Post Reveries

In Every Way, Shape and Form

2011-03-15T20:23:00.004Z

This used to be my blog. Well, I suppose it still is. It's over three years since I said anything on it, though. But it's still mine, and it's here I come now, not exactly to vent but simply to get my thoughts down in such a manner as I might not be the only person to read them.

My life has changed quite a bit since I quoted Sports Night in that last post. The cliché of the blogger is the unemployed malcontent, and that was more or less me. Now I'm an employed malcontent, although the context of my dissatisfaction has changed somewhat.

I have made an awful lot of mistakes in my life (see: unemployed malcontent), but there was a time recently when it seemed that they'd all be worth it, because if I had managed to avoid making just one of them, any one of them, I would not have been working where I was working on the morning of October 13th, 2009, when without any warning at all into my life breezed quite the most amazing girl I'd ever met: smart, beautiful, powerfully sexy, funny, warm, compassionate, kind-hearted, fiercely loyal, possessed of an intoxicating independence of spirit, an intoxicating smile, intoxicating jet-black hair, and an intoxicating pair of norks. We could barely seem to spend enough time together, and in due course the moment arrived, with that air of powerful inevitability that all such moments have, when we got drunk, kissed and told each other how much we liked each other.

Then: nothing. And to be fair her reasons for that were unimpeachable, but before she finally told me what they were there was an evening when she had sat at home, under no pressure, and calmly sent me a text where she told me that she thought I was perfect for her in every way, shape and form. So you can imagine my surprise when it turned out that the reasons she gave for not wanting to get together with a guy she had described in those terms apparently didn't apply to someone else, with whom she remains.

I like to think I'm reasonably fair minded, but I just don't understand this at all. And apparently my lack of understanding, and desire for same, ideally through having a reasonable, mature, meaningful and adult discussion with her about the choices she made which have impacted on me so hugely, is of no concern to her, or is at least significantly less important than her terror of rousing her boyfriend's stupid, juvenile jealousy, which in turn implies a mistrust of her that she should find roundly offensive, given that even the most emotionally illiterate Neanderthal could probably surmise after about five minutes with her that she is, as I said, fiercely loyal.

So now we just work together and pretend nothing ever existed between us. That is the hardest thing I've ever had to do. The best bit is, he works there too.

It's a warning, not an instruction manual

2008-01-16T18:07:00.002Z

There's a moment in Sports Night where Isaac Jaffe, the managing editor, figures out that an unfavourable quote about the show attributed to a source within the parent company came from the person who has been pretending to help him all day. He says, "JJ, if I find out that quote came from you I'll own your ass. I mean I'll absolutely own it."

This is a fairly common expression these days. In my opinion it came from computer games, where victory in a given arena or map or level enabled the victor to claim he "owned" the arena, or map, or level. Mutating as slang is prone to do, it soon came to be applied not to the venue but to the vanquished opponent, who "gets owned".

It is hardly surprising that Gordon Brown is apparently unfamiliar with this particular sense of "own". He is shaky enough on the original sense of ownership, poisoned by Proudhon as he is. Yet he has evidently come across the phrase "I'll own your ass" recently, because this week he announced that henceforth he did, in fact, own all our asses.

That is to say, his ownership of our asses would be presumed, unless we actively took steps to reclaim them for ourselves. As an idea this is so self-evidently totalitarian in conception that I'm staggered that even so unreconstructed an old statist as Gordon Brown could bring himself to announce it, let alone have the breathtaking neck to try to dress it up as a reclaimed liberty. (Mind you, that strategy has been handsomely successful in the past.) But, of course, he wouldn't be alone: he'd have the usual cheerleaders.

But I guess you can shop there.

2007-12-17T16:58:00.000Z

I don't go home for Christmas. That is to say, I don't return to the town of my birth to spend it with my family, since only my father remains there. The rest of us all live in London, so he comes to us.

I'm glad about this. My schoolfriends (from that hellish provincial market-town grammar school) have nearly all moved to London too, over the years, and they never seem to relish the trek back to the shires for Christmas. A small village on the outskirts of a small town is extremely dull whether or not you've come to visit your family. Even the relatively populous conurbation to which I would return holds little in the way of interest for me now, beyond housing my father.

In fact I was there last weekend. Two-and-a-half hours on a weekend train through grim afternoon giving way to oppressive dusk puts me on the familiar platform, and I surrender immediately to autopilot, barely thinking about how to get out of the station on which I've not set foot for five years. In the tunnel under the tracks I remember how this was the final part of a journey I made every Friday night when my grandmother, blessed beloved, lay dying. Out of habit, or something deeper - muscle memory perhaps - I light a cigarette as I make the double doors, and opposite, drearily unchanged, is the station hotel, and I catch my first blast of authentic accent: "Cost gezza nand, youth?"

My sister meets me. She went ahead the day before, and has already run out of patience with the city. She describes coming back here as like putting her life on hold. It's impossible, I have found, to retain long-term antipathy for this city, but when you pull into it on a miserable December evening, not even the fact that it was your childhood and adolescent stamping ground can disguise its unremitting bleakness and its classic industrial town decline. Not even being able to do the accent like the native I am can make me feel at home here any more. So disconnected from real life do I feel that when D rings, her beautiful cut-glass vowels sound like another language, and her easy metropolitanism seems like another country. From then on I'm just riding it out, counting the hours to get back on the train.

Of course, had I known the disgusting fucking mess Virgin had made of that train, with their relentless overbooking, I would have looked forward to it a little less. Still.

