’ve got broadband!). Thing is, I need X Window to work, and last time I tried installing it, it didn’t. I’m not overly hopeful that I’ll get it right this time.
So while I play with that and abandon my blogging duties, I’ll pass along Fafnir and Giblets’ discovery that grapefruits, while full of vitamin C and undoubtedly healthy (and tasty!), are not good for keyboards.
These 131 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:52am GMT Permanent link.
It's A Movie, Fer Chrissakes »
Want to support the effort to deconstruct the biological reality of male and female? I know I do.
Then go see Shrek 2. But you would have anyway, right? (Q. Is ‘Shrek’ animatronic Angela Carter? Explain your answer.)
Oh, the site is coool. Who can resist a Flash animation with Eddie Murphy’s voice and “The Bad Apple Pub"?
Found via Jim Henley.
These 62 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:58am GMT Permanent link.
Hat Tip: Norm »
Don’t let it be said that the interwebnet is just there for time-wasting. Mostly. Nearly always. But once in a while it rouses one to action. Sometime last year, I let my Amnesty membership lapse. One blog post, and I changed my mind. I’ve rejoined Amnesty International.
And all over one letter — and the placement of one comma in that letter.
This letter to the Telegraph from Irene Khan, Secretary-General of Amnesty International.
Sir - Your detailing of a number of major human rights abuses in individual countries, among them the genocide in Rwanda and systematic repression in Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe (leader, May 28), risked missing the point. Each of these is, or has been, rightly, a major focus for Amnesty International, as are continuing threats to human rights in Sudan, Chechnya and Nepal, for example.
But while abuses in individual countries prompt widespread criticism by the international community, the present attack on human rights in the name of the “war against terror” has instead been greeted with tacit acceptance, and sometimes adoption, by liberal democracies as well as repressive regimes. Long-term detentions without trial have been overlooked or copied and torture appears to be creeping back in. Here is the biggest attack on human rights, principles and values.
Perhaps I’m guilty of selective reading but, as “Here is the biggest attack on ‘human rights’, ‘principles’ and ‘values’” is meaningless (I don’t see how one can simply attack ‘values’ as if they were Platonic entities), I read “Here is the biggest attack on human rights principles and [human rights] values.” The principles in question are not individuals’ beliefs, which can exist anywhere on the globe, but shared ones codified in the constitutions of a minority of countries (perhaps the only way they can be said to exist permanently enough to be ‘attacked’). And those countries may be in the process of shedding them, in what Mark Steyn might term a “mass ecdysis.”
Lots of good, related posts from Chris Bertram: 1, 2, and, most pertinently, 3, and Glenn Bridgman.
Ms Garrard asserts “The idea of universal human rights goes along with the idea of universal human responsibility…” I certainly don’t believe that, one of the reasons for criticising executions in Texas is that the condemned are largely educationally backward, have low IQs, or whatever. Like children, they are less capable of responsibility.
As Randy Paul says in the comments to the first CT post:
If a right-wing dictatorship is accusing you of being a left-wing stooge and a left-wing government is accusing you of being a right-wing stooge, then you’re probably doing your job.
Indeed. Heh, even. Norm himself, only last week, wrote a post approving the Chilean court which stripped General Augusto Pinochet “of his immunity from prosecution.” Quite right. Others have felt the same way.
’The idea that such a brutal dictator as Pinochet should claim immunity; I think for most people in this country would be pretty gut-wrenching stuff.’
Peter Mandelson, no less, quoted in Andrew Rawnsley’s Servants of the People: The Inside Story of New Labour p184.
Mandelson paid heavily for transgression of the line, as he had so often penalised others guilty of veering off-message, by reading in the newspapers that government sources were calling him ‘unhelpful and emotional’.
(P185.) Most tellingly of all is page 186.
Tony Blair, though he followed the legal proprieties in public, offered a glimpse into his mind when he addressed a private meeting of Labour MPs that week. He apologised for the absence of Peter Mandelson. ‘Unfortunately, Peter cannot be with because he is at a meeting of the Socialist Workers’ Party.’ The MPs roared at the notion of ‘Red Pete.’ The Prime Minister’s joke was illuminating of his attitude. To Blair, bringing Pinochet for trial was a cause only fit for Trots.
He was wrong. Even some Tories, John Major most prominently…
The removal of Saddam and the ending of a repressive regime may have been consequences of the Iraq war, but I don’t believe that they were factors in Blair’s calculus.
I think this illustrates the difference in supporting the war which actually happened and the one the pro-war left would have liked to have happened.
These 385 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:02pm GMT Permanent link.
I Am San Francisco »
San Francisco: Liberal and proud, you’ll live your lifestyle however you choose in the face of all that would supress you.
Take the quiz: "Which American City Are You?"
I’m a little disappointed that I scored 0 for Seattle, and Portland, Oregon which I prefer over all cities in the continental US, isn’t even an option.
Found on The Virtual Stoa.
These 62 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:52pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 4 June 2004
Welcomed As Liberators »
While Christopher Hitchens seems to be hitting deadlines with the accuracy of Hunter S. Thompson (ie not at all), we’ll have to look elsewhere for the latest Chalabi story.
I think Obsidian Wings’s Katherine R came up with the best title for the next big theory: The Persian Candidate.
We need Hitchens back, as no less an authority than Giblets has it:
Add to that the internal Pentagon email that suggests that Halliburton’s Iraq contract was “coordinated” with Dick Cheney’s office and it is becoming clear that Reality itself is becoming some kind of crazed commie. I mean, the Vice President pulling strings to get his oil buddies contracts for postwar reconstruction AND a giant energy conglomerate deliberately sabotaging a state’s economy just to get richer? Come on, Universe. Giblets did not believe these kinds of paranoid fantasies when they were coming from Ralph Nader and he does not believe them coming from you.
Only Christopher Hitchens, fabled peace correspondent, can assure America that a war which looks like it was fought for the perfectly good reasons all wars are fought for — power, influence, greed, and cruelty — was in the cause of all that’s fluffy and nice.
From the Time article:
The e-mail says Douglas Feith, a high-ranking Pentagon hawk, got the “authority to execute RIO,” or Restore Iraqi Oil, from his boss, who is Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz. RIO is one of several large contracts the U.S. awarded to Halliburton last year.
Feith does keep turning up. He gets a mention in a Melanie Phillips post, the one where she memorably noted:
Scratch any apparently intelligent, educated anti-war person and they will tell you the whole thing was cooked up by the Jews — not that they would actually use that vulgar word, now that ‘neo-con’ is the euphemism of choice.
Typically for Mel, she doesn’t offer any proof for this “Neo-cons == Jews” theory. We just have to take it as read that anyone who opposed the war is a clandestine Nazi. Why they should tell you their conspiracy theories when you scratch them, instead of saying, “A bit higher and to the left, ooh ahh,” or “Get your claw-like hands away from me, you shrivelled old prune!” is not immediately apparent.
Mel quotes Richard Baehr (whose column is hubristically entitled “The American Thinker"):
But Zinni is not comfortable just with criticism of how the war or post war effort was run. He needs to blame people, and he wants heads to fall. And he names names — in particular the group he calls the ‘neocons’, naming five men: Doug Feith, Paul Wolfowitz, Lewis Libby, Richard Perle, and Ellot Abrams, as the key ideologues who caused this war to occur.
All I know about Feith is from Slate’s Condensed Bob Woodward which quotes General Tommy Franks:
Page 281: On Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s undersecretary for policy: “I have to deal with the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth almost every day.”
’The Bucks Stops Where?’ is as good an explanation as any of neo-connery.
These 244 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:33am GMT Permanent link.
Another Mole »
I am a mole and I live in a hole. Juan Cole outs another double agent:
I just heard Tom Clancy on Deborah Norville’s show. She asked him about some persons he had met in the Defense Department. When she brought up Paul Wolfowitz, and asked his impression, Clancy said “Is he working for our side?” Clancy said he was involved in a red team exercise in the Pentagon and Wolfowitz came in a briefed them, and he just did not seem to Clancy as though he were “working for our side.”
Cue Mad Mel finding that Jack Ryan didn’t save Israel enough times und zherefore talks like zhis. Good for Tom. As long as I don’t have to read his books. Might buy a few though, if only as presents.
These 55 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:10pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 5 June 2004
Nothing Like A Juicy Sex Scandal »
What would a famous blogger say about Afghanistan and, ah, a sex scandal:
Is it any excuse to say that the final lie that undid him was about something as trivial as consensual extramarital sex? Surely not. To begin with, it is not a trivial act to take regular sexual advantage of a young employee in the workplace. It is an act of almost pathological recklessness. And if the man cannot confess to such a stupid, sordid dalliance, what hope is there that he’ll tell the truth about campaign finance? Or his motives for bombing Afghanistan?
Ah, Afghanistan, the land where they used to greet gay Catholic journalists like Andrew Sullivan with ticker-tape parades and rose-petals. No? No. Of course not, Sully, you fucking poodle. They were a bunch of fascist wankers then, as they are now. Point to Clinton. If he said his motives were to protect people like you, you’d spin it somehow. Who pays ya, baby? Jesus Christ. (Found through Arthur Silber who keeps an eye on Sully’s suppurating hypocricies so the rest of us don’t have to.)
America’s moral insouciance allowed Clinton to believe he could get away with almost anything. Which is why he shamelessly corralled shifty businessmen through the White House in return for illegal campaign dollars, chatted on the phone with Dick Morris while Morris played footsie with a prostitute, and cavalierly carried on an affair in his very office with an employee half his age. These are the actions of a man who has come to believe he is beyond the moral measure of anyone else and that nobody has the capacity to catch him.
Dearie, dearie me. Compared to the man who, what? fixed his election (or got his brother to do it), invaded two foreign countries (and has yet to capture his main suspect), has destroyed the finances of “his” country, has abused the Constitution, overseen the first administration since Vietnam to practice torture (and, unlike then, not on enemy combatants, but on the people we’d supposedly “liberated”, who happened to see it differently). Only a villain would have consensual intercourse with an intelligent woman in her 20s. The perfidy!
The President, in an off-the-record statement, said, “Look, to co-ordinate all this stuff would take brains. That’s Cheney’s department. And those little grey alien fellas. It couldn’t be me. I mean, do I look smart? Do I?”
Ah, the old “I’m off my head,” excuse. It worked for Ernest Saunders, and may yet work for Augusto Pinochet. Will it work for whatsisname? That dumb guy who lost in 2000?
“And that’s another one! I’m not really the president! I lost, remember. Gore’s the president. It’s his fault. Excuse me, I’ve got a long holiday booked in Iran. I like those Ayatollahs. We agree on so many things. Gay marriage. Gays. Abortion. Contraception. Sex. Female circumcision. Stoning. …”
These 302 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:13am GMT Permanent link.
Censorship By Omission »
The unexamined life is not worth living.
Socrates
John Pilger writes to the Guardian:
Last Monday, I spoke to a sell-out audience of 1,300 people. The subject was the critical role played by journalists in channelling and amplifying Blair’s and Bush’s lies, instead of challenging and exposing them. The title of the talk was: censorship by omission. Not a word appeared in the Guardian.
Too right. Hat tip Norm.
These 11 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:36pm GMT Permanent link.
Nature's Last Word »
The reader may recall the episode in "The Code of the Woosters" where Gussie Fink-Nottle is advised by Jeeves to keep a diary, with observations about his love-rival, Roderick Spode. Gussie, not by any means among the most intelligent of men, nevertheless reached the decriptive heights of “… the way he eats asparagus alters one’s whole conception of Man as Nature’s last word.” Spode, naturally, discovered the book.
I wonder about Man’s place as nature’s last word. Not because Kitten on ‘Big Brother’ (as I’ve learned from today’s Independent) would dismiss the concept as “patriarchal and sexist”, and not because of most of the media’s continuing credulity toward those lying liars at the BBC (that’s Bush, Blair, and Campbell to you), but because of the strange searches I find in my Referrers. There’s a disturbing amount of trust in the omniscience of search algorithms.
I was found through this which apparently came from this search: effect of surfing porn on intelligence. Is “lowers your IQ” the 21st century answer to “makes you go blind"?
And I have no explanation for “i have had 8 kids by natural birth, what can i do about my enormous fanny hole?.” Not a lot I would have thought, though.
These 206 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:10pm GMT Permanent link.
Raising The Temperature »
It’s rather wonderful that with a simple hyperlink, you can, apparently, piss off thousands of people.
With that in mind, I give to you Fahrenheit 9/11.
Enjoy. Or fume.
These 29 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:04pm GMT Permanent link.
The People Who Matter »
If you want informed commentary on the UKIP, look to Anthony Wells, because the national press, or the Independent, which I stupidly bought today isn’t going to have any. This is Paul Vallely on Robert Kilroy-Silk
It is not just his smooth-operator charm which wins over the punters. There are his views too. These were expressed in fairly circumspect ways while he was at the BBC. Though his column in the Sunday Express was far more bilious, it didn’t really matter because no one who mattered ever read it.
Emphasis added. I wouldn’t touch the Express with a rolled up copy of ‘Asian Babes,’ but that’s not the point. Everyone has a breaking point with smug liberals. That was mine. Better “no one who mattered” reading your paper, than no one at all. I know I won’t again.
These 85 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:22pm GMT Permanent link.
The Things They Say, Part 1 »
This evening we begin what will doubtless fail to become a regular feature, much as similar bright ideas have fizzled before them. This time it’s the sayings of the congenitally feeble minded. Think “Look Who’s Talking Now,” without the budget, penetrating script, corruscating one-liners, and cute animals.
He supported abortion in Eastern Europe, in a country that’s losing population, he’s a self-admitted atheist, I think he’s a very bad influence in the world. He’s entitled to spend his money, and the public is entitled to know what kind of a man he is.
Those Yanks. They’re a hoot. They do know that Eastern Europe isn’t a country, don’t they? And is abortion suddenly right if the population is growing?
He is a self-admitted atheist, he was a Jew who figured out a way to survive the Holocaust.
They don’t like atheists, do they. Maybe there’s another way to read that second sentence, but I guess the speaker doesn’t care for Jews either. How charming! “Ah!” say the hordes of newspaper columnists, “is he a lefty? Did he use the codewords ‘Neo-con’, or ‘Zionist?’”
Alas no, so this story will have to be buried, as it came from the patriotic, and as he works for the devoutly religious Sun Moon (it’s his own religion, dedicated to self-worship, but that’s better than atheism), believer, and conservative fellow Tony Blankley.
These 163 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Spoiled For Choice »
I thought the idea of a politics professor actually reading New Scientist would be a good thing, but not when we get ’Nightmare waiting to happen’. I mean, it’s possible that some terrorists have a ’dirty bomb’ in their possession and the FBI finds out with only 24 hours to stop them, but then it’s possible that missing fissile material has been stolen for a time-travelling De Lorean, or an asteroid the size of Texas is on collision course for earth, or senior US officials who’d been captured and brainwashed into becoming sleeper agents gain control of the White House, or machines could rise up and try to take over the earth, or machines could rise up and actually take over the earth, or some mega-rich swivel-eyed scientist-entrepreneur could recreate the dinosaurs.
With so much to panic about, I don’t know where to start. But the nuclear terrorist one is quite far down the list. I’ll believe it when I see it.
All of this is part of a “panic panic panic, if you ask questions, the terrorists have won” mindset.
These 181 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:34pm GMT Permanent link.
How Could They Tell? »
Ronald Reagan has joined the choir invisible, if he wasn’t nailed to his perch, he’s be pushing up the daisies, etc.
Via Kevin Drum.
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 6 June 2004
No More Heroes Anymore »
Men were real men, women were real women, and small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small, furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Spirits were brave, men boldly split infinitives that no man had split before. Thus was the Empire forged.
Douglas Adams
I’m in two minds about this. I could say that I’ve learned something new about journalism. I used to think it was about making your own goddam mind up, unless you worked for Pravda or Rupert Murdoch, and typing until your fingers fail. But Melanie Phillips shows the new way: it’s quoting work by someone else with a short introduction so she doesn’t get booked for plagiarism. Today it’s Victor Davis Hanson, from whom she culls “This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach…”
Here is my other problem, if I understand Mr Hanson, he’s calling Bush (whom he doesn’t mention) a spineless idiot. So I could applaud him. Understanding him, however, requires a miracle, as he writes a lot of unconnected and baseless assertions in a sort of wishful thinking river of consciousness.