Fixed terms and fixed wisdom

2007-10-05T14:07:00.000Z

Chancing to watch Question Time last night (nowadays rarer than a post on this blog), I became enraged during a discussion on elections and term limits. Much gangway was given to the usual blasts of hoofy self-righteousness about "the gift of the Prime Minister" and related plaints concerning his use of the timing of an election to his advatange. Sir Menzies Campbell, in his usual role as Question Time's human amphetamine, proffered a lengthy speech in favour of fixed terms which went drearily unchallenged. A member of the audience, evidently hoping to galvanise the other panellists to the same level of agitation as Sir Menzzzzzies (I know that makes no sense as a spoken pun), asked if there were arguments against fixed term elections. Here, I thought, was George Osborne's chance to prove he knew something. Depressingly, Osborne offered only a mathematical argument: that occasionally elections might be too close and who wants weak governments to hang around for four years when you can have another poll? This was rightly swatted away by Dimbles, who pointed out that coalitions must be built rather than telling the electorate that they got it wrong and they'll just have to have another go.

No-one mentioned the following: that fixed terms make politics much more expensive and much less productive. When the Prime Minister calls an election, as far as I know it must happen within six weeks. That is, within six weeks of an election being called, a new government is being formed. This keeps campaigns short and cheap. If, on the other hand, on the day of an election everyone knows exactly when the next one will be, four years thence, then campaigns will get longer and longer, and more and more expensive. The more expensive campaigns get (a cost that is met by the parties themselves, of course), the more the parties will be in the debt of the rich people who fund them: the more they will be beholden to them. Less time to concentrate on the job they were elected to do, and more corruption in the doing: this is the result of fixed term elections.

The August Placeholder

2007-08-29T13:15:00.000Z

Well, a little more than that.

This stretches credibility to the limit. Can there really be no-one even tangentially connected to the "War" on Drugs who is prepared to stand up and call this theft? Is the fear of being painted "soft" on crime now so intense that highway robbery is now tolerated as necessary in this tableau of epic futility?

Assuming he gets the money back in a year, and even assuming it doesn't cost him a cent to achieve that, does anyone seriously imagine that the DEA will pay him a year's worth on interest at commercial rates on $24,000? 5% is $1,200. Even if it doesn't cost him anything else, his full and pleasant cooperation with the DEA on that weigh bridge will cost him $1,200 and a year spent proving he isn't a criminal. Way to get the average citizen on your side, DEA, you fuckin' dolts.

Playing catch-up

2007-07-13T10:23:00.000Z

Another slack summer. I have once again become embroiled in energy-sapping debates with utilitarian friends and have expended considerable keyboard wear on attempts to elucidate my objections to the ban on smoking in "public" places that has recently come into force here: a curiously depressing crusade, particularly when, having stated quite clearly that my objections were meta-legal in nature and not rooted in my being a smoker (for comparison I noted my contempt for the ban on hunting with hounds, which I nurse, and of which I actively support the flouting, despite having never so much as sat on a horse and moreover finding hunting rather unpleasant), the first reply I received asserted that of course I would object: I was a smoker, and if I weren't a smoker I couldn't object. Even when we were able to get past that little reading comprehension stumbling block, the attitudes shown by my friends towards legitimate legal procedure, their faith in democracy as a positive power and consequently their apparently unquestioning acceptance of democracy as sovereign, when taken together, offered a rather bleak picture.

This is also my first post under our new Dear Leader, whose accession highlights once again the procedural flaws in our constitution (such as it is). Constitutionally it is unexceptionable, as many Brown cheerleaders have been at pains to emphasise. We do not elect a PM as such (otherwise he would a President): we elect individual representatives of particular parties and that party with the most elected representatives is invited by the monarch to form a government, and traditionally (though not necessarily), the leader of that party becomes Prime Minister. If the leader of the majority party were to change, so would the Prime Minister, and it cannot be denied either that Brown has precedent on his side under both Labour and Conservative governments.

But technicality is not a strong enough argument. It must be accepted that most people vote for a Prime Minister by proxy. The party leaders are the focus of the national election campaigns; it is they who appear in the party political broadcasts, they who are the subject of vilification by the opposing parties in national advertising campaigns, and they who appear in the print media offering their vision of (of course) a better Britain. When people go to the polls they go with this in mind - certainly closer to the fronts of their minds than are the invariably soporific and anonymous campaigns of their constituency candidates. If they like a party leader, they vote for that party: it would be most illuminating, I suspect, to discover what proportion of those who voted at the last election are actually able to name their MP off the tops of their heads.

This goes double for the Blair government: not only was that administration coincidental with an unprecedented explosion of media access and coverage, which it encouraged and exploited to the full and which served to highlight yet more the role of the Prime Minister and diminish yet further the role of the constituency representative, but also the reforms enacted by Blair and the attitudes entrenched by his style of government (often accused of being presidential, with his contempt for Parliament and his close circle of advisers) have concentrated the focus yet more closely on the Prime Minister alone. In the light of this circumstance, to defend Brown's accession on the basis of its strict constitutional propriety is to dismiss perfectly legitimate concerns about the extent to which he has, in what you might call "real terms", the authority and consent of the people to govern. Wisely, he appears to recognise this, and while many of his acts thus far as PM have most decidedly warranted Simon Heffer's vision of the "Brown terror", he has also taken welcome steps to head off accusations of unmandated power by returning some long-lost authority to Parliament. But he will also know that nothing will solidify his moral authority like winning an election as leader of the Labour party, and the longer he leaves it the weaker he will appear to believe he is. Here, too, though, precedent is on his side, as John Major had practically to be dragged, heels leaving wavy lines on the floor as it were, to Buckingham Palace to seek permission to go to the country, at the very last minute, in 1992, so unconvinced was he of the prospects of a win following his similar accession to PM. Yet win he did, although whether Brown can count on the same degree of indiscipline and incompetence from David Cameron's Tories as Major could from Neil Kinnock's Labour Party is questionable.