Liberal pundits went ballistic over Abu Ghraib and Fallujah. Worse still, many conservatives bailed or triangulated.
He never mentions either again. Worrying about these is clearly a sign of weakness. We must not be weak. “Bring me my hood of darkest black: Bring me my electrodes of desire…”
For those who think that we are either incompetent or disingenuous in Iraq, look at Kurdistan, where seven million people live under humane government with less [sic] than 300 American troops.
(My emphahsis.) We know that Donald Rumsfeld tried to alienate all possible allies (how was he to know that Blair would make like a door mat?) in the belief that American tanks would be welcomed as liberators, just as Chalabi had promised. But other nations are, however reluctantly, involved. There are Korean soldiers:
But some 20 lawmakers plan to propose a resolution within this month, recommending the government withdraw its plan to send 3,700 additional soldiers to the war-torn country.
The Seoul government believes major hurdles faced by the troop dispatch have now been cleared with the Defense Ministry’s successful weeklong consultation in Irbil, a town in northern Iraq, where Korean troops are likely to be stationed.
The ministry has already received a welcoming letter from the Kurdistan Regional Government in Irbil.
(My emphahsis.)
So the problem in central Iraq is not us, but rather the fact that unlike Kurdistan — which had a decade of transition toward consensual society thanks to Anglo-American pilots — the country is reeling from 30 years of autocracy…
In other words, it has Clinton and Gore to thank for the transition period.
Even a saucer-eyed Al Gore got into the spirit of things. Recently he screamed out the names of those who must walk his plank, and went into an exorcist-like trance when his vein-bulging, spinning-head got to spitting out the name “Woolfwoootizzzzz.”
I’d like to have seen that. The last Democratic candidate (the one with the most votes in the 2000 presidential election) able to turn his head right round like an owl. I’d have thought that would have led the news for days.
If there was advice from a “bloc” of so-called neoconservatives, it has not “failed,” but is in fact already working even as we caricature it: We’ve taken out Saddam; we are on the eve of a transition to an autonomous reform government; and we are shooting the enemy 7,000 miles away, rather than being murdered at Ground Zero.
But the enemy we’re shooting is a different enemy to the one at what became Ground Zero. And we’re not dying at Ground Zero because it’s not there anymore. People have died elsewhere, the war not withstanding.
This is the bit Mad Mel likes:
We do have a grave problem in this country, but it is not the plan for Iraq, the neoconservatives, or targeting Saddam. Face it: This present generation of leaders at home would never have made it to Normandy Beach. They would instead have called off the advance to hold hearings on Pearl Harbor, cast around blame for the Japanese internment, sued over the light armor and guns of Sherman tanks, apologized for bombing German civilians, and recalled General Eisenhower to Washington to explain the rough treatment of Axis prisoners.
That can only mean Bush, Cheney, and so on. Clinton, after all, was attacked by Andrew Sullivan for bombing Afghanistan. Just think, if he’d kept it up (no pun intended) and got lucky (no pun intended), there’d be no excuse now for the Patriot Act. Hell, Bush might even be popular. (Nah, with the economy so screwed, there’s no chance of that.)
Judging from our newspapers, we seem to care little about the soldiers while they are alive and fighting, but we suddenly put their names on our screens and speak up when a dozen err or die.
This man is a journalist with a widely read column. Nothing is stopping him from asking his editor for an expense account, getting on a plane and writing about those soldiers. “Oh, no, it’s all the media’s fault.” “You are the media.” “Not me, dear boy, the other media.” Plus I assume that he reads the paper he finds congenial, ie the conservative press, more often than East Coast liberal rags, so what’s his beef? Don’t tell me the GOP spends far more time attacking the Dixie Chicks, Michael Moore, and George Soros than it does congratulating the lads out in Iraq.
Our very success after September 11 — perhaps because of the Patriot Act, the vigilance of domestic-security agencies, and the global reach of our military — has prevented another catastrophe of mass murder…
Ah, Bali? Madrid?
These depressing times really are much like the late 1960s, when only a few dared to plead that Hue and Tet were not abject defeats, but rare examples of American courage and skill. But now as then, the louder voice of defeatism smothers all reason, all perspective, all sense of balance — and so the war is not assessed in terms of five years but rather by the last five hours of ignorant punditry. Shame on us all.
You missed My Lai. And I just wasted more than five minutes on ignorant punditry. Shame on me.
Still, if you want to go on a cruise, this looks like fun. Going by the polls National Review’s 2004 “Post election” cruise should be a blast. Order the champagne. Play the music loud! Bring a video camera. For some reason I don’t see Mr V.D. Hanson or Mr A. Sullivan rejoicing at a government who might rescue the economy, go back to fighting terrorism (everyone agrees al Qaeda had been planning for years, but they failed to strike under Clinton), and put a few Iranian agents and robber barons in jail. Holiday of a lifetime. You might be woken in the wee hours by the odd loud splash, but, after all that celebration, you’ll fall asleep again.
These 631 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:18am GMT Permanent link.
No Dunce Left Behind »
Well this is a first, a link to the Corner (found through Artios who linked to the post three above).
The White House press release spelled Reagan the dreaded REGAN!
I’m sure there are interns who weren’t born when he won his first Presidential election, but bloody hell. I mean, where’s Goneril? They could at least have spelled his name phonetically: ‘Ray-gun.’ (And I can’t find the press release in question. Perhaps they amended it. This is the only press release on Reagan yesterday.)
These 74 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:01am GMT Permanent link.
You Did Voodoo »
We begin bombing in five minutes
While the papers try to accommodate tributes to the first American to go prematurely orange, Whiskey Bar has a thoughtful obit.
I’m hoping someone gets George Bush Snr to reminisce about Reaganomics.
These 32 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:10pm GMT Permanent link.
Friends Reunited »
Since I came back from a weekend away a fortnight ago now, I haven’t seen Gordon’s friend Felix at all. I thought that they may have fallen out. Felix is an annoyingly chatty cat, who mumbles a continuous commentary about God knows what, and he won’t ever calm down.
He’s reappeared with shaved areas of his tail and his right front paw, clearly done by a vet, and there are marks on the exposed skin. I’m not sure if these are inoculation scars or he’s been attacked by a dog or something. He seems in his usual fettle, and stoical about his absence as cats are.
The two of them lie together…
…until I disturb them with a camera, and Gordon slouches off.
At least, I’m sure he has a home that cares for him now.
These 120 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:55pm GMT Permanent link.
A Trotskyite If Not Worse »
Friday’s Telegraph had a very jolly piece on the film buffery of Stalin by Simon Sebag-Montefiore (an extract from his book Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, which the Telegraph claims is published in paperback on June 10, but Amazon is flogging quite openly already). The quotes are unexpectedly funny.
Eisenstein had left for Hollywood and then returned. He was, Stalin told his deputy Kaganovich, “a Trotskyite if not worse” but also “very talented”.
And:
Sometimes Stalin joked about the director, “If this one’s no good, we’ll sign his death sentence.”
And:
Khrushchev recalled how Stalin would ideologically criticise cowboy movies — and then order more. But, in spite of his enjoyment of the films, one source claimed that Stalin once declared at the end of a showing that Wayne, a vociferous anti-Communist, was a threat to the cause and should be assassinated.
Whether Stalin was speaking drunkenly in the early hours, or whether he meant what he said, such was his power that, either way, the order was quite likely to be executed. Assassins were supposedly sent to LA but failed to kill Wayne before Stalin’s death. When Khrushchev met “Duke” in 1958, he told him “that was the decision of Stalin in his last mad years. I rescinded the order.”
Perhaps there is no greater condemnation among the left than “a Trotskyite if not worse”. It’s somewhere near the most grievous of insults kown to Harry and Nick Cohen (if that second link doesn’t work, this should be the Medialens mirror page).
This isn’t one of those affairs where everybody behaves with decorum. George Galloway has threated to sue Cohen. Even more unwisely, he’s issued the press release announcing his intention to sue before hearing back from his lawyers. (Shakes head in disbelief.)
Lenin has a spirited point-by-point rebuttal. He’s well wrong in places. Cohen reports:
As for gays, well, they are being told that they must know their place. A few weeks ago, there was a nasty incident when members of Peter Tatchell’s OutRage! group joined a pro-Palestinian demonstration.
And Lenin derides:
Funnily enough, if I were going to a demonstration in favour of Palestinian rights, I wouldn’t bring along a placard implying that Palestinians were responsible for homophobia.
Now, I rather admire Peter Tatchell (especially for his attempted arrest of Mugabe), but, as he admits, he often drafts press releases for Outrage, which undermines OutRage’s report somewhat.
Another protester, Peter Tatchell, said…
The abuse of Palestinian gays has been confirmed by two senior Palestine Liberation Organisation officials in conversations with queer rights activist, Peter Tatchell. … said Mr Tatchell.
Which leads me to believe that Tatchell reported on his own actions and then interviewed himself. You can take the boy out of the Militant Tendency, but you can’t take the Militant Tendency out of the boy.
I don’t much care for his use of the word ‘queer’ either. If anyone straight uses it, with the abusive meaning or the inclusive one, I just want to lamp them. Can’t he just use ‘gay’ like everyone else? I’ve been trying to reclaim the phrase “deep-fried Mars bar” from so-called English comedians. Never say “See you, Jimmy,” to me. David Hume and Adam Smith were Scots, but you never meet ‘characters’ in pubs who say “Och, that’s post hoc ergo proper hoc, ye ken,” when they fix your accent, or “That’ll be the invisibul hand of capitalism, nae doot.”
That doesn’t alter that I think that Tatchell was in the right here, despite his penchant for self-publicity. Conditional support is the foundation for intelligent politics. You want something, fine, but we want something in return. Is that so bad?
Yes, according to Lenin, and Todd Archer in the comments: “such ‘me first’ attitudes show only a bourgeois sensibility”. Such galimatias makes me tune out. Actually, this attitude undermines the otherwise good work they were doing in persuading me that, contra Cohen, SWP and Respect believe in “Opposition to all forms of discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs (or lack of them), sexual orientation, disabilities, national origin or citizenship,” which I’d second, and note that that’s exactly what Peter Tatchell was showing.
Though Cohen annoys me at the end of the same paragraph:
[T]he gay protesters were surrounded by an angry crowd of Islamic fundamentalists, Anglican priests and members of the SWP, and were variously denounced as “racists”, “liars” and “Zionists”. Say that Palestinians should be freed from theocratic tyranny as well as Israeli occupation and you’re an American, or, worse, a Jew.
Why he thinks you have to be American to be a “racist” (or even a “liar” but I’m not sure which of Cohen’s classes that maps to) when we have plenty of our own, I’m not sure. Not all Zionists are Jews, are vice versa. ‘Menaced by an angry crowd of Anglican priests’, now there’s a claim.
Cohen has only one palpable hit against Galloway and that’s the famous “Sir, I salute your courage, your strength and your indefatigability.” Not something that I’d have said, but that’s almost insolent to how Gaddafi or the Pope expect to be greeted. It’s come up so often that I’ve started regarding it as the alpha and omega of the case against Galloway. He’s not so devilish in this old Guardian interview where he presses all my buttons: he’s independent minded, has taste, and liked John Smith.
On the way out, I spot a letter on the wall that Harold Pinter sent him after he’d written an article lambasting the government.
Dear George,
Cracking article. Right behind you as you know. Fuck ‘em, and you can tell that to the chief whip.
Yours, Harold.
He reads the last line aloud. “Fuck ‘em, and you can tell that to the chief whip.” And he laughs.
I won’t vote for Respect because I consider single-issue voting a waste of my rare (and therefore precious) ballot. I think Cohen’s game is to brand all anti-war marchers as dupes of the SWs and then discredit the Trots. There were lots of good arguments against backing the war, some of which were clear to non-Trots: Blair, Bush, and Campbell lied to get us into it for a start. (See D2.) George Bush is another good reason. Chalabi. Rumsfeld’s tragic lack of planning and hostility to every other nation on earth.
The price you pay when you ally yourself with religious fundamentalists is a downgrading of the aspirations of women and gays. …
Nick Cohen isn’t, as you might think, talking about Blair’s alliance with Bush. He’s talking about Respect’s involvement with Muslims, but I’ve seen nothing to suggest that all Muslims are ‘religious fundamentalists’; that’s a lazy generalisation.
Cohen’s final paragraphs ring true for me, but the SWP have always been like this, and who gives a toss? If you want to follow leaders, you’re going to get shafted. I’d have thought that was obvious. But then I’m not a joiner. And, as my dad used to say, “I hope you’ll never be an electrician either, I wouldn’t trust you with my wiring.”
These 790 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 7 June 2004
Doubtless In Order To Avoid Him, Sir »
John B (who kindly emailed me to point out a couple of non-working links — the valid xhtml and valid rss ones, which, now that they’re checkable, will turn out to be either lies or damned lies; I can’t spin them as statistics), discovered Max Sawicky’s Useful Idiot Blogroll Contest. (It’s closed now.)
The idea was to go to the Useful Idiot’s site (I’m not providing a link, which is fairly pathetic: he wouldn’t notice if I did, so he won’t care if I don’t: but I’m not linking out of the remains of my Sartrean humanism — if everyone did this, it might matter), find his blogroll (that’s the sites he links to on the sidebar on his index page), and find something shocking.
Now, look, these are blogs; they are free speech. Dafter things get said on blogs than used to written in the days of pamphleteering. If you’re going to spend a month’s income on your views, you proof-read and revise. If you paid last October and it’s a mouse-click away, chances are you’re less careful.
And it’s very easy to say thoughtless things. I’ve done it. Perhaps you have too.
There are so many things I want to note here, that I don’t know where to start. For a while, I liked Glenn Reynolds. I had the impression that he was a nice person, even if I disagreed with his views. (Now, I’m less sure; he thinks less than I’d like.) If you followed the link above, you may have noticed that the first two entrants are on my blogroll (and are frequently cited here). I like both Jim Henley and Andrew Northrup a lot (as bloggers, and, of course, in a manly way).
To reverse the order, Andrew used Misha (whom I won’t link to). This is where this becomes more than a “politically-correct” exercise. John Cole, a perfectly sane and respectable conservative blogger, removed Misha from his own blogroll. Follow link for his reasons. (John Cole winds me up; I disagree with a lot of what he says, but we agree on the terms of discourse, which at least makes debate and democracy possible.) What I’m trying to say is that, for those of us who are net-savvy, which ought to include major-league bloggers, a link counts as a vote of approval. I think Misha can write. I think he’s percipient at times. But I think he attacks free expression (which I believe to be among the foundations of the USA) in the post John Cole links to, and I think a law professor ought to recognise both points (1. that a link is an endorsement, and 2. that Misha has gone outside the principles of his own country). I am NOT saying Glenn has to delink him, I am saying that, as a clearly intelligent person, he ought to be able to justify everything he does, and a fixed link from a very popular site counts for something.
I think the statement that attracted John B’s link was this one (from Misha):
BAGHDAD, Iraq - A car bomb collapsed the hotel housing the U.N. headquarters on Tuesday, killing at least two people and wounding dozens, including the chief U.N. official in Iraq (news - web sites), who was trapped in the rubble.
I heard this on the news this morning and had almost popped the cork off of a bottle of sparkly when I heard that it was the U.N. HQ in Baghdad.
Oh well, it’s a start, I suppose.
(Emphasis added.) I have more problems with Jim Henley’s submission. Like Misha, Gutrumbles/Acidman can write. Yes, he’s a racist, and no, I don’t like it. He was on my own blogroll for a while. (I found him through Glenn.) I think it was his steadfast Republicanism which pissed me off. Anyway, blogs are like diaries; they ought to be uncensored and honest. I think he’s offensive and wrong. But he’s entitled to his view, and I want people to be open about such things. I want to know whom to vote for. As Jeeves said, after Bertram Wooster had defended a particularly iridian pair of spats with, “But everyone is asking who my tailor is,” “Doubtless in order to avoid him, sir.”
Of the 260-odd comments, I agree with this:
I’d much rather have a nation of loud-mouthed ex-football players with stupid ideas about black people, than law professors who entertain the possibility of genocide as happily if it were a 10% chance of rain.