And so to Boris. Boris for Mayor. That's the rumour. I would welcome Boris for Mayor (I don't think it would surprise my extensive and devoted readership that I would welcome one of Ken Livingstone's newts as Mayor over Livingstone himself, but I would particularly welcome Boris): he is, as I read recently, one of that rare breed of politician who is not merely tolerated but actively liked. Even people who are essentially lefties (like some of those friends mentioned at the top of this post) like Boris. Although I am not a Conservative, I would far rather see a Conservative Mayor (and government, for that matter) than a Labour Mayor (or government), and Boris I would like to see most of all. The only worry I would have about a Johnson mayoralty is the Olympic Games. It is doubtful whether anyone could rescue the Games from the trough of spiralling expense and the widespread apathy or pessimism into which they have fallen. Livingstone's grubby fingermarks are all over this imminent embarrassing failure, and there's a part of me which would rather like him still to be in office when they happen, just so we can all be quite clear whose fault it is. If Boris were elected in 2008 he would be saddled with the responsibility for someone else's stellar incompetence.

Denying the bleeding obvious

2007-06-04T12:01:00.001Z

The switch to fortnightly refuse collections has left many people in need of a service that, naturally, the market has begun to provide.

This is the spontaneous order in action. We can't necessarily predict exactly what people will want or need (although in this case it was a fairly easy call that fortnightly rubbish collections weren't going to cut it), but by examining post hoc the behaviour of the market, we can quite well determine to order of events and their motivations. In this instance, we can conclude that people feel that fortnightly rubbish collections are thoroughly inadequate so are prepared to pay privately for extra collections, and that they exist in sufficient number that others are prepared to undertake to provide such a service in the belief that they can meet the costs they will incur and perhaps even make a small profit. The comparative absence of the profit motive serves only to highlight the inadequacy of the fortnightly collection: this service is being offered on environmental and public health grounds.

Naturally, therefore, the head of waste and something called "street scene" in the district has raised his head from his busy work to announce to the world his ignorance of these simple economic concepts: "People living in the district pay council tax to have their waste and recycling dealt with; there really is no need to be paying any extra."

Clearly there is, you dolt. If there weren't, you would be able to point to the fact that no-one is bothering to pay any extra to make up for the shortfall in service. But since people are paying extra to make up for the shortfall in service, your statement is remarkably stupid.

The banners, they'd all flown in the last war

2007-05-21T09:52:00.000Z

Joss Whedon has been making a bit of noise recently about what he has taken to calling "torture porn". Initially this took the form of a letter to the MPAA requesting that they remove the rating from the film Captivity, the central conceit of which is the abduction and torture of a young woman. At this point, it seems likely that Whedon had not seen Captivity but was, as he makes clear in the letter, objecting simply to the advertising campaign which was occupying large and prominent hoardings all over Los Angeles.

I noticed this at the time, but it didn't interest me a great deal. I'm a great admirer of Whedon's work as a writer, director and creative force behind some of the greatest American TV of the last decade (a parameter into which some of Buffy no longer fits, but heigh-ho. Memento mori) but I don't belong to that peculiar genus of fanboy who will take up arms on an issue merely because someone I admire raises it: in fact I thought it was slightly bogus. In the letter Whedon attempts to head off accusations of censorship by citing his support of the First Amendment (referencing his history as a maker of horror stories) and his distrust of those who recommend banning something "for the good of the people". Then he tramples over the First Amendment and recommends a de facto ban for the good of the people. Removing the MPAA rating from Captivity dramatically reduces the number of US cinemas that are prepared to show the film. Since all the major studios are signatories to an agreement to submit all their films to the MPAA (the process is technically voluntary), the cinema chains they own will not show unrated (or even NC-17) films. Refusing a film a rating is therefore a functional means of restricting it to independent and arthouse cinemas, thereby ensuring that its audience will be minimal. Whedon calls for this action explicitly to protect people: because "this ad [and by implication the film] is part of a cycle of violence and misogyny that takes something away from the people that have to see it."

Yesterday he posted a rather longer tract to the Whedonesque website, discussing initially the "honour killing" of a 17 year old Iraqi girl, Du'a Khalil, and the facts that it was filmed with mobile phone cameras and that the footage was available on CNN, and later drawing this into his theme of torture porn and his continuing quest to have Captivity in some manner banned or censored. This was rather more interesting to me, because of what I consider to be the entirely specious moral equivalence he draws between the practice of killing your daughter or sister or cousin for perceived infractions of a barbaric, mediæval, repressive and misogynist creed and filming it as sport; and the practice of making fictional, nonreal films with some, though by no means all, of the same themes.

Let's, as Michael Howard once began, be clear. I have no disagreement with Whedon when he says that the phrase "honour killing" is a breathtaking oxymoron. There is no honour, and certainly no manliness, in the violent subjugation of women, whatever the religious or anthropological justification. (I am reminded here of a scene in the TV series Nip/Tuck in which a Somali woman has a procedure to rebuild her clitoris following her religiously-motivated mutilation as a girl in "a place where men are such pussies, they have to neuter their women to get a hard-on", as Dr. Troy says.) I offer no demurral, either, of his revulsion concerning the filming, for posterity, pour encourager les autres, of this subhuman act and its subsequent availability on the website of a major news network. (No, I haven't checked it out, and I won't be linking to it.) But I'm afraid that's where he starts to lose me.

I could start a rant about the level to which we have become desensitized to violence, about the evils of the voyeuristic digital world in which everything is shown and everything is game, but honestly, it’s been said. And I certainly have no jingoistic cultural agenda.

Perish the thought, Joss. Let nothing come between you and your relativism. An "agenda" that dares to posit a link between burying a woman up to her neck in sand and throwing rocks at her head, or (say) holding her down at the age of twelve, hacking off her clitoris and sewing her labia shut with coarse twine, and the "culture" (for which read religion) that enthusiastically condones these actions as the natural order of things is, like, obviously nothing more than dumb jingoism and clearly has nothing to do with the contravention of civilised ideals like freedom, justice and individual rights that transcend mere nationalism. We are better than that; let's not be afraid to say it.

Moving on to Captivity, or more accurately its trailer:

The trailer resembles nothing so much as the CNN story on Dua Khalil. Pretty much all you learn is that Elisha Cuthbert is beautiful, then kidnapped, inventively, repeatedly and horrifically tortured, and that the first thing she screams is “I’m sorry”.

Much of the rest of Whedon's piece seems to grow from this (slightly meretricious) revelation. He takes great exception to the fact that the first words (in the trailer, anyway) that we hear Elisha Cuthbert scream are "I'm sorry."

It's worth knowing, at this point, that Whedon has a great affinity for what he calls "strong women". That phrase is unbearably trite these days, and there was never a time when it didn't by implication dismiss other women not granted such a label as weak and inferior. Contrast with the (both pejorative) uses of "strongman", who is either a circus freak, all brawn and no brains, or a tribal leader, exercising power through fear and impervious to reason from we sophisticated intellectuals: a strong woman is universally a positive thing, so by interpolation a mere "woman" is inferior. To talk of "strong women" these days is to make the same error as Diane Abbott made on This Week on Thursday, when she chose as her moment of the week the fact that Lewis Hamilton, F1's first black driver, had assumed sole custody of the top of the Championship table. Diane is still fighting the battles of the 1970s and so probably thinks that there has been some great conspiracy to keep black drivers out of F1, but the simple fact is that motor racing generally seems to have relatively few black fans. No doubt when he sits in a McLaren, Hamilton is a racing driver first and a black man second, and if I were he I would have found being made part of Diane's superannuated race agenda insulting and patronising. So it is with Whedon and "strong women". Brought up largely by his mother (it's unclear why this was the case), he cites her as a strong influence in his writing and his identification as a feminist, but the battles she was fighting when she brought him up are not the same ones that are being fought now. A woman that some years ago would have merited the epithet "strong" is these days simply a woman.

Anyway. "I'm sorry" sends Whedon off on some riff (well, in music metaphors, more of a slightly disorganised progressive jam that lasts twenty minutes) about how society sees women as wrong, as something that needs to be corrected. This meme is apparently perpetuated despite, as he makes very clear, more than half the population of the world being women. Must be a conspiracy. We don't even know, of course, when or why Elisha screams, "I'm sorry". It probably isn't the first thing she says. It may have been taken completely out of context. She may have done something terrible.

Oooh. No, I don't wish to indicate that she could have done something to warrant or justify her abduction and torture. That's why we'll be on her side, something I can say without ever having seen Captivity. Elisha is the protagonist, she is the focus for the audience's projection. We root for her. But she might still be legitimately sorry about something.

But no. Whedon prefers to assume that she is being made to apologise for being a woman, and as such is merely yet another cipher in the code that runs through society's intellectual and social fabric that suggests women are inferior, manipulative, "morally unfinished". (Er, what?) From here he descends into a mass of contradictions. Misogyny is rife, but misandry doesn't exist (here's a clue: Blogger's spellcheck knows the former but thinks by the latter I meant "Sandra"). Women are tough, the equal of men - but we can't show them being tortured. Where was Whedon's campaign about "taking something away from the people who have to see it" when Hostel and Saw (and sequels ad nauseam) were being released? Ah, these depict the torture of men. Men deserve it.

How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.

Oh boy. As a connoisseur of horror, one would have thought that by now Whedon would have mastered the technique audiences were advised to practise when viewing Last House on the Left: "keep repeating, it's only a movie". For someone as well-versed in the simulacra of film as Joss Whedon so casually to gloss over the differences between the two pieces of footage defies belief. The "upcoming torture-porn" is available for our viewing pleasure because it is not real, and we know it; it was made by consenting adults who weren't harmed, and we know it. The murder of Du'a Khalil is not available for our viewing pleasure. It is available for our viewing horror. It is real, and we know it. A girl is actually losing her life at the hands of her family in casually brutal fashion, and we know it. It documents a grotesque act of repression and retribution for imagined crimes, an act seemingly committed with the full knowledge and consent of what passes for the community or the society in question. It is another appalling testament to the use of violence and fear of a closed society, and if we can bring ourselves to watch it at all we do so with churning stomach and rising fury. We don't sit down with a bucket of Coke and put our feet up.

The irony is that in fighting the last war, as it were, Whedon is just as guilty of patronising women as Diane Abbott is of patronising Lewis Hamilton. Does he think that Elisha Cuthbert was in some way forced to make this film? She's a successful actress who is short of neither a bob or two, nor the means to make more. She made Captivity because she chose to. Is Whedon suggesting that she is misguided or somehow complicit in the imagined subjugation of her sex? Is it not more important that she be free to make a film that he disagrees with, however indefensibly, than that his rather outdated views on gender politics be given sway over art, however unpleasant or transgressive?

You think there's a difference between a reason and an excuse?

2007-05-03T18:52:00.000Z

Well, yes, actually.

This rather hysterical Grauniad article makes an astonishing admission (astonishing, that is, for the Grauniad) then immediately tries to gloss over it.

The roots of the international conspiracy to mount a bomb attack in the UK,
which was intended to kill and maim as many people as possible and cause
unprecedented disruption, can be traced to a point long before the war in Iraq.

Really? So what you're saying is that when Islamists try to blow us up, it's not because went dictator hunting in Iraq and ended up getting the blame whenever Sunnis and Shias kill each other with that special, indiscriminate bloodthirstiness of which only the truly devout are capable? Indeed not:

Several of the plotters had come together in 2001, some had discussed "hitting"
British targets before the invasion, and at least one had undergone terrorist
training before 9/11.

So the war really has nothing to do with all this? But then, whatever else can be the cause, oh Grauniad? Surely the war in Iraq is responsible for anything and everything? Ah, well, quite:

The war, however, clearly provided the impetus - or at least the excuse - for a
plan to target the UK.