My view entirely. It’s not the blogroll that’s the problem.
These 649 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 8 June 2004
Transit Of Venus »
Since looking directly at the sun is not good for your eyes (Newton tried of course, but you can be smarter than him in this at least), there are a couple of sites covering this morning’s transit of venus.
Breakfast with Venus has a live webcam, but it requires Windows. (Bastards, bastards, bastards.)
Sheffield Venus Transit Live Webcast has still photos, less sexy, but then, not a lot happens.
These 70 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:39am GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 9 June 2004
Slightly Smaller Than Oregon »
Chris Lightfoot pushes the very excellent TheyWorkForYou.com.
I tried it out by looking up my deeply unexciting MP, Alun Michael, and my previous one, Jon Owen Jones, whom I campaigned for in 1997. I’m pretty sure he’ll lose his seat in the next General Election, while Alun Michael will keep his — would that the results could be reversed.
Jon Owen Jones asked a rather canny question in the house on Monday.
Any Foreign Secretary’s role is, inevitably, to sell various mixed messages, but can the Foreign Secretary help me, as one whose mental agility is not as great as his, to understand this: if we succeed, as we hope we shall, in setting up a democratic Government in Iraq, which will be a beacon of democracy in the region, why would it be in the interests of near-neighbouring countries to help to set up something that would, inevitably, help to undermine their own oppressive regimes? Given that some of the countries with the most oppressive regimes are those to which we are most sensitive, can the Foreign Secretary explain for me the overall strategy?
Jack Straw replied.
Well, my hon. Friend will be familiar with what is coming since he and I attended similar schools in the days of President Reagan and before. We face in the middle east a transitional situation, to use that term precisely.
He’s lost me already. Reagan left office at the start of 1989 and more or less retired from politics — that was 15-and-a-half years ago. How long can a transition last before it looks like it’s not transitioning anymore? “[T]ransitional situation” is a precise term? Google doesn’t seem to think so and nor does the OED.
The simple truth is that it is a parody to suggest that there would be an Iraqi democratic Government while all the surrounding Governments were dictatorships; that is simply not the case.
Oh no?
A process of democratisation, of building representative government, has already taken place across the whole Arab region. Different countries in the region, such as Bahrain and other Gulf states, now have elections that are recognisably democratic by any standard. Jordan has recently had elections.
That would be these Jordanian elections. The King of Jordan says Arab reform must emerge from within:
Arab nations meanwhile adopted their own reform programme at a summit in Tunis last month, pledging change but each at its own pace.
King Abdullah reiterated that this was the goal.
“It is important to stress that a statement of principles on reform and a plan of action to implement these reforms are not quite the same. A commitment to common principles is acceptable, but a one-blue-print-for-all is not,” he said.
He explained that the reform programme adopted in Tunis was based “on Arab needs and on revisions of many earlier ideas put forward by the West and the United States”, taking into consideration “each state’s particularities”.
I accept this argument on the surface, but I can’t be the only person to read the subtext as “We’ve no intention of changing, so stuff you.” The Bahrain Government does have the constitution online, but it’s in Arabic. (Logical, I suppose.)
We have arguments with Iran, but however else one might describe the Iranian situation, it is certainly not a monarchic autocracy.
So that was why George Tenet resigned! The CIA Factbook describes the government type as “theocratic republic” which is, I suppose, not quite the same thing. And we all know how much al-Jazeera hate democracy and all that:
Iranian reformists allied to President Muhammad Khatami have accused conservatives of making the country look despotic by barring thousands of liberal-minded candidates from a national election.
“(The conservatives) are paving the way for enemies who want to show the Islamic Republic is a despotic state,” said a statement from Khatami’s pro-reform League of Combatant Clerics, carried by the official IRNA news agency on Monday.
Of course, the following day, we had another argument with Iran:
Tuesday, June 8 [2004], France, Britain and Germany overcame their reluctance to get tough with Iran and took the bull by the horns. Without waiting for the UN nuclear watchdog to submit its report at the June 14 Vienna board meeting, the three European governments circulated a draft UN nuclear resolution that would sharply rebuke Iran for not cooperating fully with the lAEA. The draft reportedly “acknowledges Iranian cooperation in responding to agency requests for access to locations”, but deplored this cooperation for not being “complete, timely and proactive.”
I think Jack Straw is literally right, but very legalistically so (as is his right in the House, of course). I can’t however stop myself thinking that he plucked a form of despotism which Iran truthfully isn’t out of the air, and hoped to give the impression that it isn’t as bad as all that. It is.
Among other countries, Egypt is in a state of transition, as, even, is Saudi Arabia; they are at different stages.
See the King of Jordan’s answer above.
I get no sense from my colleagues in Arab Governments that they are opposed to the democratisation of Iraq: they know that democracies have a much higher propensity to being peace-loving than authoritarian regimes ever have; and what they want, above all, after three decades in which they have been threatened by Iraq—some have had missiles fired at them and two countries have been invaded by Iraq—is a peaceful Iraq, which means a democratic Iraq.
Iraq could also be broken up, so that each new state was too weak to attack former enemies. Iraq’s invasion of Iran rather suited us at the time. (By ‘us’ I mean our then governments, I’d be surprised if Jack Straw had been keen himself back then.) Is Libya a peaceful country? We seem to be their friend again.
A November 2003 CIA report covering the first half of 2003 identified North Korea as a key supplier to Libya’s ballistic missile programs.
Oh, I know that a country can have ballistic missiles and keep them only for defence, but do we really trust Libya? Since Jon Owen Jones originally asked:
Given that some of the countries with the most oppressive regimes are those to which we are most sensitive, can the Foreign Secretary explain for me the overall strategy?
I think the short answer is, “No, but our fingers are crossed.”
Earlier, Robin Cook had made a point, congratulated Jack Straw, and finally asked a question. In order:
May I welcome the broad thrust of my right hon. Friend’s statement, especially the strong stress that he placed on the role of the United Nations? Many of us in the Chamber — I suspect himself included — would have welcomed such a central role for the UN from the start.
Many of us includes me.
Those of us who have been critical of the occupation should recognise that the events of recent months have obliged the United States to accept a much bolder transfer of sovereignty than it had been contemplating. Given the extent to which nudging from Britain has moved it in that direction, I congratulate my right hon. Friend and the Foreign Office.
This is, to me, the most bitter criticism of the handling of the war by the US — that they weren’t looking to give Iraq that much freedom. Now Cook finally gets to a question, which is what he’s on his hind legs for, though of course he needs a qualifying preamble worthy of John Humphries first:
Will my right hon. Friend clear up one point? A month ago, Ambassador Bremer said that the interim Government would not have the power to vary the laws that he brought in as presiding genius of the coalition authority. Will my right hon. Friend give me the further good news that the United States has also given ground on that point and that the interim Government will be able to amend the directives that they inherit from the coalition authority should they wish to do so?
Jack Straw basically says, and keeps on saying to further questions, that the Iraqi government which should be elected at the end of the year will be in sole charge of the country. Crispin Blunt asks the most hurtful question, which I think Straw just ignores.
As for the countries surrounding Iraq being democracies, the CIA Factbook calls Bahrain a “constitutional hereditary monarchy” and says of executive elections (this is out of date, being based on information to 1 January 2003, as are all the following examples) “none; the monarchy is hereditary; prime minister appointed by the monarch.” United Arab Emirates Suffrage: none. Jordan “constitutional monarchy”, “the monarch is hereditary; prime minister appointed by the monarch.” Egypt doesn’t sound like a democracy to me.
For comparison, at least one country is a Constitution-based federal republic; [with a] strong democratic tradition, while the UK is a “constitutional monarchy” which doesn’t sound too good, but with all the stuff coming through the door, I’m sure that there’s an election tomorrow, so we must be a democracy, even if we’re only slightly smaller than Oregon.
These 665 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:06pm GMT Permanent link.
Slated »
Christopher Hitchens — is this heavy sarcasm or has he really lost it?
Sen. John Kerry waited until the first week of June 2004 to tell us that he met Ahmad Chalabi in London in 1998 and that he didn’t care for him then. That makes six intervening years in which the senator could have alerted us to this lurking danger to national security.
Kerry may not have been psychic, but then who could have predicted how the neo-cons would act?
Still, when he’s working from his notes from the old days, Hitchens gets it right.
Ronald Reagan was neither a fox nor a hedgehog. He was as dumb as a stump.
Slate covers Ronald Reagan… his death, his life, his legacy and all of it, as Andrew Sullivan notes, is negative. Sullivan is one confused man at the moment. He’s defending Reagan, and then he discovers this (immediately below last link; follow link for full text):
“Society has always regarded marital love as a sacred expression of the bond between a man and a woman. … We will resist the efforts of some to obtain government endorsement of homosexuality.” — Ronald Reagan, July 12, 1984.
The reader email which follows is pretty devastating about Bush, and I didn’t know any of it. It follows the pattern of this administration’s attitude post September 11, 2001, and Rumsfeld’s behaviour toward the UN and Europe in particular. Finding common causes, making compromises, building bridges, the things you and I call day-to-day politics, business, or even just work or life are not among Bush’s exiguous set of virtues.
Also on Reagan, the one and only Adam Yoshida, who doesn’t link as often as he might, links to Greg Palast (different page to the one Adam links to, but same story, and the Reader’s [sic] Respond is pretty corrosive).
Jim Henley whom I’ve always considered a Republican in the conventional parties, turns out to have been a Reagan-hating Democrat. But he’s pretty fair, and pretty much right.
Of all I’ve read so far, my favourite assessment is Juan Cole.
But it always struck me that he was a mean man. I remember learning, in the late 1960s, of the impact Michael Harrington’s The Other America had had on Johnson’s War on Poverty. Harrington demonstrated that in the early 1960s there was still hunger in places like Appalachia, deriving from poverty. It was hard for middle class Americans to believe, and Lyndon Johnson, who represented many poor people himself, was galvanized to take action.
There are many strikes against LBJ, but there are also several in his favour. Of the Presidents who’ve been in office in my lifetime (obviously I was too young to judge some), there’s never been a Democrat I haven’t liked, or a Republican I haven’t loathed. (I think I may have been served in this by Gore’s loss; I’ll never accept his position on censorship.) LBJ is the one I’m most ambivalent about. Of course he saw through equal rights and most of the moon programme, and he had a lovely way with words, but he was — well I’m not yet sure, one day I’ll finish Robert A. Caro’s biography and maybe have an answer. But LBJ knew who needed politicians, and it wasn’t the rich seeking extra dollars in tax breaks.
Then when he was president, at one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.
In Anthony Burgess’s autobiography Little Wilson and Big God he recounts the time when he worked as an army trainer in WWII. I can’t remember why, but he was training lads from the East End of London. They took basic training twice, mostly so they could eat enough to reach fighting weight. I know there were few wars on Reagan’s watch, and no draft. But if you expect, as the CIA World Factbook does (that military manpower is some variable of males from 18-49), the state is asking for their lives, which is all they have. Begrudging a few vegetables (don’t say they won’t eat them) is nothing short of nasty. Every child, no matter what her parents are like, should be well fed.
I think there are three reasons for opposing communism.
- You can dislike it because it’s a leveller, and, like Dr Johnson, you believe that inequality is the natural state of things, and if you really push it, God’s will.
- You can take the economic argument: that while there’s large income disparity in the US, most of the people are better off than they are elsewhere.
- What I call the ‘Orwell argument’ after his realisation in “Homage to Catalonia” that the Russian backed militia weren’t fighting for the same cause he was. Throw in the purges and the gulags.
I think reasons 2 and 3 are bulletproof. I’m not a communist mostly for 3, though 2 is my preferred argument now.
I think Reagan was a reason 1. (I know I just made these reasons up, and I haven’t got comments working, so fume or email if you want.) Reason 1, I can get my head round, but I dislike intensely. Hit it Jamie.
He was no hero of mine.
[Addendum of little interest, even to those who’ve got this far. It’s been said by just about everyone (Jim Henley for example) that Reagan was the only one who could imagine the fall of Eastern Europe. I hold my hands up, I can’t think of an alternative candidate. But I expect my readers to be intelligent enough to have heard of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. The really smart ones (that means you, Damian) will know that Einstein didn’t coin that term, and indeed, even hated it: he preferred ‘invariance’. (Relativity was the choice of Henri Poincaré — he’s in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.) If you’ve looked at early Einstein, you’ll know that he was recondite then, and yet he wasn’t alone. (If you prefer biology, think Darwin and Mendel.) I refuse to believe that some ideas visit certain individuals and no one else. If John Logie Baird had been run over by a bus, we’d still have television.]
These 826 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 10 June 2004
Quote Of The Day »
Why the hostility, girls? Did someone ignore your deadly epidemic or something?
These 12 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:53am GMT Permanent link.
Big Mouth Strikes Again »
Well, I still like Morrissey. Lots of Americans, it seems, don’t. (They can’t spell either.) I doubt that many Americans read the Manchester Evening News, but I can’t find where they all came from.
The comments range from things I wish I’d said like:
Reagan was hated by communists, despots, and many entertainers.
Which has a lovely bathos. Then there’s the rest:
Morrissey is ,like everyone else entitled to an opinion, However i do not believe that he should use the opportunity of a public performance to express is personal opinion on something.
I can’t see why not. He expresses enough opinions in his songs. So if he wrote one called “I wish George Bush had died, not Ronald Reagan,” that would be OK?
Morrissey is a real Neville Chamberlain and George W. Bush is a real Wintson Churchill!
No, I don’t understand that one either.
This is obviously a comment from an uninformed, callous, and insensitive individual.
Morrissey may be many things, but he’s none of those.
If you keep pushing and pushing your hatred of my country the day will come when you’ll need our help again.
That one’s lost me too. So, finally, one I agree with.
Morrissey obviously has no idea what’s going on. If Bush died, Cheney would be president. And that would be truly scary.
Hang on, Cheney isn’t running the country?
These 119 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Don't Encourage Them »
Don’t vote demands Daniel (D2) Davies.
Bottom line: “Really popular with nutters” isn’t an election winning strategy, but it can get you a good showing in UK local elections. All of which makes me even more determined to vote Tory next time. I really want to punish Blair for lying to me, and I now know that I can do so without taking any material risk that the buggers will get in. And the frightening thing for Duncan Smith is that my kind of support is probably quite a material proportion of his entire franchise.
I had already, I voted just after 8 (I left the house when Rabbi Lionel Blue stopped yattering), and cast my ballot on the way to buy the Torygraph. There wasn’t a queue. Are the people in the polling station returning officers or is that just the bloke charged with reading out the winners? Whatever, one of them was talking on his mobile to his girlfriend or wife, and the other had to wait for him to finish. It wasn’t complex at all, and the wait was tougher than voting.
The council elections here are reckoned to be very close between Labour and the Lib-Dems (by the local paper and the Lib-Dems; Plaid see it differently and the incumbent Labour party is surprisingly low profile), so I’m almost interested.
I voted Lib-Dem for everything. I too want to punish Tony Blair for lying to me, and I won’t mind if the LDs win: they fit my basic strategy of voting for the left-most electable party, and that’s not Labour. Though if a sensible libertarian (I know that’s nearly an oxymoron) like Boris Johnson became leader, I’d consider voting Tory. The LDs have been trying really hard, they’ve shown a lot of interest in my vote, and they don’t have Tony Blair.
Was it, we asked ourselves, entirely wise of Mr Blair to fly off to attend that island meeting with his fellow statesmen? Might he not find that a coup is mounted in his absence by a humble retainer whom he had imagined to be unimpeachably loyal?
If so, this column would like to be the first to congratulate Mr Prescott on becoming Prime Minister.
In the unlikely event that Andrew Gimson is psychic, I’d vote Labour next time.
These 231 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 11 June 2004
The First One Now Will Later Be Last »
Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.
Galatians 6:7
Pennies From Heaven is pretty funny, but it claims to reference this which itself is a follow-up to Peggy Noonan’s ‘séance’ with Paul Wellstone. It’s all a little over my head. I think she’s saying, ”I never knew this guy, but I decided that I liked him anyway, and not knowing a thing about him frees me to use his still-warm corpse as a mouthpiece.”
Other journalists are more percipient. David Aaronovitch wrote, way back on Tuesday April 29, 2003:
These claims cannot be wished away in the light of a successful war. If nothing is eventually found, I — as a supporter of the war — will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.
(My emphasis.) How right he was!
They probably are.
Oh well. Win some, lose some. Now you too can be an armchair warrior like Big Dave! (Found through Michael Bérubé.)
The BBC has a clever Flash map of the council elections, the simple version is Labour suffers election ‘kicking’. I can’t help thinking that if the Tories win any more seats and Labour keep losing, Michael Howard will be woken tomorrow by a Fed-Ex van bearing crates of champagne, Fabergé eggs, flowers and so forth with a note, ‘Michel, we reelly must catch up. i kno you are a conservative like miself, and not like that red “Prime Minister” you hav. Best, yores preznit G “W” Bush’ While Tony Blair finds making contact with either the President or his challenger suddenly difficult. “Tony who? Tony Bear? I’m sorry, Senator Kerry doesn’t deal with cartoon animals. Have a nice day!” Ah, there’s no loyalty in politics. When you’re up, everyone says ‘I love you’ and when you’re down, they walk away.
Tim Ireland feels the same way: 11 Reasons Why Tony Blair Must Go. (It’s in reason 3; but I wrote my paragraph above before I read it.) Tim clearly didn’t watch Newsnight last night, because he says, quite erroneously, “all references to [Tony Blair] were kept out of Labour’s TV broadcasts and campaign leaflets.” Not so. The redoubtable Kirsty Wark did find a photo of the PM on a Labour leaflet delivered in West Sussex (I think it was West Sussex). Who says he’s keeping a low profile? He’s been asking us to trust him for the past seven years, and now we have a bloody good reason not to, he asks us to put it from our minds and remember all the good times. How he filled the NHS with paper-fiddlers for instance. How they abandoned the ‘ethical foreign policy’. How he promised Labour would be “whiter than white” and there was some reason Mandleson had to resign, twice. And have they chekced whether banning smoking in public is OK with Bernie Ecclestone? He gave them some money once. God, I miss John Smith.
Tony should be happy that at least Polly Toynbee, Michael Frayn, and Maureen Lipman support him. Even if Richard Rogers (that’s the Labour peer) doesn’t.
Bible quote from Kevin Drum.
These 462 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:45pm GMT Permanent link.
He's Not The Only One »
“BLOODBATH,” screams the headline from tonight’s South Wales Echo, though the story itself is less exciting.
Labour lost control of Cardiff today after the Liberal Democrats made sweeping gains in the Welsh capital.
Although six wards remain to be declared, Labour cannot now win enough seats to hold a majority. …
The normally solid Labour ward of Grangetown returned all three of its councillors for the Liberal Democrats and Plaid Cymru made a breakthrough by winning two of three seats in Riverside.
Christ. Only the second time in my life that I’ve voted for the winners. (The first time was in 1997.)
Despite predictions he could lose his seat, council leader Russell Goodway held on to his Ely seat by 62 votes from Independent Charlie Gale.
In the paper, it says he’s “considering his position.” To adapt the title of George Galloway’s book, “he’s not the only one.”
These 58 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:47pm GMT Permanent link.
This Just In »
Ken Livingstone retains London. I got my hopes up when I heard it was close, and it would have been so pleasing for Ken to rejoin the Labour party only to lose. How we’d have laughed, and purple powder filled condoms and al-Qaeda could slip down the list of immediate dangers to Tony Blair’s life. ("Sleeping with the newts.” Heh.)
Back here in Wales:
“If I’ve been chased down the garden path on any issue it’s been the fact that the health service in Wales does not compare favourably with that in England.”
Cardiff Labour group leader Russell Goodway. Now why might that be? Could it because South Wales is a Labour heartland, so a) there’s no votes in it for New Labour? and b) it’s all poxy horny-handed sons of toil and other riff-raff round here, no Formula one billionaires passing out the champagne? And it rains all the bloody time. How’s a minister to top-up his permatan? And speaking of the Welsh Secretary.
… Peter Hain said Labour had “taken a hit”, and accepted that Mr Morgan’s D-Day absence was an issue.
Russell Goodway agrees:
Mr Goodway partly blamed Mr Morgan and D-Day.
(Both quotes from the BBC story above.) I’ve met Rhodri Morgan. He’s a good bloke and a nice guy, not like some moon-faced yuppie kleptocrats I can name. Anyway, he’s widely reported to have apologised. He didn’t apologise; he gave a very cogent explanation. He’s just being spun against by the excuse-makers and ass-covers of the party.
Kudos, however, to Nick.
These 200 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:21pm GMT Permanent link.
There's A Job For You In Military Intelligence »
John Quiggin asks is the “Riemann hypothesis proved?” Doubt is cast by Mathword, from which fellow CT blogger Kieran extracts the following quote.
Purdue University news release reports a proof of the Riemann Hypothesis by L. de Branges. However, both the 23-page preprint cited in the release (which is actually from 2003) and a longer preprint from 2004 on de Branges’s home page seem to lack an actual proof.
Sounds familiar.
These 25 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:42pm GMT Permanent link.
Judas »
No blogging from me over the weekend; I’m off to North Wales, and when I get back on Sunday, I’ve tickets for Ken Dodd.
I’ve a cultural week ahead. After Ken, I’m going to hear some American folk singer next Friday.
I hope he’s learned from the Morrissey débacle that his countrypersons wouldn’t like him to “use the opportunity of a public performance to express is personal opinion on something.” I mean god forbid that anyone would go to see some singer to hear what he thinks about politics or religion. Or sing an anti-war song or something.
I don’t imagine he’s ever cared what people think. He’s not playing Manchester though. I can’t think why.
These 116 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:46pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 14 June 2004
Yet Another Reason »
"Have you noticed how we only win the World Cup under a Labour Government?" Perhaps it’s time we had one of those. Twenty-five years of hurt, etc.
Of course, this is great news here in Cardiff. If I were sufficiently entreprenerial, I’d have realised that the essential chave fashion item this summer would be a Zidane shirt. Vive la France!
These 63 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:12am GMT Permanent link.
Dear Bill, Part Whatever »
It’s been a few weeks since I posted about my hero of modern journalism, Bill Deedes.
Full marks to the Guardian, though, for having the courage to print this letter from a reader: “Moaning about fuel prices? Try removing the flag from the top of your car — it cuts down drag and improves fuel economy. And you no longer look a complete wally.”
I hope that the writer of such a letter is enjoying police protection.
Might please Chris Brooke. I can’t find the letter on the Grauniad website. (Despite the letters being one of the things I used to read first in the paper, the website puts Gary Younge or Polly Toynbee above the pithily expressed observations of its readers. Update:Oops! Chris Lightfoot emailed with the link. I couldn’t find it, but for some reason I assumed it was published on Friday or Saturday.) Bill shares my reluctant Euro-scepticism.
They are such bad psychologists in Europe, so slow to grasp that in all democracies the art of politics is persuasion. …
I have always accepted that if we are to have the benefits of a free-trade European bloc, then we must all conform to certain rules. But that does not confer on Brussels the right to get bossy on a vast range of human affairs that are not relevant to fair trading.
Every word is right. The reasons for being in Europe, the reasons Geoffrey Howe used when he brought down Thatcher still obtain. We have to be in. Whatever we do, we’ll end up bound by EU legislation. But the word ‘bossy’ with its intimations of pettiness and despotism is exact. Like citizens all over the old EU nations, especially Scandinavia and Holland, I want to be in the EU, but not this EU. I want a retreat to the Common Market. Labour used to be against even that, as was Enoch Powell, whose last catchphrase as a member of the Conservative Party was “Vote Labour” (an option denied the current generation of voters who have the ‘meat-substitute, no veg’ choice of New Labour, Tory, Lib-Dems, Green, the Loony Left, and a plethora of far-right nutters). Ideally, they were right. “Sod the world, go it alone,” is my preferred choice too, but no country is an island, to paraphrase Dr Donne.
Jim White inadvertently nails my dilemma over libertarianism.
Never before have I eaten like it, courtesy of McDonald’s. Chick pea salad followed by tortelloni pesto, then duck in a cream and mushroom sauce, with slices of pineapple to freshen up at the end. …
The message Sir Geoff and his colleagues wanted to convey was this: the company’s involvement in football is part of its drive to promote a healthy, active lifestyle among children. Which, presumably, was why none of the product it usually sells across the globe was available for consumption.
If you want to know how much McDonald’s really promotes a healthy, active lifestyle, you should take the opportunity to see the film Supersize Me when it opens in British cinemas in September. …
Ultimately, I have no objection to McDonald’s making Supersize profits. I have no real problem in the manner in which it stampedes American culture across the globe. But I do resent it peddling its usual fare to our children, while simultaneously claiming it is the purveyor of health food.
You see, here is my problem. I believe in freedom over a nanny-state (because the latter will deny us our self-destructive rebellious pleasures which happen to make life worth all the flak), but we need to be informed in some way of the harm of smoking, etc. I think McDonald’s is rubbish, but I’m a vegetarian, and wouldn’t eat there anyway. I don’t know the solution to this. Freedom of speech encompasses the freedom to be wrong, and proving intention — as in lying over being mistaken — is nearly impossible. So the best I can say is, like Jim, go see Supersize Me when it comes out and consider yourselves informed.
As part of the push, when everyone arrived at the event in Porto, they were given the new McDonald’s pedometer. This is a device, soon to be handed free to every customer, which measures the number of steps taken in a day. Ronald recommends a minimum of 2,000. Mine was an optimistic item. By the end of the pre-lunch press conference, during which I had been sitting down, it somehow registered 1,438. Maybe I had picked up the wrong gadget, and it was a calorie counter, primed to record a Big Mac and fries. Or maybe it picked up each snort of derision every time Sir Geoff talked about promoting healthy lifestyle options.
Maybe if things get really bad for TB, he can call his old friend Peter Mandleson and they can hold the McDonald’s New Labour Nuremberg Rally as a way of securing the popular vote. At least it would be a marriage of true minds. Never let facts get in the way of a good advert. Or a good war. And if the war isn’t such a good war after all (people got killed, well I never thought that would happen), just ignore it, because it doesn’t affect these elections, and you can still trust me. Because I say so. And I’ve never lied yet, etc.
This is (yawn) yet another reason I buy the old Torygraph. Jim White is sceptical about claims; he prefers comparing them to personal experience, his own perception of things, and reason. Anyone might think he’d read David Hume over following the cults of St Peter of St Marx, or studied a science. Here, sadly, is the Grauniad’s David Aaronovitch:
These claims cannot be wished away in the light of a successful war. If nothing is eventually found, I — as a supporter of the war — will never believe another thing that I am told by our government, or that of the US ever again. And, more to the point, neither will anyone else. Those weapons had better be there somewhere.
But no one not on a YOPs scheme or in a home for the mentally ill would have “believe[d] another thing that [she was] told by our government” since the Charge of the Light Brigade. It’s in the interests of politicians to lie, so they do. Trust? Fat Dave, you old Stalinist you. Remember Squealer, the young pig who was so eloquent in ‘Animal Farm’? The duty of journalists is to ask — all the time — “why is this lying liar lying to me?” Only the prostrated trust. Just write at the top of every fart, “I kissed Tony Blair’s ring, and took the following dictation down…”
When people say that they don’t like John Humphrys because he refuses, as a good Welshman, to tug the forelock, I have to doubt their sanity: do they still believe that the world should be led by blind faith as it was before Galileo, da VInci, Newton, Descartes, Voltaire, Hume and friends and was until recently in the Eatern Bloc and still is in the Arab world and the mid-West of the USA? Apparently so. Maybe the terrorrists have won.
These 699 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:57pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 15 June 2004
The Dupe Rides Again »
Listen kid, I’m not gonna bullshit you, allright? I don’t give a good fuck what you know, or don’t know, but I’m gonna torture you anyway, regardless.
Christopher Hitchens continues to baffle me: he’s making some of the right noises, and I think he’s genuinely offended by Abu Ghraib (as is Andrew Sullivan, while Glenn Reynolds and Congressman James Inhofe regard it as unimportant).
So far, the press has focused on the questions “who knew” and “how far up did it go?” I’m equally interested in the question of how far down it has gone and how widespread it is. As Seymour Hersh has pointed out, the original imperative for harsh measures came from a Defense Department, and by extension a White House, that was under intense pressure to get results in the battle against al-Qaida and felt itself hampered by nervous lawyers. Almost the whole of public opinion is complicit in this, as is shown by the fury over the administration’s failure to pre-empt the Sept. 11 assault: a pre-emption that would almost certainly have involved some corner-cutting in the interrogation room.
(A Moral Chernobyl. My emphasis.) Ahem. Chris Brooke posted in April on Against All Enemies; the so-called 20th hijacker, Zacarias Moussaoui was arrested on August 17. The FBI and the CIA were at least part of the way to stopping the hijackings; that they didn’t signals incompetence, not “nervous lawyers” or some outmoded faith in the Geneva conventions. Bush told of threat before September 11:
Two weeks ago it emerged that an FBI agent in Arizona had warned the agency about large numbers of Arab men seeking pilot, security and airport operations training at least one US flight school. That memo mentioned Bin Laden by name and urged the FBI to check all flight schools to identify possible terrorists. The FBI did not act on the memo.
I can’t understand why Hitchens is “equally interested in the question of how far down it has gone and how widespread it is.” These aren’t mysteries — there’s the video and photographic evidence and the Taguba report which ought to answer both questions.
However, this very voyage to the pits may be of some moral use. Nobody has yet even suggested that the disgusting saturnalia in Abu Ghraib produced any “intelligence” worth the name or switched off any “ticking bomb.” How could it? It was trashily recreational. But this doesn’t relieve the security forces of democratic countries from their sworn responsibility to protect us -— yes us, the very people who demand results but don’t especially want to know the full price of our protection.
I count three discrete thoughts in that paragraph. What “moral use"? Too late, the Dupe has rushed on to his favourite topic: that the torture was the invention of some uneducated Southern types, people as different from the likes of him as he can imagine. The sentence starting with “but” contradicts something — but not a something mentioned anywhere else. He happens to be right about the military having a “sworn responsibility to protect us.” Indeed they have, and not go swanning off fighting righteous crusades against dictators hamstrung by UN weapons inspection programmes in the cause of making the President popular.
The abuse wasn’t “trashily recreational": it was ordered. BBC; Telegraph; Josh Marshall.
Typical old Trot. If the war goes well, it’s because of the moral leadership of the President and the strategic brilliance of the generals. If it goes wrong, it’s the malice of a few grunts. In the real world it’s the assholes at the top who screw things up: if they go right, it’s the dogged courage of Tommy Atkins.
These 319 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:27pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 16 June 2004
Evil Capitalists »
To explain the following, I have to revisit Juan Cole’s assessment of Reagan which I linked to last week.
But it always struck me that [Reagan] was a mean man. …
Then when he was president, at one point Reagan tried to cut federal funding for school lunches for the poor. He tried to have ketchup reclassified as a vegetable to save money. Senator Heinz gave a speech against this move. He said that ketchup is a condiment, not a vegetable, and that he should know.
Senator Heinz’s traitorous and anti-American action has led us to "W” Ketchup! No really. Moe Lane checked it out.
A couple of points:
G5s or GIs? A Tough Choice
Choose Heinz and you’re supporting Teresa and her husband’s Gulfstream Jet, and liberal causes such as Kerry for President.
And Republicans use Windows now? WTF?
W Ketchupâ„¢ is made in America, from ingredients grown in the USA. …
The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well. W Ketchup comes in one flavor: American.
So a vote for Bush is a vote against global capitalism. No more multi-nationals building factories where work is cheap. If you’ve ever been to a supermarket in the US with a native, you’ll have noticed how cheap food is and how much they buy. Seems like that’s about to change. That’s a real vote winner you’ve got there.
Did I say two things? I meant three things.
A portion of every sale will be donated to to the Freedom Alliance Scholarship Fund, which provides scholarships for the children of active duty service members killed in the line of duty.
I’m a dodgy old socialist. I believe the state should pay (for education for all, as it happens). Moe contacted the charity:
… the group making this is an actual company who will be donating to said charity, which argues against a satire site. The mocking of W Ketchup may now resume.