I like that: "the impetus - or at least the excuse". In other words, let's get back to what we do best - ignorantly blaming the war in Iraq for troubles here that have been brewing for up to half a century. Because there's really no difference between a reason and an excuse, right?

Well, just because the guy in Traffic says so, doesn't mean it's the case. There is a difference between a reason and an excuse. An excuse is what you offer when you don't want to give the reason. "The dog ate my homework" instead of "I couldn't be bothered to do it". "My phone was dead" instead of "I knew you'd call, and didn't fancy spending the next hour listening to your self-absorbed dissection of your relationship troubles, so I switched it off". "They were perfectly peaceable until we started gratuitously killing them in Iraq" instead of, oh, gosh, I don't know, "They are fanatical adherents of an acquisitive, repressive, bloodthirsty creed that finds nothing but contempt for the decadence of the Western liberal tradition, and they're still stinging from being kicked out of Spain 500 years ago, and this kind of shit is just the excuse they need to wage their campaign of terror with the tacit approval of the America-hating, Jew-baiting left-wing media."

"But if ALL those shows get canned, we might have a chance."

2007-04-30T16:30:00.000Z

I've been thinking a lot about the scene at the beginning of the Family Guy episode North by North Quahog, which was the first episode shown after FOX renewed the show in 2005. Typically parodically, the show opens with Peter receiving news of their cancellation. "We just have to accept," he says, "that FOX needs to make room for shows such as Dark Angel; Titus; Undeclared Action; That 80's Show; Wonderfalls; Fastlane; Andy Richter Controls the Universe; Skin; Girls' Club; Cracking Up; The Pitts; Firefly; Get Real; FreakyLinks; Wanda at Large; Costello, The Lone Gunmen; A Minute With Stan Hooper; Normal, Ohio; Pasadena; Harsh Realm; Keen Eddie; The $treet; The American Embassy; Cedric the Entertainer Presents; The Tick; Luis; and Greg the Bunny."

What these shows have in common is that they were all commissioned, produced, aired and cancelled in the time that Family Guy was off the air. A few made it past Season 1 (Dark Angel, for example) but most were cancelled before the end of their debut season, and some (notably Girls' Club) were cancelled after as few as two episodes had been shown.

FOX is notorious for this cavalier, scattergun, moronic approach to TV success. I was personally affected by several of these untimely calculations (Dark Angel, Firefly, Wonderfalls) and read many similar tales concerning other shows. The fabled, unicornesque regular reader of this blog will know that I am the last person to criticise the practices of capitalism, and I accept if a TV show isn't successful, you stop spending money on it: but the problem is, FOX seems to have forgotten how to make a show successful. Apart from 24, now limping towards its sixth season finale and trading heavily on former glories (as I understand it: I don't start watching a season of 24 until it's finished, then I watch the whole season in a weekend), FOX seems to have very little success with scripted drama, and I wonder if their inability to give a show the time and support it needs to build a following has anything to do with this. Again, 24 is the exception, but what better advertising for a show about Americans defeating terrorists than for its excellent first season to start weeks after 9/11?

This week, after airing a mere four episodes, FOX cancelled Drive, the new show from Ben Queen and, more importantly for me, Tim Minear, who along with Jeff Bell gave us those two incredible seasons of Angel, 3 and 4, which were ultimately retconned into one long arc. Minear must be starting to feel personally insulted by FOX, since it did much the same to his Wonderfalls. But here's the point. I do not know this personally, since I don't live in the US, but consensus seems to be that FOX didn't exactly push the boat out advertising Drive. It wasn't on the air long enough for FOX to start bouncing it around the schedules (another favourite ploy to drive viewers away; see also Firefly) and at least they weren't airing the episodes out of order (see, again, Firefly). But they didn't exactly get behind this product they'd spent so much money on. And then they're surprised that nobody's watching?

But even more fundamental than that is this consideration. FOX now has an entirely deserved reputation as a network with no respect for fledgling TV shows or audience expectation, and no concept of audience development. As a number of people on various message boards have said explicitly this week, they keep away from new FOX shows for precisely this reason. No-one wants to get invested in an interesting new TV show that shows considerable potential for future development only to have the Evil Prince of Numbers yank it because they can't sell enough ad space. People who were, all other things being equal, interested in watching a show like Drive were steering clear of it because it was so likely that FOX would cancel it that they felt it wasn't worth bothering with. This is not the way to develop and maintain a loyal audience, FOX, you fucking idiots. Get a grip.

In Soviet Russia, art draws you!

2007-04-23T08:50:00.000Z

I am, as may perhaps be obvious, more than occasionally embarrassed by the behaviour of people, groups or organisations who are in many ways my ideological stablemates - economically, say, or geopolitically - when the discussion turns to the role in society played by graphic (that is to say "explicit" or "violent") art.

Hayek wrote that the search for meaning is innate: it is an instinct to which we are little more than slaves, much of the time. It is a fundamental component of constructivism (I have covered this before in the context of religion): the search for meaning, the relentless analysis of effects in search of causes inculcates the belief, or more accurately the unconscious assumption, so ingrained as to take on a degree of certainty quite alien to a belief, that design is inherent and that it can thus, quite naturally, be refined if a greater intelligence is brought to bear than has been hitherto.

This search for meaning seems to catch everyone out at one point or another. Most destructively (pun intended) it is in the constructivist economic ethos; for some, as mentioned, it is religion. And some people like to blame art when people go on kill-crazy rampages. Distressingly, as I say, it is often those who avoid the other pitfalls of constructivism who fall for this one.