My emphasis. I only note that they haven’t yet, and haven’t promised a fixed amount or a percentage of profits. As always when a commercial product promises a donation, you know it’s bad value (it must be over-priced; and if it needs a gimmick to shift it, it’s probably crap too). If you support the cause, write a cheque yourself. That way you know they get it.
These 206 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:22am GMT Permanent link.
Quote Of The Day »
From Kevin Drum:
America is at a serious crossroads when Hollywood scriptwriters can no longer sling scientific gobbledegook even as well as a bad 50s movie. Clearly, something needs to be done.
It’s the end. Though they never really could ‘sling scientific gobbledegook.’ I swear that I’ve ruptured a sinus snorting at references to tachyons and ‘trace elements’ and different kinds of space and time in Voyager. But as I only watch it in the hope of seeing Seven of Nine naked, I can’t really complain.
These 57 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:37am GMT Permanent link.
Timely »
I was planning to get out the old sackcloth and flay myself a little with reference to cognitive bias. I’m sure I’m as bad as the next person, provided the next person isn’t Glenn or the Freeper crowd. What were the persuasive reasons for the war again? WMD? Nah, Campbell lied, and Hutton whitewashed. Torture? Um… And now there’s no al-Qaeda connection.
This war wasn’t properly debated Stateside the way the first Gulf War was, so it’s not a question of collective responsibility going wrong. It looks like one man’s war and that one man is Dick Cheney.
What’s the tally so far? 10,000 civilians and 700-odd Coalition troops? (Don’t ask Paul Wolfowitz, he doesn’t know or care.) And in an election year…
Is Tony Blair still Prime Minister?
These 129 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:58pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 17 June 2004
57 »
And if thy hand offend thee, cut it off: it is better for thee to enter into life maimed, than having two hands to go into hell, into the fire that never shall be quenched …
Mark 9:43
Ever since I discovered "W” Ketchup, I’ve worried about the American Right’s ‘commitment to America.’
“The leading competitor not only has 57 varieties, but has 57 foreign factories as well.” (What a convenient co-incidence. Not a shred of evidence for that number of course.)
Ever since Henry Ford pioneered the assembly line, US success has depended on multi-national conglomerates who move factories wherever labour is cheap. If Bush’s supporters really want to close down global capitalism, because it’s not American, they’ll find the country they supposedly love changes character like a lifelong spouse who develops Alzheimer’s.
And when did Republicans begrudge anyone having a Gulfstream Jet? What happened to the land of opportunity?
(I would, of course, tax Senator Heinz “till the pips squeak” and encourage him to distribute what he’d lose in tax to his employees, who, after all, earned it. But he’d be free to spend the rest how he damn well pleased.)
If these people are serious, they’re either nuts or prepared to say anything. This is going to be a very dirty campaign.
These 178 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:56am GMT Permanent link.
An Apology At Last »
Asked for his thoughts about the invasion and occupation of Iraq, a Labour Party spokesman said he “had been anxious today to send a message, both to those citizens in Iraq and at home, that we in no way condoned such activity. Although we recognised that it was being carried out by a small minority, the message had to be sent loudly and clearly that such behaviour would not be tolerated…”
Asked if there was any concern within Government that England might be thrown out of the United Nations because of military aggression, the Prime Minister’s Official Spokesman (PMOS) said that that was a matter for the Foreign Office.
Grateful thanks to Downing Street Says on Euro 2004, which is even funnier than usual.
Asked by the Daily Express if the Prime Minister would raise the flag of St George in Downing Street in response to the campaign being waged by the Daily Star, the PMOS said that the Prime Minister was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He was sure that the Daily Express, with its strong tradition and proud heritage, would recognise and accept that point above all. Put to him that the Prime Minister was Scottish in any event, the PMOS agreed there was no denying the fact that the Prime Minister had been born in Scotland.
You couldn’t make it up.
These 129 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:02am GMT Permanent link.
The Wrong End Of A Large Pig »
Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Abu Aardvark on the Dupe:
And now along comes Mister Consistency himself, Chris Hitchens, arguing that Abu Ghraib is really all of our faults. Why? Because, you see, “Many, many people must have fantasized about getting Osama Bin Laden into some version of an orange jumpsuit and then shackling him for a while to the wrong end of a large pig. … So in a distressing sense—of course you can all write to me if you like and say that you never even thought about it—we face something like a collective responsibility, if not exactly a collective guilt.”
So again, I ask, what do you mean “we”, Chris? Those were your porkine fantasies, not mine… and this is an earth-pig born talking here. That was you arguing with all your heart and soul for this war, ridiculing all who disagreed, not “us.” …
It all reminds me of a classic Simpson episode, the one where Homer and Barney are competing to be an astronaut. At the end of the competition, the NASA guy delivers this immortal line: “In a very real sense, you are both winners. But in more real sense, Barney is the winner.”
Collective responsibility? Include me out. “We’re sorry our president is an idiot. We didn’t vote for him.” As most people didn’t, remember? 2000 Presidential General Election Results. Bush: 50,456,002 47.87%; Gore: 50,999,897 48.38%.
Collective responsibility? Like it or not, Maj. Scott Ritter had it right all along.
Ritter, the United Nations’ chief weapons inspector in Iraq until 1998, took us all on — virtually alone, against incredible odds — stating, “Iraq is not a threat to the U.S.” and begging the American people to take charge and not “sit back and allow your government to go to war against Iraq … [without all] the facts on the table to back this war up.”
On a related matter, Eve Garrard wrote on Norm’s site:
It’s one thing to protest against abuses at Abu Ghraib and elsewhere; it’s a different matter, and no part of Amnesty’s remit, to encourage any particular position on the Iraq war.
I gather Ms Garrard is not a regular blogger, so she may be excused understanding of the ground rules, but if you want to say that something is “no part of Amnesty’s remit,” a link is expected. Perhaps it just sounded good. Come in from the cold war: I can think of three reasons to take a position on Bush and the war.
- What has happened in the name of the Iraq War has happened, whether I like it or not, in my name. Worse things may have happened in China, or in Iran (which Christopher Hitchens, his many dinner dates with Ahmed Chalabi notwithstanding, no doubt scowls at the double image of).
- We, that is, citizens and taxpayers of the US and UK, paid for said torture.
- I may be able to do something about it. I exclude Ms Garrard from this calculation, because I have no doubt that she can point to worse abuses in China, Indonesia, or ancient Egypt. As an academic, if the Potters Bar accident had happened on front of her, rather than treat, or even comfort, the nearest person, she’d rather flap her arms in the direction of the most foully mutilated victim, like a lame hen trying to outpace a fox.
But I’ve had no similar letters from Amnesty to be sent to the rulers of Russia, China or Yemen, whose jails also have dreadful things in their dark places, and maybe even in their light ones. This seems to me to support the case that it’s the West, and especially the US, that is Amnesty’s present target.
And there’s an excellent reason for that. George Bush in answerable to the citizens of the US and might listen to those in the UK in a way that his counterparts in “Russia, China or Yemen” are not and would not. In a very real sense, all should listen to Amnesty letter-writers, but in a more real sense the White House just might. Leave the Blue Peter foreign policy of patronising some skinny Africans and ignoring deprivation at home to children’s television where it belongs.
Those of us who believe in democracy and accountability also believe we can shift Blair and Bush, and by god we will. If something worse comes along, we’ll shift that too.
These 389 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:03pm GMT Permanent link.
Quote Of The Day »
The 9/11 commission says that there was no link between Iraq and September 11. Duh.
But someone tell Dick Cheney, please. He apparently doesn’t read the newspapers, either.
Anyone who followed September 11 knew that the money trail went back to Afghanistan via the UAE and Pakistan, and that not a dime could be traced to Iraq.
Did he say ‘Pakistan’? Hi Pakistan reports the local interest story:
A report released by the investigation also said that Pakistan broke with the Taliban only after September 11, even though it knew the militia was hiding Osama. “The Taliban’s ability to provide bin Laden a haven in the face of international pressure and UN sanctions was significantly facilitated by Pakistani support,” said the report, entitled “Overview of the Enemy,” adding: “Pakistan benefited from the Taliban-al-Qaeda relationship, as Osama’s camps trained and equipped fighters for Pakistan’s ongoing struggle with India over Kashmir”.
Didn’t we invade Iraq over 9/11? Will Bush start another war?
On Wednesday, President George W. Bush named Pakistan a major non-NATO ally of the United States, making it easier for Islamabad to acquire U.S. arms. The announcement rewards Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf for supporting the U.S.-led war on terror. Khan said he would not go into specifics about the weapons Pakistan could purchase. “But we envisage a strong cooperation.”
Reuters. Yes, but Saddam tortured and all of that.
Human Rights Watch pointed out in its letter that military agencies have frequently tortured and harassed political opponents, critical journalists, and former government officials. The past four years have also seen a rise in activity by extremist religious groups and an increase in sectarian killings in Pakistan, in part due to the Musharraf government’s policy of marginalizing mainstream opposition political groups. Opposition legislators have told Human Rights Watch they have been beaten, harassed and subjected to blackmail for opposing Musharraf’s policies.
“In Pakistan, the judiciary has been emasculated, political parties rendered powerless, and extremist and sectarian religious parties strengthened under Musharraf’s rule,” said Brad Adams, executive director of Human Rights Watch’s Asia Division. “General Musharraf should transfer power to a legitimate government now.”
Human Rights Watch. Bush’s kind of administration.
These 40 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:18pm GMT Permanent link.
You're Everywhere And Nowhere, Baby »
“Do not ask yourself, if you can possibly avoid that, ‘how can it be like that?’ because you will lead yourself down a blind alley in which no one has ever escaped.”
Richard Feynman
It’s not Teleportation. Someone on Today this morning said that to transport a human would require an array of computers which would stretch at least a third of the way to the centre of the galaxy (to calculate the quantum states of all the particles in the body). Even if it worked, it confirms my suspicion that the process would copy you and kill you. (In Star Trek, the doubts were always expressed by McCoy. Spock said it made no difference.)
Not that it’s a new idea or process. EPR, Alain Aspect, and all of that.
These 96 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Henley Gets It »
I am coming to have real concerns whether we as a people retain enough republican virtue to insist that the country remain true to itself. On one level, when Christopher Hitchens argues, in his latest column, that we’re all to blame for the torture our government has been engaging in, it sounds like a cheap attempt to deflect blame from his warhawk buddies. But on another level, I think Hitchens is sincere, and also correct. Since September 11, 2001, this country has faced not an existential threat, but an essential one: who will we have the courage to be? Lately, abetted by an administration gone mad with vainglory, we have begun to fail that test. We take it as our right to commit the abuses we condemn in others. Worse, we take it as our right to transgress ourselves, and continue to condemn those who trespass likewise. I myself have been too willing to simply observe and record. This morning I will start making those calls Applebaum enjoins me to make. Please do likewise.
Yes, the Dupe means to “deflect blame from his warhawk buddies”, but he’s also right. That’s what I was trying to say this morning. Support Tim. Support Amnesty.
It’s time these bastards went.
These 37 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:51pm GMT Permanent link.
Desperation »
Matthew also notes that Iraq was not involved in 9/11.
However on further reflection I realised that this is a news story of great importance. No lesser a figure than the vice-president of the United States is convinced that this is untrue. 20% of Americans believe it to be untrue. Melanie Phillips believes it to be untrue. And so on.
I haven’t seen Melanie Phillips actually say she doesn’t believe the Commission’s findings, but she will. Do I detect a shrill note of paranoia in this sentence?
Here is the story that you won’t read anywhere in the British press …
’Anywhere in the British press’ must include the Daily Mail, must it not? (I know, I’m reluctant to call it a newspaper too.) Not a liberal organ really. And it won’t publish this story? Why ever not?
Could it be that the World Tribune reporters choose to remain anonymous, don’t give sources and the website looks like a tinfoil neocon supermarket tabloid? It’s the Sport with xenophobia and sans tits. Might it be that the story Mel links to is as likely as “World War II Bomber Found on Moon"?
These 127 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:20pm GMT Permanent link.
Still More On The Dupe »
Regular readers, if I have any that is, will know that I went to Cardiff as a mature student. It’s not a big point, but for the first year (I worked in the evenings), I tried to keep office hours in the library — I’d have started earlier than 9, I went for a run a 6, but that’s when they opened. The unfortunate upshot of this was that I had too many hours to do too little. (There’s a mature student in Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong, and, reader, I was him.) Anyway, I didn’t just read some of the research cited in handouts; I read all of them. And I read most of the studies they cited too. And one day we had a lecture on brain damage and memory loss (sincere apologies here: I can’t find the papers I’m going to mention) which got a few facts wrong about the epileptic patient — well they contradicted the original paper, which was by the doctor who operated. From that day on I stopped reading in depth for more detail, and started reading in depth for misrepresentation.
Here the interwebthing trumps the university library. It’s very easy to follow up references.
Biographical details aside, there is a point to this. Chris doesn’t like The Essential Dishonesty of Christopher Hitchens: “If it’s false, it’s slander. If it’s true, it’s cruel.”
Chris can’t have read the recent Hitchens spiel.
Nobody has yet even suggested that the disgusting saturnalia in Abu Ghraib produced any “intelligence” worth the name or switched off any “ticking bomb.” How could it? It was trashily recreational.
See? The point is, it’s the fault of those unedicated Suthners. No administration could have stopped it, not one where the president shagged an international sex symbol in the Oval Office, not even a degenerate one, where the Chief had to make do with some 22-year-old intern, still less one with an ex-cheerleader (pause for giggles) who thinks the French have no word for ‘entrepreneur’ (long pause while I bite the carpet). It’s that pesky working class, as only a Trot from another country, who’s practically a dwarf, chronically overweight, and even without these impediments, is barred from fighting for the USA, could have put it. Why, oh why, is Hitch so keen on war, I wonder? Never mind the overwhelming evidence that it came from the White House, and the soldiers were, as soldiers do, following orders.
The prosecution would like to call Social Calendar: Christopher Hitchens — Too Drunk For DC, Disclosure. Hitchens claimed to be a Trot.
“Perhaps, sir, and this is just a supposition, you are less like your intellectual hero George Orwell than you’d like to think.”
Neal Pollack, who, almost tediously goes on:
“Impossible! Intellectual courage is my hallmark! I never back down from my positions, and neither did Orwell.”
“That’s not entirely true, sir. Orwell occasionally admitted that he’d been wrong.”
“No he didn’t! Because he wasn’t! And I’m not either! I still believe that invading and occupying Iraq, installing an ineffectual and patronizing interim administrator, bombing religious sites, and killing thousands of civilians was the right thing to do! For democracy! Orwell would have said the same thing.”
Almost tediously, but not so much so that I didn’t fall off my chair at this rereading. Did someone mention Orwell? and Trotsky? Once, when I were an uninformed wee thing, I thought Orwell might have been a Trotskyite too from the Emmanuel Goldstein thing in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
There’s a lovely passage in Orwell’s Politics:
As for Orwell’s difficulties with regard to the Second World War, these were, as we shall see, an honest attempt to adapt his socialist politics to the situation and surely compare favourably with the problems that the Hitler-Stalin pact caused for British Communists. Stradling is probably on surer ground with the criticism that Orwell did not carry out ‘basic research’ — he was too busy in the trenches, getting shot in the throat and evading the police.
(P58) And if the Dupe failed on ‘basic research’? — he was too busy sucking up to a certain Iranian Islamofascist (Hitchens’ own neologism, oh, cruel irony!) mole.
He [Orwell] went on to consider the dissolution’s likely impact on the British party. It would have little impact on its middle-class membership: the left-wing intelligensia, in particular, ‘worship Stalin because they have lost their patriotism and their religious belief without losing the need for a god or a fatherland.’
The Dupe hates the proletariat, in a way the better educated Orwell never did. From some angles, a supernova may outshine a galaxy. From all others, the reverse is the case. And supernovae fade.
These 526 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:22pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 18 June 2004
Near Boiling Point »
’Fahrenheit 9/11’ Gets Standing Ovation is the sort of story that really ruins my day.
But once “F9/11” gets to audiences beyond screenings, it won’t be dependent on celebrities for approbation. It turns out to be a really brilliant piece of work, and a film that members of all political parties should see without fail.
As much as some might try to marginalize this film as a screed against President George Bush, “F9/11” — as we saw last night — is a tribute to patriotism, to the American sense of duty — and at the same time a indictment of stupidity and avarice.
And that’s Fox News’s opinion! How can I call the serfs of Murdoch mindless automata now?
Tom Tomorrow was at that screening too, behind Kurt Vonnegut.
So. You’re going to hear a lot of nonsense about Michael Moore over the next few weeks. You’re going to read a lot of commentary about this film from people who haven’t seen it, and you’re going to read nitpicky bullshit from the usual self-appointed fact checkers. Not to mention a lot of truly ignorant bloviation about how much Michael “hates America.”
That would be Kaye Grogan:
I would not give Michael Moore’s “Fahrenheit 9/11” (the Bush bashing documentary), a moment’s notice, much less a 20 minute standing ovation. Anything coming out of Hollywood is automatically suspect in my book. …
The public-at-large is still vulnerable to Hollywood films, and spend a lot of money just to be able to converse about movies, and not look like “puritans” in society. Many leave “The Good Shepherd’s” fold to become part of the in-crowd, while many have never been in the fold in the first place.
Some of us actually like movies, of course. I’ve never been in the fold, but then, I’m not a sheep.
More worryingly, GOP PR Firm Attempts to Censor Michael Moore’s New Film.
An organization called “Move America Forward” has launched a preemptive attack against movie maker Michael Moore’s new film Fahrenheit 9/11 by requesting movie theaters across the country not to show the film, scheduled to open June 25. Their website claims they “are urging movie theaters to drop the anti-American film from their movie lineup.”
There was a time last year when I was annoyed at being called anti-American. But now that I’m confident that the majority of Americans who voted also answer to the charge, I’ve decided that I can live with it.
The warning cited a report in London’s the Guardian, which referenced a June 9 story in Screen International. The Screen story, about plans that United Arab Emirates-based distributor Front Row Entertainment has for the film, reported “organizations related to Hezbollah … have rung up from Lebanon to ask if there is anything they can do to support the film.”
Reuters, ’Fahrenheit’ Fight Nears Boiling Point This Week seems rather sceptical of this story. An unnamed group of terrorists ring up and offer to walk the streets with sandwich boards or put up fly posters. It’s less stressful than suicide bombing I suppose. Disinformation? Or dat information?
These 164 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:36pm GMT Permanent link.
What Is Truth? »
Good catch by James Casey:
I have also determined that the use of armed force against Iraq is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.
Text of a Letter from the President to the Speaker of the House of Representatives and President Pro Tempore of the Senate. Unlike James I can only read that as meaning that Iraq is one of “those nations … who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001.” It doesn’t say ‘merely had links and exchanged Ramadan cards with’.
Mr Bush said his administration never claimed Iraq helped co-ordinate the 11 September 2001 attacks on the US, only that it had had contacts with al-Qaeda.
Bush disputes 9/11-Iraq findings. True, Bush didn’t say “helped co-ordinate,” he said “planned, authorized, committed, or aided.” Is that such a big difference?
These 93 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:15pm GMT Permanent link.
Excuse My Ignorance »
Yesterday, I criticised Melanie Phillips for using a story from The World Tribune. Until then, I’d never heard of it.
Fafblog is not just the interwebthing’s only source of Fafblog, it has little gems of information too.
Mr [Sun Myung] Moon also owns a number of respected media outlets including a newspaper, a wire service, and whatever the World Tribune is and he donates millions of dollars to conservative organizations.
Moon is just the sort of staunch conservative that Mel respects. No fuzzy moral relativism for him. Because religion these days is getting too liberal, he crowned himself the Messiah … in a Senate office building. (Discussed at length on Crooked Timber.)
So when I compared the World Tribune to the Sport, I was being unkind to the Sport.
These 97 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:12pm GMT Permanent link.
The Fox Knows Many Lies »
Tim Ireland’s pretty excited about the Ofcom ruling on John Gibson (who continues to bleat). Even Norm wades in with some uncharacteristic sarcasm. The most useful critique is by blah in Jeff Jarvis’s comments.
The Ofcom summary makes interesting reading.
Fox News accepted that Andrew Gilligan had not actually said the words that John Gibson appeared to attribute to him.
Remember that it’s Fox accusing the BBC of lying here.
The Fox response:
As for the factual basis of John Gibson’s piece, Fox News said that the BBC had appointed a special executive to monitor â€?pro-Arab’ bias at the network; that tapping the phrase “BBC anti-American” into Google resulted in 47,200 hits; that the BBC “continually bashed” American policy and ridiculed the American President; and persecuted Tony Blair because he was pro-American. These facts justified the phrase “frothing-at-the-mouth anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest”.
The Ofcom decision:
Ofcom does not accept that Fox News’s claim that an appointment of a monitor to detect â€?pro-Arab’ bias is proof of an “anti-Americanism that was obsessive, irrational and dishonest” within the BBC. Similarly, we do not believe that a simple Internet search for the words “BBC” and “anti-American” is sufficient evidence to back-up such a statement. (An Internet search will only identify those sites which contain those words, it will not make any editorial judgement over how those words are used). Fox News stated that the BBC’s approach was “irrational” and “dishonest”. However, it did not provide any evidence other than to say the BBC bashed American policy; or that it ridiculed the US President without any analysis; and that it persecuted Tony Blair.
The best bit is the 47,200 Google hits for “BBC anti-American.” Way behind such killer facts as Fox News killed President Kennedy which has 63,300 hits. (Fox News did not exist in 1963.)
These 89 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:43pm GMT Permanent link.
Well, Er, Happy, What Is It? Birthday »
While I struggle to knock out a review of his Bobness, today is (not for much longer) Boris Johnson’s birthday. Enjoy, and the next time someone like John Prescott puts the case that voting against Labour might put the Tories back in, just come back with “if it’s Boris, it’s fine by me.”
I don’t know. Celebrating the Shadow Arts Minister’s birthday, what depths of bias the BBC sinks to daily.
These 71 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:49pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 19 June 2004
Bob Makes A Good Case For Surtitles »
Cardiff Set list. They got that up quick.
Live 1964 shows Dylan at the peak of his early performing powers. Less than three years since his first album was released, he offhandedly jokes with his audience, fending off enthusiastic hecklers with deft wit and snappy comebacks, only to turn around and deliver blisteringly intense versions of protest songs, folk tunes, talking blues, love ballads and a few theretofore unreleased, indefinable songs, including “Mr. Tambourine Man,” “Gates of Eden” and “It’s Alright Ma,” that would spark a musical revolution over the course of the next year.
Bob Dylan News. He certainly wasn’t like that tonight. ‘Curmudgeonly’ as Neil McCormick puts it, is a little harsh. Still when they went off at the end of the set and after the encore the band lined up across the stages like actors after a play, but a lot more stone-faced, I’m sure Bob was holding a stopwatch, though I couldn’t tell if he was timing the applause or how long they were prepared to stand.
The band were more than competent, a little too much so. One guitarist switched instruments with every song, which looked like boasting.
And Bob? Well he was basically dour all the way through. I think he smiled, but I was too far back to be certain. He didn’t go in for anything spontaneous like banter, and he stuck to the electric piano on stage right, in profile and sheltered under a comedy stetson, not perhaps the best position to engage with the audience. If that set list is right (and the rest of it seems to be), I didn’t recognise “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” at all. That was only the second song, when his voice was still intelligible, before it started sounding like someone tip-toeing on gravel.
Face it, his lungs are not good. At one point the band were were joined by a faint buzzing sound, like a fly locked in a bank vault, while Bob was holding something to his mouth. These phenomena may have been connected in some way.
It wasn’t a bad concert. My own mood was grouchy, as I phoned in advance to ask if I could take a camera in, and told ‘yes’ only to have it confiscated for the duration. (So no Alister style gig photos.) The band rocked, and they knew what they were playing, even if it hardly resembled anything laid down in the studio. “Most Likely You Go Your Way…” was the only outstandingly clear riff. There were a couple of guys in their 50s over to my right, who discussed previous concerts and predicted he would open with “Maggie’s Farm.” Still, it must have been a lucky guess to recognise “It Ain’t Me Babe” before the chorus. I only realised that he was singing “Stuck Inside Of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again” when my brain caught up with the “Post Office has been stolen.”
He may have been smiling, but he delivered “Highway 61 Revisited” as if it were totally meaningless (which it may be), and as if it weren’t funny at all.
Finally, “All Along the Watchtower” seemed to have been rewritten around the bassline to “Riders on the Storm.”
Neil McCormick is wrong about audiences. This was a collective from the moments it had its tickets torn. And it wanted to see Bob. By willpower, a sort of temporary mass delusion, he may even have been good. He’s have failed the audition, but it wouldn’t have been the same without him.
These 502 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:18am GMT Permanent link.
Those Wacky Academics »
The death of philosopher Stuart Hampshire, reported this week, reminded Karl Sabbagh, who has kindly reminded me, of an exchange said to have taken place on the high table at Wadham College, Oxford, where he succeeded Maurice Bowra as warden. “Have you read my Tudor Cornwall?” the immodest historian AL Rowse inquired of Bowra. “No,” said Bowra, “but have you met our Stuart Hampshire?” Please don’t tell me this isn’t true.
That would be this Tudor Cornwall. Wasn’t Bowra the mentor of Margaret Thatcher and her kind? Please don’t tell me he was witty as well.
These 27 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:35pm GMT Permanent link.
A Money Saving Suggestion »
No thanks to Nick, I read Jeremy Clarkson, while not writing the Bob Dylan thing earlier, and ended with a fatter than usual inferiority complex.
The only reason for buying a pick-up is because you want to look American. But there’s an easier way of doing that. Eat lots of chocolate and lose your atlas.
But if you are American?
When you have a pick-up, you are not an IT engineer from Intel.corp. You are a frontiersman who likes his beer cold, his deer raw and his music country-style. You can go to the woods at weekends with your other pick-up-driving friends and dream up plans to rid Washington of its coloureds.
Well, that explains a lot about Little Green Footballs, the Anti-Thing Dog and the rest of them.
These 47 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:50pm GMT Permanent link.
Who's In Charge? »
Wonkette doesn’t know.
According to the 9/11 commission’s statement released yesterday, it was Cheney who gave the order to shoot down civilian planes. … Though the evidence for this phone call are “incomplete,” Bush and Cheney both “told the commission that they remember the phone call; the president said it reminded him of his time as a fighter pilot.” Imagine Bush’s surprise when he didn’t get to take the next 11 months off.
Imagine my surprise when I learned that Bush shot down civilian airliners when he was a fighter pilot. Maybe that long vacation was for the good of everyone.
These 30 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:17pm GMT Permanent link.
I Like Catblogging As Much As The Next Person »
Even when it’s The Blogger With Diminishing Credibility:
VARIOUS DISCUSSIONS AROUND THE BLOGOSPHERE lead me to believe that some people are taking this whole blog thing a little too seriously at the moment.
Look, I didn’t call him that. That was TBogg who asks:
Why exactly does he take George W. Bush seriously about the war?
I leave it to the reader to infer (or not) whether the second quotation has any bearing on the first.
Nicholas is, however, very sweet.
These 44 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:17pm GMT Permanent link.
Be Careful What You Wish For »
Roger L Simon is sceptical of Vladimir’s Putin’s motives for revealing that Russia gave the US intelligence concerning a possible planned attack by Iraq.
Kevin Drum finds it odd too:
Why do Russian political circles think that Vladimir Putin wants George Bush to win reelection? And if they’re right, why does Vladimir Putin want George Bush to win reelection?
Guardian: Putin will never give Russia the reforms he promises. The Guardian also reports on the senior US intelligence official who says Bush is playing into Bin Laden’s hands. If he’s right, why does Bin Laden want George Bush to win reelection?
These 72 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:01pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 20 June 2004
A Possible Answer »
Why might Putin seek a Bush re-election? One theory is floated by the LA Times:
Some Russian political analysts said Friday that, although Putin may have given the U.S. information about Iraqi terrorist plots, he was probably disclosing it now to boost Bush’s chances for reelection.
“It’s apparent that Russians and President Putin are interested in a second term for Bush,” said Liliya Shevtsova of the Carnegie Moscow Center. “We’ve always had good relations with Republicans. We dislike Democrats, because Democrats always care about democracy in Russia.”
Some analysts say the controversy over Bush’s policies in the Middle East is distracting Europe from Putin’s increasing authoritarianism and human rights abuses in Chechnya.
David Aaronovitch considers Putin a trustworthy fellow, who meets Big Dave’s criteria for a democrat, if no one else’s.
These 34 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:09pm GMT Permanent link.
The Way To Criticize A Film »
Roger Ebert considers Michael Moore, in an article too tightly written to excerpt. However,
The wise French director Godard once said, “The way to criticize a film is to make another film.” That there is not a pro-Bush documentary available right now I am powerless to explain.
There is a shortage of pro-Bush films, but there isn’t a similar shortage of anti-Moore stuff.
Michael Wilson, a documentary filmmaker, is hard at work on a movie entitled Michael Moore Hates America. We need to support him and those like him. We need to fight our way back into the popular culture, clawing through blood-filled trench after blood-filled trench. It’s a lousy option, but it’s the only one open to us.
The inimitable (but who would want to?) Adam Yoshida. I don’t think whatever Adam believes was ever in the popular culture, apart from a few years during the 1930s in Italy.
It reminds me of Josh Marshall’s observation about the differences between the presidential candidates’ websites.
A few days ago I noted a divergence between the websites of the two presidential candidates. John Kerry’s website showed lots of pictures of John Kerry in all the expected poses of authority, empathy and so forth. Meanwhile, President Bush’s website also showed lots of pictures of John Kerry caught, as you might imagine, in poses suggesting buffoonery, arrogance, indecision and the like. What the GWB website didn’t have any of was pictures of George W. Bush.
But hang on there, batman, “The wise French director Godard …” WTF? Wise? French? No, no, it cannot be. I’m sure James Lileks uses the French to scare Bug into eating her greens.
These 109 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:04pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 21 June 2004
I Was Wrong »
We have standards here, not very many of them, and they’re not very high.
I’ve been fisked, and mightily so, by Damian “PooterGeek” Counsell. He’s right about this post.
No excuses. (Though I drafted lots.)
I was wrong. Indeed.
These 39 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 8:59am GMT Permanent link.
Sticking My Neck Out »
The site of an acrimonious three-way struggle that autumn between Blair, Brown and Mandelson was the Post Office the future of which was a litmus test of New Labour’s attitude towards the public sector. Blair was eager for the Post Office to be privatised. Mandelson, who suffered a rough ride from the trade unions and the party over the issue, finally nudged the Prime Minister away from the idea of selling off the Post Office. It would be hard to reconcile with the manifesto pledge to keep it in state hands …
Andrew Rawnsley, Servants of the People, p217
I admit that Damian fisked me good and proper. I don’t admit that because I’m civilised or gentlemanly (as Damain quite unjustly accused me of being): I’ve spent years trying to overcome those instincts. I admit it because I know that I have faults, but I don’t want hypocrisy to be among them. I want to enjoy the freedom (now a limited freedom in my case) of carrying on and accusing others of same.
So, to disappoint anyone who’s come from Damian’s site (or even Norm’s), I intend to follow Cherie Blair’s frequent advice to her husband — ie pick myself up, dust myself down, and start all over again.
I intend to get back on the horse where it threw me. I turn my attentions back to Norman Geras. “But why?” you ask, “you made such a pillock of yourself the last time.” Because there are some fights worth picking, and there are some windmills worth tilting at. I hope I’m consistent in this, and with so many posts by now, even I’m not sure, but I’ve always attacked the influential and the established. Instapundit is a law professor and influential blogger; Andrew Sullivan is an editor of whateveritis and PhD in something and influential blogger and so forth. American readers: blink now. De l’audace, de l’audace, toujours de l’audace. You can now open them again.
(Deep breath, and yes, I’m not happy that England won, here goes.) Here’s Normie!