The Virginia Tech shootings have prompted an entirely predictable rash of debate and recrimination. I do not intend to rehearse the vastly entertaining argument I am having with a friend via email about gun control, my views on which are briefly outlined in this post. It was only a matter of time before some sharp-eyed, dull-witted hack noticed that the pose in which the perpetrator Cho held a gun to his own head in his ridiculous "multimedia manifesto" was remarkably similar to that in which the protagonist of the Korean film Oldboy held a gun to his own head. The notion that perhas there is pretty much only one way in which one can hold a gun to one's own head appears to have escaped him, and many others subsequently.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not, for once, to indulge my penchant for rambling, self-righteous discouse; rather it is to draw attention (insofar as this blog is at all capable of that) to this excellent article by Sam Leith (which oddly enough had quite a different headline when it appeared in Saturday's paper, something like "You might as well blame the Bible for these shootings". I wonder why that was changed. The constructivists strike again, perhaps?). Mr Leith, despite being, I suspect, a candidate for that select (though very large) group of journalists who owe their career success to something more than innate talent, is nonetheless an exceptionally talented writer, and although he occasionally writes drivel, I am unable to think of where I have seen better repudiated the constructivist view that we are all slaves to the hynpotic ugre to violence that is inherent in violent art.

More cultural doublethink

2007-04-20T12:10:00.000Z

I'm greatly enjoying the second season of Life on Mars, which I've just started watching. I marvel at the writing of Philip Glenister's character DCI Gene Hunt, for sometimes it seems as though these days the BBC is the kind of place where you'd get excommunicated for even thinking up lines like Hunt's. Despite the fact that they are delivered as it were ironically, through the prism of early 21st Century mores, with a knowing wink to the audience for whom the humour derives (or is supposed to derive) from the exquisite agony of remembering there was ever a time when people were so "unreconstructed", and certainly not from any empathy with the character; despite, in other words, the seal of modern, progressive disapproval being stamped all over Hunt, Glenister has managed to make him a genuinely likeable character whose bluntness merely defines and characterises rather than condemns him. It is not clear to what extent the writers wanted to ignite the audience in a fervour of "progressive" zeal, but to whatever extent it was their intention, they have failed. Audiences like Gene Hunt because he reminds them of a time when the everyday processes of life weren't so stultifyingly micro-managed by the paranoid rigours of political correctness, a time when the police "service" was a police force and a joke was a joke. They have embraced the programme without buying into the myriad PC pieties which pervade it. (Most of them, at any rate: this chap has a different take on thinly-veiled progressivist TV/film.)

But you just can't keep a good progressive agenda down. There have been at least three references to Margaret Thatcher so far, which for a show set in 1973 can only be to provide dramatic irony-derived humour for the 2007 audience. The first two (that I can recall) one might be tempted to let pass: both were essentially the same, that is to say a 1973 character voicing disbelief or disapproval. Hunt scoffs at the general notion ("there will never be a woman Prime Minister as long as I have a hole in my arse") and later his boss, Supt. Woolf, is more specific, reacting with horror when Tyler says "by the time Maggie Thatcher becomes Prime Minister". So far, so what: Hunt is casually sexist and Woolf, for all we know, may be a socialist red in tooth and claw. Neither of them knows the future so their reactions are entirely understandable, even if the writing is somewhat uninspired.

The third time is different. WPC Annie Cartwright, who might as well be a representative figure called Emancipation, recently groundbreakingly (of course) promoted (of course) to WDC by Tyler (of course), reflects, after someone mentions that pretty soon she'll be Commissioner, that she might even become Prime Minister - after all, a woman couldn't do a worse job than the blokes have been doing. Cue laughs all round, then Tyler, the only person in the entire 1973 world who actually knows better, tells Annie that she might live to regret saying that. In other words, Tyler affirms to the expectant audience that yes, in fact, the woman did do a worse job than the blokes had been doing.

This kind of cognitive dissonance is astounding. The entire premise of the show is to highlight the differences between 1973 and 2006/7, to show the degree to which British life has changed in the intervening three decades. The person most directly responsible for those changes is Margaret Thatcher, in the teeth of opposition from almost everyone, including many in her own party. That Life on Mars can present those changes as overwhelmingly positive (as it does when it invites us to disapprove of all the aspects of life which are now gone forever) yet have its protagonist, the only person who knows what changes are coming and why, state that the woman Prime Minister will be the worst of the lot, is simply unfathomable. Nothing may be permitted to infringe on the cultural assumptions of the progressive agenda, prime among which is the caricature of Maggie as the Great Satan, not even when writing a show that highlights all the positive changes she wrought.

Implacable insanity

2007-04-18T14:37:00.000Z

Nepotistic sinecure though it may well be, Celia Walden's Spy column in the Telegraph has an astonishing little snippet. The BBC postpones Bob Dylan's Old Time Whiskey-Soaked Rambling Hour in the light of the Virginia Tech massacre because he was going to talk about guns.

Right. Now is not the time to talk about guns. Obviously.

Mickey Mouse has grown up a cow

2007-04-10T09:04:00.000Z

A year ago I had a great deal more time for David Cameron than I do now. While I am not instinctively a Conservative, I am realistic enough to understand that the party most likely to promote and apply policies I am prepared to support, while remaining at all electable, is the Conservative Party (the Liberal Democrats having, with a few uninfluential exceptions, almost entirely abandoned all political philosophy remotely related to their name), more specifically the Thatcherite wing of same. (Although Mrs. Thatcher was a Hayekian liberal economically, she remained morally authoritarian; but as Hayek himself makes clear, it is economic freedom that is the prerequisite to all other types of freedom, on the basis of which I consider it more important to support a party of economic freedom and questionable moral authoritarianism than to support a socially liberal but economically ignorant party.) There are, of course, many schools of thought within the Conservative Party, of which only few are instinctively liberal in outlook: the Tory tradition of paternalism is esentially statist in character, for example.

Unfortunately David Cameron has demonstrated not only a worrying degree of naïve faith in the benign power of the state in the economic arena, but also he has from the very beginning shown himself to have a healthy self-righteous moral authoritarian streak, not least in his dreary and transparently psephologically-motivated homilies about the environment. Not one to shy away from a cause du jour, he has parlayed vague and generally ill-informed watermelon rhetoric into a moderately successful favour-currying machine. The practical result of this, combined with his bewildering belief in something called "sharing the proceeds of growth" between tax cuts and "public services" (which serve only to ensure there will, in fact, be little or no growth of which to share the proceeds), is that now there is no aspect of the modern Conservative Party which the average voter of less than 35 would recognise as remotely Conservative in any respect.

That is, of course, the point, but it makes it pretty strange that Cameron should arrange to have Arnold Schwarzenegger address the party conference this year. This is the man who introduced Milton Friedman's TV series Free to Choose in 1980, the man who voluntarily recorded nearly five (perforce hysterical) minutes of to-camera speech praising the socio-economic views of one of the most powerfully anti-state thinkers of the last century. If indirectly, Friedman was almost as potent an influence on Mrs. Thatcher as Hayek was - and now Cameron invites his disciple to address the Tories. They're united over their environmental "concerns", of course - although Arnie doubtless favours more freedom-friendly non-statist measures. I wonder to what extent he'll discuss that, and to what extent his speech will consist merely in evasive platitudes that are the hallmark of Cameron's tenure as leader.

Cashback

2007-03-29T09:50:00.000Z

My sporadic updates to this bloggette notwithstanding, I enjoy writing. This is largely because I'm good at it, my occasionally insufferably self-regarding style also notwithstanding: generally we don't enjoy things we aren't good at, and if we do we tend to do them in private, my non-existent readership still again notwithstanding.

I've been thinking lately about why this is. I have a reputation among friends, built largely on my wholesale ignorance of myriad Eighties children's TV programmes, for a childhood spent reading Proust. I have never, as it happens, read so much of a page of Proust, but I enjoy the reputation nonetheless, because like all the best caricatures it is essentially, if not strictly factually, accurate: my childhood was a literary as opposed to televisual one. I certainly wasn't banned from the TV but I was pushed as a reader by my parents from an early age, such that by the age of, I think, six I was introduced to the first of two people who taught me more about writing than any others: Richmal Crompton (there is a particularly fatuous essay linked at the bottom of that page which I urge you to ignore). Her William series is well summed-up by Miles Kington on the back of every book: "Probably the funniest, toughest children's books ever written." Crompton wrote as though for adults, intruding on the action with adult-perspective asides: in other words, she never talked down to her juvenile readers, preferring to challenge them, not caring if she sent them to a dictionary twice a page, and certainly not caring if they couldn't be bothered with the dictionary. Equally inspiring was her technical gift: even today my approach to control and structure owes much to her example, for technically her writing was flawless.

It was through her that I came to meet my second great influence. At the age of seven I insisted that I follow my sister, two years my senior, to the prep department of a nearby independent school only a year after she had gone. I duly passed the exam, and so it transpired that a month shy of ten, in February 1988, I sat the entrance exam for Newcastle-under-Lyme School, for admission that September. Part of the exam was, of course, a creative writing piece, and mine borrowed heavily from Miss Crompton. It also included the phrase "he cursed his lack of vigilance and swore silently", lifted wholesale from Robin May's Robin of Sherwood tie-in book, Robin of Sherwood and the Hounds of Lucifer. The man marking my essay was clearly not a habitual reader of Robin of Sherwood, for later he singled out this phrase, when discussing my entrance exam performance with my parents, as an example of the unusually mature manner of my writing. My mother gleefully reported that he had written across the top of my essay, "I want this boy in my class." For all I know he wrote that of ten or more boys a year, but I remain grateful to this day that he wrote it of me.

Like Miss Crompton, he refused to talk down to his first-year English class, and he insisted on teaching technique as well as appreciation. I learned to parse sentences and was acquainted with such arcane concepts as synecdoche and hypallage. I have never heard of a first-year English class learning such things anywhere else. He transmitted his love for language and its possibilities to even the most lumpen of boys, a feat which in my opinion was founded not only on his contagious enthusiasm but also his respect for his pupils, which manifested itself not only in what he chose to teach but also in how he interacted with us - generally with the gentle, affectionate ribbing that is the hallmark of all relationships of equals.

I was only fortunate enough to be taught by him in my first year. (I had another two English teachers at Newcastle before I changed schools, neither of whom was really any good; at my new school, Adams' Grammar School in Newport, Shropshire, I had a further two, the latter of whom, a master of condescension by the name of Neil Gibbs, managed in two years to drive all love of studying literature out of me, and drove me towards the sciences at A-Level.) Nonetheless, his teaching has stayed with me, to the extent that, 18 years later, I am furious to learn of his sacking from Newcastle. He is Peter Cash, apparently sacked "partly" for poor exam results, though as this letter to the Board of Governers makes clear, the standard of results is comparable with those of any other department in the school, and even if it was a relatively poor year by Mr. Cash's standards, the school is unlikely to have any better luck with his replacement, particularly as this fiasco spirals and damages yet further the reputation of what I remember as a fine school. Other factors may be at work, as the commenter GWS points out here (comment 4). (I suspect this is my former Mathematics teacher, Graham Swift.)

The aspirant literature students of Newcastle and Stoke on Trent, and particularly those who do not yet know they are aspirant literature students, will only be the poorer for this vindictive act.

"Gallowaying" Galloway

2007-02-28T19:09:00.000Z

I've always found it slightly unfair that Robert Fisk should be singled out as the eponym of the verb meaning "to deconstruct or demolish a specious argument using point-by-point responses" - and no, this doesn't mean that Mr. Fisk is especially skilled in such matters; it means that he is the frequent target of such treatment, for he is an idiot. Unfortunately for him, "fisk" actually sounds like a verb: it has that transitive, transitional sense about it and is pleasantly conjugable (fisks, fisked, fisking, fisker, fiskage, etc.), so he's probably stuck with it. You couldn't really say the same of "Galloway", which is a shame, since George seems to be trying desperately hard to have his own verb coined in the image of "fisk".