I agree with Seumas Milne: “from a democratic point of view, it is necessary for politicians to be held to account.” You are welcome to follow the link and discover that he says more, to wit: “for the kind of calculated defiance of public opinion over a decisive area of state policy that took place last March over Iraq.” Norm approves of Pete Burnand who points out that “The democratically elected House of Commons debated and sanctioned military action.”
Yes they did. As we have a representative democracy where politicians cannot consult voters over matters of policy mid-term (no evil looks at New Labour focus groups please). I’m all for politicians having the freedom to vote how they judge fit, where the manifesto is silent. However, they should also be held to account for those judgements at the next election they face. If they are intelligent (as all our representatives should be), and articulate (ditto), and persuasive (ditto), they ought to be able to persuade their constituents of their motives. (If they just did what the whips told them, damn them to hell.)
It comes to this, if you think your MP (whom you can check up on on Theyworkforyou.com) voted for what you believe to be an irresponsible and illegal war, vote him or her out.
They were democratically elected. Not to do whatever, but to represent the opinions of their constituents. If they lose and they think they did the right thing, they can leave with their heads held high. Is that so awful?
These 497 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:02pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 22 June 2004
Uglification And Derision »
Moe Lane has a complaint about Fahrenheit 9/11. I’m with the first commentor, Iron Lungfish on this. I mean, how many thousands of porn films are there which ‘homage’ others’ titles?
If Ray Bradbury wants to get upset about intellectual theft, he can sue David Beckham for stealing The Illustrated Man look. (Which is, anyway, a much better book than ‘Fahrenheit 451.’)
Speaking of Beckham, do the BBC read the Virtual Stoa? Chris says
The Croatians were a far better looking team, even if their football was less accomplished. And it goes without saying that the Croatian fans were kinder on the eye than their English counterparts.
To prove his point, the BBC website has In pictures:Â England v Croatia. That’s just the fans, who wouldn’t be all that bad if they weren’t given to waving their bellies, and pulling up their shirts to do so. (In God’s name, why?) Isn’t there a law against ‘spectating with menaces’ which is the only way I can describe the England fans behind the Croatian goal in the second half.
David Beckham was once reasonably good looking, but is now clearly trying to look nasty with his general lack of hair and tattoos and facial expressions; Wayne Rooney is a talented striker, but very ugly indeed; David James has cultivated some exceptionally unpleasant facial hair; and Paul Scholes looks like, well, Paul Scholes (fine header, though, at the end of the first half).
I disagree about David James, but then I admired David Seaman’s luxuriant ponytail, which places me in the minority. I could just about take Beckham the pretty boy, but now he looks like he ought to be being towed round some sink estate by a child-maiming dog with a name like ‘Rapist.’ Perhaps media exposure is like being out in the sun. You don’t realise you’ve had too much until it’s far too late. (And on that subject, why would anyone with hair want to shave it off when they’re running around in the sun in a place like Portugal in June.) Something has addled the boy’s brains. Not that he ever had many to addle.
Jamie at Blood & Treasure has posts on this too: the ugly Englishman, a race of Gazzas, and insult to injury.
England players are, taken one with another, appreciably uglier than those representing abroad.
The only good thing about England going through is that it keeps Sven-Goran Erikson in a job. (And when I googled to check the spelling, I may have discovered that he’s an INTP, which is a good thing, because I may be one too.) If Erikson were a sign that the future of Britain is more continental and gracious, I’d be all for the England team. The players, however, seem to belie that, so I’m still wishing them an early exit.
While the England fans were served alcohol-free beer so save the stadium from being turned into a reconstruction of Abu Ghraib prison in May last year, I turned switched channels at half time and saw Jeremy Paxman read the riot act to Simon Hoggart of The Guardian. No really, he did. I missed the end though, I assume the journalists won.
These 422 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:10pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 23 June 2004
Courting Unpopularity »
Is what Stephen Pollard is not doing. The first two paragraphs are written in the second person, but even Stephen doesn’t imagine that he’s addressing the “habitués” when he tells his readers that:
The truth is that, far from making the world a better place, Glastonbury represents much of what is wrong with it today.
I’m not sure what is wrong with the world today in Stephen’s addled world view, but it seems to involve drugs, and he makes no mention that Glastonbury is a music festival, instead censuring it as some sort of smashed urbanite pretence of an idyll.
Bobbie of PolitiX makes the case against, as do many of his comments. At least Harry of Harry’s Place (it’s back up) agrees with Stephen. In Bobbie’s comments Stephen denies that he is a ‘libertarian’ (not really a surprise from a fan of David Blunkett), and instead declares a preference for “neo-conservative.” Which might explain his position on Glastonbury.
I suppose I should be arguing with my fellow right-wingers about that, and drugs, and many other things. But I won’t be. Arguing, in the sense of attempting to convince others, has gone out of fashion with conservatives.
The rather wiser P. J. O’Rourke (a conservative I’ve always liked despite myself; he’s funnier, more thoughtful and less spiteful than Mark Steyn).
There’s supposed to be a lot of liberal advocacy on TV. I looked for things that debased freedom, promoted license, ridiculed responsibility, and denigrated man and God—but that was all of TV. How do you tell the liberal parts from the car ads?
Stephen Pollard writes for the Times because he likes addressing his own kind. He won’t change any minds, and he’s happy that way.
The Telegraph has more adventurous journalists, like Andrew Marr:
Well, what about Rooney, eh? Yes, I know what you’re thinking — I’m the one who doesn’t like football. I’m the beta-male without the diamond chromosome.
And you are right. It was just that … well, you know … I happened to be passing the sofa at the time and a twinge of calf pain from that run led me to sit down, and as the game was on already…
Anyway, having made myself thoroughly unpopular for denouncing footie, I might as well go the whole hog. So fair play, Croatia! As a Scot, I cannot help rooting for small nations who are being hammered by a bunch of Juto-Germanic marauders (yes, that’s you lot) with their drums thrumming and their floppy red-cross hats bobbing — and who, in the face of this daunting sight, just won’t give up.
Done with style, that man. Done with style.
These 200 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:10pm GMT Permanent link.
Thursday, 24 June 2004
Hostages Freed »
Well, the good news is they’re free. (Though you wouldn’t think from any of today’s front pages that eight British soldiers were being held by a hostile country, one which is not above torturing or killing them. And even though that was very unlikely, wasn’t parading the captured trooped in violation of the Geneva Convention, or is that just when war is declared?)
BBC: Timeline: UK-Iran relations.
Scotsman: How Diplomatic Crisis Unfolded.
MSN Encarta map of Shatt_al_Arab.
Juan Cole had some thoughts, “symbolic act of retribution.”
Michael Ledeen just randomly types rubbish.
The Brits were in the way, blocking easy access for saboteurs to the Iraqi oil facilities. …
And one other thing: The Iranians figure they’ve got the Brits under control, because the Brits have lots of contracts with them.
Is it just me, or is there a contradiction there? Either we’re “in the way”, or we’re “under control”. Each seems to preclude the other. (And I haven’t snipped half the article: I’ve cut two sentences.) Never mind that (see the BBC timeline) we don’t have lots of contacts and we openly criticised Iran’s nuclear programme (more so that Washington has, it seems).
I first heard of Ledeen when he wrote a Torygraph op-ed piece last year which made no sense to me, but I failed to blog because I feared I might just be being thick. Then Stephen Pollard praised it and I thought, “Oh God, it was that bad.”
Nick has some suggestions for Stephen Pollard’s next article including “Really, newspapers will fill their comment sections with any old toss nowadays, won’t they?”
Indeed they will.
These 230 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:12am GMT Permanent link.
Fiction And Reality »
I first came across this story on Whiskey Bar:
I don’t know if you’ve been following the silly little feud between Peggy Noonan and her fellow Reagan speechwriters (hey, it’s not like we’ve got a war or an election or Jack Ryan’s sex life to worry about)…
And I’m like WTF? Jack Ryan is a fictional character in Tom Clancy, man, he doesn’t exist. I don’t care if he gets more action than James Bond on viagra injections in a Thai brothel. But, of course, it’s a common name.
Kevin Drum has a post, best summed up by Kevin, as “So that’s politics, GOP bashing, geeky Star Trek references, and hot women all in one short post!”
It is a truly horrible story because it also involves Ryan’s now-ex wife Jeri, better known to this blog as Seven of Nine. Juan Cole has all the gory details. Wonkette weighs in. Oliver Willis is fascinated too (clearly there is life beyond Beyonce).
I think Juan Cole is right. This isn’t a political story really (until Professor Cole gets a little too psychoanalytic); leave it to the tabloids.
I don’t think candidate Ryan is either hypocritical or immoral; he is clearly insensitive, but there’s a wide gap between lack of feeling and wrong-doing. As for the story that she was unfaithful to him: can you blame her?
Juan Cole is right:
The lesson for the Republicans of all this is that the wages of Puritanism are hypocrisy.
Indeed. It’s about time all politicians learned that.
It’s nearly ruined Voyager for me though.
These 207 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:36pm GMT Permanent link.
A Theory For Harry »
From Unfogged:
As far as we can tell, Unfogged’s recent downtime was caused by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi.
Nick blames Stoppers.
I think it was Saddam, exerting mystery powers from his cell, like the Emperor in ‘Return of the Jedi.’ (I know the Emperor wasn’t in a celll). Perhaps we’ll never know.
These 36 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Leaders Of The Gang »
Top Cat
The most effec-tu-al Top Cat
Who’s intellectual;
Close friends get to call him T. C.
Providing it’s with dignity
Top Cat
The indisputable leader of the gang
If Norm’s rock n roll poll is too low-brow for the bragging blogger, Alex F on Matthew Turner’s blog’s Comments draws attention to Who are Britain’s top 100 public intellectuals?
(Really for readers of Prospect Magazine, but proof of purchase is not required, so no ring-pulls or special labels.)
Alex F suggested Melanie Philips ironically, but I can’t think of four others to vote for in the same way. Michael Ignatieff, the erstwhile late-night Kilroy-Silk? I think Norm might go for Karen Armstrong. Am I mean enough to suggest Adam Phillips, Seamus Heaney, or Jeanette Winterson?
First, we are stressing current contribution—by which we mean the past five to ten years. Many names you might otherwise expect to see are absent for that reason.
The dates are a problem. If I took this seriously, Richard Dawkins would be #1 but I don’t think he’s done much new in the last 10 years. Richard Rogers’ best work was in the 80s; the Dome detracts from that and devalues his recent appeal.
Martin Rees should be in, so should Steven Rose. I think I prefer Tom Stoppard to Michael Frayn but the latter’s been the most prolific recently. Jonathan Miller has a massive brain, but is he still doing stuff? Outside the scientists, the only other candidate I take seriously is Melvyn Bragg. I meant this to be a glib, quick post. But if I think about it, I’ll be here all night. And I’d rather watch Venus.
These 223 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:17pm GMT Permanent link.
Friday, 25 June 2004
Divided Loyalties »
Talk about wrong. I missed Owen’s goal because I was texting to explain that I wouldn’t make the running club because I wanted to see the match and that the papers would be full of the scandal of Venus’s exit.
I watched the match in my local, which I normally avoid, sticking to pubs named after terrorists in ‘well-to-do’ areas. In Pontcanna and Roath, they cheer whoever’s playing England. Here, in solidly prole Grangetown, they support the English (with the exception of David Beckham of course). Very odd.
I received a text back at half-past midnight saying:
Football was very funny.
It’s a class thing.
The estimable Jim White, "But he hasn’t had a good tournament, you know, what’s his name, the one with the tattoo." Some might say the ugly one.
Abdul, who sells me the Telegraph, would fail Norman Tebbit’s “cricket test”. He still thinks Eng-er-land were robbed.
Will says what the Sun cannot.
And I seem to have a date with the girl who told me I was supporting the wrong side. In trendy Pontacanna, not round here, obviously.
These 178 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:30am GMT Permanent link.
Summer Of Drugs In Sport »
The Scot — who has strongly denied the allegations and has never failed a drugs test — is being treated as a witness, not a suspect, and he was expected to be released last night, but the timing could hardly have been worse.
When could the police detain witnesses? Not that David Millar is anything like my favourite Tour rider, he’s a miserable sod, a bit like Morrissey on wheels.
Tim Montgomery admits to drug use. It gets nasty, he claims his troubles started with White:
Sprinter Tim Montgomery, under investigation by U.S. authorities for the suspected use of performance-enhancing drugs, blamed Union City’s Kelli White for dropping his name to the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency and starting a probe into the world record-holder’s relationship to indicted BALCO founder Victor Conte.
Last month, White admitted to using banned drugs to further her career as a sprinter and was suspended from competition for two years. She also agreed to testify in court about the use of banned drugs in track and field.
This looks bad for Marion Jones whose ex-husband C.J. “Hunter, a former world champion shot putter, tested positive for steroids four times in 2000” and now her partner Tim Montgomery is fessing up.
U.S. athletes urged to ‘tone it down’ in Athens. They have to get there first. U.S. now must look in mirror for cheaters. Steroids are, of course, thoroughly bad for you.
These 108 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:25pm GMT Permanent link.
Life Begins At 40 »
Nick Barlow is the subject of 40th The normblog profile. A splendid answer:
What philosophical thesis do you think it most important to combat? > The idea that there’s some kind of invisible friend watching over us and we should live our lives according to the rules set down years ago that someone believes will please it, no matter how insane those rules may be.
And a splendid choice of favourite bloggers. Hem hem. So well done, Nick. I did it myself (and what I said about politicians will disqualify me from ever being asked).
These 43 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:39pm GMT Permanent link.
Barnet Fair »
Chris Bertram of Crooked Timber considers public intellectuals (which I covered yesterday). He’s worth reading, not least for the 30-odd comments, which include the gem:
I’m shallow enough also to be annoyed by his [philosopher A.C. Grayling’s] hairstyle.
A sound reason. Just don’t tell Chris Brooke.
These 33 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 5:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Saturday, 26 June 2004
More On Hair »
Chris Brooke writes in:
Hey, Backword Dave —
With reference to: http://backword.me.uk/2004/June/barnetfair.html
Obviously only Chris Bertram can comment authoritatively on this important subject, which is why this message is being copied to him, but I think my hair’s quite different from A. C. Grayling’s.
His hair annoys because it is clearly being carefully cultivated to achieve the particular mane-look that he sports. Whereas my hair is anything but carefully cultivated, and just grows all over the place. Important difference. At least, I think so. But then I would say that, wouldn’t I?
(It may be the case that the other Chris is just as annoyed about my hair, too, but has always been too polite to say so.)
Chris
P.S. My hair has been extremely useful for identifying me to fellow bloggers: I first met Josh Cherniss when he guessed who I was in the Turf pub in Oxford on the strength of my hair. So don’t mock: it’s functional, as well as un-Grayling-like.
Chris Bertram replies:
Indeed. Grayling’s hair is carefully sculpted and no doubt costs a great deal. Chris Brooke’s hair is, well, whatever the opposite of “sculpted” is!
C Brooke again:
Perhaps mine is unkempt, and ACG’s is kempt?
Chris Bertram has the final word.
Hmm, I think kempt suggests mere tidiness, whereas ACG’s hair involves engineering. If he lived in the 18th century, he would patronise the most expensive of wig-makers.
I’ve tried to find whether Jean Jacques Rousseau (the subject of Chris Bertram’s book) patronised wig makers, expensive or otherwise. The only portrait I’m really familiar with is the Allan Ramsay one in the National Gallery of Scotland where he’s wearing a hat, but others show him clearly bewigged. (See for example the cover of The Confessions.)
Rousseau appears not to have approved of wigs on others however:
His head was of the common size, to which appertained a well-formed face, a noble look, and tolerably fine eyes; in short, it appeared a borrowed head, stuck on a miserable stump. He might very well have dispensed with dress, for his large wig alone covered him from head to foot.
Also from the Confessions, Book IV.
Now, is there an antonym for “sculpted"?
These 97 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:24pm GMT Permanent link.
Polling Day »
Norm complains that his rock n roll poll “has got off to a worryingly sluggish start.”
So here is my provisional entry.
- Captain Beefheart
- Led Zeppelin
- The Undertones
- The Clash
- The Pixies
- The Smiths
- Radiohead
- The Doors
- Bob Dylan
- Tom Waits
As he said, “You know you’ll do it in the end.”
These 54 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:39pm GMT Permanent link.
Civility And Decency »
Harry of the eponymous place catches the Veep out.
The Center for American Progress has turned up the following declaration by Mr. Cheney from the 2000 Presidential campaign: “Governor Bush and I are also absolutely determined that [we] will restore a tone of civility and decency to the debate in Washington.”
Dick set the tone in a discussion with Sen. Patrick J. Leahy (Vt.) when he said, “Fuck yourself.”
Cheney, who is president of the Senate, then ripped into Leahy for the Democratic senator’s criticism this week of alleged war profiteering in Iraq by Halliburton, the oil services company that Cheney once ran.
He could read Thirty-eight dishonest tricks. “Fuck yourself” is of limited utility in refuting allegations, even those of auto-eroticism. Juan Cole has a particularly clear take:
Now, it seems to me that the Senate floor is public space, paid for by the public. And in this regard, there is no difference between it and the public airwaves, which the public also owns.
Cheney refutes that one with a simple sentence, “Fuck yourself.”
Billmon has a previously unheard Cheney speech.
Atrios has the civil and decent response of George Bush to an interview he didn’t like (discussed on Crooked Timber). Atrios has the whole story; it’s not worth the hassle of registering to read the original.
And it emerged last night that presidential staff suggested to Ms Coleman as she went into the interview that she ask him a question on the outfit that Taoiseach Bertie Ahern wore to the G8 summit.
I’ll never know why anyone doesn’t love Jeremy Paxman and John Humphreys. A few weeks of the Blair, Bush, and Campbell vision of an enervate media might change their minds.
These 136 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:07pm GMT Permanent link.
Not A Tautology At All »
And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,
From this day to the ending of the world,
But we in it shall be remember’d;
We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;
For he to-day that sheds his blood with me
Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,
This day shall gentle his condition:
And gentlemen in England now a-bed
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks
That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day.
It’s nearly July. Imagine that you’re called into your boss’s office and charged with having, so far this year, phoned in sick every Monday, taken three years’ worth of holiday, and gone home early when you did come in. An all purpose reply:
“My job is to do my job.”
Well that’s perfectly clear. If that fails to convince, point out that no less a person than George W Bush said it (on C4 News just now, but confirmed by the press release — second paragraph of Bush’s second last contribution).
Eric Idle in The FCC Song (3.1 MB mp3 format) charged Mr Cheney with “Your pacemaker must be a fake/You haven’t got a heart.” Billmon agrees:
… the heart doesn’t seem to have ever been a particularly important organ in Cheney’s psychology. (A man who produces an offspring nine months and one day after learning that only fathers will qualify for a student draft deferment can’t exactly be called someone who is ruled by his emotions.)
I’m not suggesting that I want a latter-day Henry V in charge. Someone who can rally the troops with magnificent speeches and is prepared to fight himself. No, I am suggesting that. Our troops deserve no less.
They deserve someone with cojones, someone like Sen. Joseph Biden:
Biden: I was in the Oval Office the other day, and the president asked me what I would do about resignations. I said, “Look, Mr. President, would I keep Rumsfeld? Absolutely not.” And I turned to Vice President Cheney, who was there, and I said, “Mr. Vice President, I wouldn’t keep you if it weren’t constitutionally required.” I turned back to the president and said, “Mr. President, Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld are bright guys, really patriotic, but they’ve been dead wrong on every major piece of advice they’ve given you. That’s why I’d get rid of them, Mr. President — not just Abu Ghraib.” They said nothing. Just sat like big old bullfrogs on a log and looked at me.
From a Rolling Stone round table about Iraq. (Found through Kevin Drum.) And those allegations that Cheney resented?
[Gen. Anthony] Zinni: Halliburton is spending staggering sums of money building fortified workplaces. It’s killing the American taxpayer, who’s footing the bill. There are two bodyguards for every worker. For $100,000 a year, you’ve got a truck driver from West Virginia. If I’m an Iraqi, I say, “For that cost, you could hire ten of us as drivers. And if I’m getting a paycheck, I’ll have a vested interest in that truck getting through.” Even the way we do contracting makes no sense.
War going wrong? It’s making Cheney rich, and isn’t that the point?
These 187 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 7:14pm GMT Permanent link.
Sunday, 27 June 2004
No Such Thing As Bad Publicity »
Jeff Jarvis (and what’s with the graffio ‘4’: did someone tell him there was a sci-fi book called Fahrenheit 4-something-something?)
The Dupe. (Chris, please call your memoirs The Spy Who Loved Me: My Life and Times with Ahmad Chalabi.)
After weeks of debate and media coverage, “Fahrenheit 9/11” opened today far better than expected.
An estimate of just how well it could do is difficult to make, but as of 3 p.m. on the West Coast, it looks as if Michael Moore’s doc could sell between $6 million and $8 million worth of tickets on its first day. …
That record is, for the moment, is $21.6 million cume for Moore’s 2002 doc, “Bowling for Columbine.” But, that pic played for 25 weeks before it crossed $20 million.
Hat tip: Oliver Willis.
These 46 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 10:39am GMT Permanent link.
Upating The Blogroll »
Chun has given up and disappeared, Neal Pollack has near given up, and Tim has admitted defeat to Blair. All very miserable.
So, in their stead come Mick Hartley on the strength of his post on aquatic apes, A General Theory of Rubbish for being so argumentative, Inveresk Street Ingrate for such a wonderful title and being Scottish, and The Religious Policeman for keeping up catblogging.
These 66 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 4:55pm GMT Permanent link.
Monday, 28 June 2004
Persuasion »
First things first: kudos to the Bush campaign for making videos available in all formats.
Right, time to get back in character. Gene has a good post on the current GOP ad. He doesn’t like it. Nor do I. Not just as a supporter of the other side: it’s terrible, shameful politics. Unlike British politicians (Tony Blair came to Number 10 never having run anything more challenging than a bath) US candidates are, very rarely, experienced Senators like John Kerry, or more commonly, State Governors. Promises are one thing, but promises get broken: decent politics demands that candidates show a balance sheet of performance in office and they admit their mistakes and weigh them against successes.
What does the Bush broadcast do? Mostly show the opposition — and Adolf Hitler. Gene thinks:
The real point is slyly to compare the angry rhetoric of Democrats before cheering crowds to the rantings of Hitler. Or am I seeing something that isn’t there?
But as the comments note, this interpretation has been ‘debunked’: Josh Chafetz
Indeed, do see it for yourself, because here’s what the ad is: It’s a series of clips of Al Gore, Howard Dean, Richard Gephardt, and John Kerry making totally over-the-top denunciations of Bush. Interspersed are clips from MoveOn.Org ads comparing Bush to Hitler. The ad ends with, “This is not a time for pessimism and rage. It’s a time for optimism, steadly leadership, and progress. President Bush.”
In other words, Bush is criticizing his opponents for, among other things, comparing him to Hitler. In response, the Kerry Campaign sends out this incredibly dishonest email suggesting that Bush has compared his opponents to Hitler and asking for money.
Scare quotes because you really need to know where the Hitler images came from. (As an avid blog-reader, I guessed, but I doubt that running your opponents’ ad in the middle of yours without commentary plays well with your average bored-by-politics voter.) Friday’s Daily Mail’s front page showed three photos of an red-faced Sven-Goran Erikson. You could run those and ‘demonstrate’ that Sven is pessimistic and outraged, but who would that fool?
That said, it’s really unfair of the Kerry Campaign to suggest that Bush is comparing Kerry supporters to Hitler, when in fact all he’s doing is pointing out that Kerry supporters have compared him to Hitler.
That may be true if you’re in the know, but surely the point of campaigns is to reach the unconverted? There’s still hope in the form of the traditional televised debate.
Both campaigns are disgraceful for even bringing Hitler into the election. If any party tries similar tactics here, I will not vore for them whatever (even if, gulp, it means sacrificing a tactical Labour-out vote).
These 283 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:38am GMT Permanent link.
It's The Economy, Stupid »
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.”
If I were to suggest a negative ad campaign for John Kerry (but I would recommend it only as part of larger platform which emphasised the postive), it would go something like this.
I’d run three similarly themed adverts, each featuring a real person: perhaps one trailer-resident, one clearly middle-class, one more obviously blue-collar; two should be female, one black. All tell variants on the same story (but it’s important that these are their stories and true) — all lost jobs or found themselves downgraded; their income went down; all took refuge in the credit cards offered constantly, all ran up huge debts on several cards, taking out new ones when they reached limits on others. All cut up some dead cards on screen. Cut to charts showing lower taxes and higher spending under Bush. End advert.
These 137 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:18pm GMT Permanent link.
Don't Try This At Home »
The Adam Yoshida Drinking Game. May also be played, perhaps with a spliff, with Melanie Phillips. (Warning: roll one (1) “Camberwell Carrot” before starting.)
These 24 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 1:47pm GMT Permanent link.
Apology Of The Day »
I’m not the only person who can admit he’s wrong. Abu Aardvark can too. In his case, about most likely outcome in the event of an American invasion of Iraq.
It takes guts to say, “So I was totally wrong about that. Sorry.”
These 43 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 2:22pm GMT Permanent link.
Prediction Of The Day »
My guess is that 50 years from now Gulf War I and Gulf War II will be considered merely the opening salvos in a single, longrunning conflict: the first of the large, modern wars fought primarily to protect the oil supplies of the West.
This sounds right to me.
These 7 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:56pm GMT Permanent link.
Tuesday, 29 June 2004
You've All Got To Think For Yourselves! »
In a break from Michael Moore film-blogging, Roger Ebert reviews the re-release of The Life of Brian. (It’s not clear whether this is because the film is now 25 years old, or whether it’s a reaction to “The Passion of the Christ.")
The difficulty with a literal interpretation of the Bible is that it is a translation of a translation of a translation of documents that were chosen by the early church from among a much larger cache of potential manuscripts.
And this from a former altar boy. Someone should tell Peter “Rocky” Cuthbertson.
These 55 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 11:25am GMT Permanent link.
Good Names And Trash »
BBC: Beckham exhibition photo defaced:
The words “you loosers” were scrawled in red pen across the five-foot high picture of the England captain at the Royal Academy of Arts’ Fifa 100 show. …
The words “Beckham and Meier, you loosers” were also scribbled on a wall opposite a picture of Pele. …
The misspelling of ‘losers’ may have been a reference to Rebecca Loos, whose claims of an affair with Beckham made headlines earlier this year.
Isn’t that reading a little too much into graffiti? (It seems that “Urs Meier … has not been selected for another match at the tournament.") “Show curator David Grob” managed to be surprised at the sort of people who go to exhibitions of footballers’ portraits.
“You do not expect people to act like football hooligans — it is very frustrating.”
I can’t see the appeal of the picture myself — or of its ilk. Better photographs (if not as flattering) appear in the sports pull-outs every day now. I’d rather see Becks on the run or in the air in his club colours than standing in a hotel corridor in a university T-shirt.
On the not-unrelated matter of good names and trash, Richard Perle finally releases his sue-Hersh dossier.
Perle originally threatened to sue Hersh for libel (March 2003) but downsized his outrage to a demand for a correction (March 2004) as the statute of limitations ran out and his attorneys advised against a suit. In declining to sue, Perle told the New York Sun that the documents would “make it absolutely clear that [Hersh’s] reporting is false. … With the benefit of that information I would expect The New Yorker to make a correction.”
So, while not being short of brass, he waits until it’s too late to sue, as his lawyers tell him not to, yet sticks to the line that he has been libelled.
Perle has never precisely described how the Hersh article libeled him. At the time of its publication, the New York Sun asked what part of the story was incorrect, and Perle responded, “It’s all lies, from beginning to end.” If Hersh were the litigious sort, he could probably file a slander suit against Perle for making that statement — and he wouldn’t have to go to England to get a court to take it.
That’s a good basis for a suit. Of course, if it wasn’t “all lies, from beginning to end” he’d look a bit silly. You get the impression that Slate don’t care for libel-criers who fail to follow through.
After writing extensively on Perle’s dual roles as DPB chair and businessman, Hersh asks Perle if there are any conflicts of interest between his two roles or if they constituted an appearance of a conflict. Hersh never makes the charge. Since when is raising a relevant question of a government employee an action for libel?
Perle is a neo-con. Secrecy is his middle name. (See also Cheney, Dick.)
These 202 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 6:53pm GMT Permanent link.
The Falcon Cannot Hear The Falconer »
Nick suggests it may be time for Tom Watson watch. I couldn’t agree more.
Among other things Tom Watson is “joint-editor of Liberal Demolition, a magazine for activists campaigning against the Liberal Democrats.” Conventional wisdom believes that elections are for the incumbent party to lose, rather than the opposition to win. Surely the best strategy once in power is to sit tight, make voter-pleasing decisions, and kiss babies and so forth? Tom prefers negative campaigning and running down the other side, in effect saying, “You may think we’re crap, but look at them.” The policy of a proud man, clearly.
Molesworth divided bullies into two kinds: “fat bullies who can’t run for toffee” and “fat bullies who can.” Given Tom’s resonant squeals, I suspect he is of the former genus:
I know the Lib Dems will say anything and do anything in an election, but to hog the comments section of a weblog to undermine a campaign is a fresh low.
Check those comments out! Most posters deny that they are Lib-Dems, and I, for one, believe them. Hogging the comments section of a blog! Why isn’t that in the Geneva conventions? (Oh Tom, you backed Don Rumsfeld and gave the finger to the UN, so even if it were, you’d be out of luck old son.)
Still, I suppose I should get used to Lib Dem dirty tricks for the next few weeks. They should stick to the issues — like why they don’t want crack heads and junkies to go to jail.
This is such a deliciously ambiguous statement I can’t believe Tom drafted it himself without advice from Sauron Alistair Campbell. When the Dark Lord himself retired from Downing Street, it seems that Tom’s pager number was given to Paul Dacre.
I’m a former Labour member (until the Borg took over), and I “don’t want crack heads and junkies to go to jail.” I don’t buy the “prison works” thing, Labour used to be against all that — Bedlam, the workhouse, and their latter-day manifestations.
As it happens, I’ve a friend who’s taken a second job as a prison doctor. She says that she has to attend admissions and “80-90%” of those aren’t fit — they’re on something (including alcohol) and have to detox. So it sounds to me like enough “crack heads and junkies” “go to jail” as it is. And the jails are full.
My friend is used to being let down by MPs. Her day job is in a General Practice in St Mellons, where she specialises in family planning. The politically informed reader will remember John Redwood, the much-loved Tory Welsh secretary (at least his replacement, William Hague, attempted to learn the language, but then his first tongue wasn’t Vulcan).
John Redwood, rightwing champion of family values, is refusing to discuss his own living arrangements now he has split with his wife (the mother of his two children) and is stepping out with Nikki Page, his Westminster assistant and a former model. Asked if he now regretted that notorious 1994 blast at single mothers on Cardiff’s St Mellons estate, advocating two-parent families, the former Welsh secretary refused to comment but, if looks could kill, Redwood would be helping police with their inquiries.
What’s that old Hegel cliché about lessons from history?
These 398 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 9:05pm GMT Permanent link.
Wednesday, 30 June 2004
Surprise Of The Day »
Michael Bérubé thinks “there’s no question, England was robbed in that game against Portugal”. But then he also observes that “soccer players are far more handsome than hockey players — in some cases, astonishingly so.” Not saying much, but still. And, on that ‘s’ word:
Two: I have long thought that soccer — known in some parts of the world, namely, everywhere but here, as “football” — is almost the perfect sport.
Perhaps he’d read Will.
These 49 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 12:23pm GMT Permanent link.
You're My Favourite Waste Of Time »
Jim Henley has a rather splendid piece in the American Spectator on comics (his favourite subject) and suicide bombers.
The historian Gerhard Weinberg pointed out that Japan’s kamikaze program was a rational response to the country’s inability to train qualified pilots. By late in the war, the average new bomber pilot died on his first mission anyway. The Divine Wind was simply a way to salvage something from that death.
I did not know that. You learn something every day.
No thanks to Damian, I’m stuck on level 17 (of 25) of this bloody game. I look at it for a couple of minutes every hour or so now, in the hope of some inspiration. And it isn’t happening.
These 68 words were hurriedly scribbled by Dave @ 3:20pm GMT Permanent link.