Writing in the Guardian (where else?) on Wednesday, which is odd in itself since you wouldn't think a national newspaper, even one so disreputable and degenerate as the Guardian, would willingly give gangway to the ravings of someone who has previously advocated treasonous acts in public, George decides to stick it to all those who don't get their kicks fawning before tinpot tyrants with what he doubtless fondly imagines to be a "robust" defence of the nascent Venezuelan dictatorship led by Hugo Chàvez. "These orchestrated attacks on Chàvez are a travesty," declaims his headline, and right there in the byline, before he's even started the article proper, he's using the "neocons" buzzword, confident that merely by invoking that dread cabal he will be seen to be on the side of the angels.

The chilling Oliver Stone film Salvador got a rare airing on television this week. It was a reminder of a time when, for those on the left, little victories were increasingly dwarfed by big defeats - not least in a Latin America which became synonymous with death squads and juntas.

Admittedly, the death squad is not commonly associated with communism. I suppose when you're chasing the kind of body-count that communism can claim, yer basic death squad seems a little feeble. A purge is probably more likely to get the job done; failing that, a famine. And this explains your general point. It was a reminder of a time when people were so horrified by the results of collectivism that they went too far the other way - or what they thought was the other way, but which turned out to be essentially the same way. The difference between you and me, George, is that you claim to disapprove of one method of curtailing individual freedom - the military junta - while actively endorsing another - communism - merely on the grounds, I can only surmise, of their respective economic outlooks. I abhor them both.

How different things seem now. Yesterday US Vice-President Dick Cheney came uncomfortably close to the reality of Afghan resistance to foreign occupation. On the same day Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez delivered a mightier blow to the neocon dream of US domination, announcing an extension of public ownership of his country's oil fields - the richest outside the Middle East.

It's not "Afghan" resistance, it's the Taliban - another crowd of violent, repressive obscurantists with whom you throw in your lot merely because they hate the Great Satan (c.f. Saddamite Iraq, Cuba, the Soviet Union, whose fall you have described as the biggest catastrophe of your life). It is they who are the foreign occupation, hailing as most of them do from either Pakistan or Saudi Arabia.

I'd also like to know how Chàvez' "extension of public ownership of his country's oilfields" (an agreeable euphemism for theft at the point of a gun) is in any way a "mighty blow" to the "neocon dream" (there's that word again; it's as though you hope it will have some Pavlovian effect on your readers) of US domination, when the US imports barely 10% of its crude oil from Venezuela - and if, as you seem so facilely certain, the US went to war in the Middle East to secure oil supplies, what does it matter if a Venezuelan personality cult arbitrarily decides, in violation of the rule of law on which you are so keen when it suits you, to "nationalise" their oilfields and stop selling oil to the US? How is that a "mighty blow", again?

Much more is at stake than London mayor Ken Livingstone's welcome oil deal with Chávez, which will see London bus fares halved while Venezuela gets expertise from city hall and a bridgehead in the capital of the US's viceroy in Europe.

I eagerly anticipate the halving of London bus fares. This will return them to the price they were in 2003, a fact which betrays the rapacious fare increases Londoners have endured under the villainous Livingstone, while the provision of services, in the absence of competition which, it is almost universally acknowledged, promotes better performance, has remained miserable. Is this the kind of "expertise" Venezuela stands to get in return for its valuable oil? And why isn't Chàvez using this commodity to improve the lot of his citizens (I use the term advisedly) if he's so committed to the mirage of social justice? Why is he flogging it on the cheap to the UK? Surely what he should be doing is getting the best price possible for it - even if that means selling it to the Great Satan. If he were truly committed to improving the lot of his people, that's what he'd do. But he's a posturing megalomaniac, not a man of the people.

Washington's biggest oil supplier is now firmly in the grip of a social revolution. This month I watched with Chávez as thousands of soldiers, French and British tanks, Russian helicopters and brand new Mirage and Sukhoi fighter bombers passed by: the soldiers chanting "patria, socialismo o muerte" - enough to make any US president blanch. Chávez answered the salute with the words: "the Bolivarian revolution is a peaceful revolution but it is not unarmed".

Venezuela is not Washington's biggest oil supplier. Not in terms of crude, and not in terms of petroleum. And I'm sure sitting there with Uncle Hugo as the military parade passed you by was faintly erotic, but please don't try and persuade us in the same paragraph as you so lovingly describe it that this is a "social" revolution. It is clearly nothing of the kind: it is like Russia's, Cuba's, China's and North Korea's before it. It is a military revolution (so much for your dismissal of "juntas" at the top of your article, Geroge) and a death cult, if we take the soldiers' chant seriously. Chàvez' magnificently paradoxical statement is the icing on the cake. An "not unarmed" revolution is not peaceful. It has no intention of being peaceful. It utilises the classic Marxist technique of systematic ambiguity towards violence, claiming peaceful intentions but clearly prepared for bourgeois resistance to the historical inevitability they proclaim - and once entrenched in power, that same threat of violence will prevail. Peace is not the absence of violence; this is particularly so when the only reason for the absence of violence is that the threat of violence was sufficient to win the day.

The music played throughout the event was the hymn of Salvador Allende's 1970s Chilean government, declaring that the people united will never be defeated. But Chávez's socialism is a good deal more red than Allende's - and its enemies seem no less determined than those who bathed Chile in blood in 1973.

Yes, because socialists never bathed anyone or anywhere in blood, did they?

Despite complete control of Venezuela's national assembly - the opposition boycotted the last elections after being defeated in seven electoral tests in a row - Chávez has been given enabling powers for 18 months to ensure he can pilot his reforms through entrenched opposition from the civil service, big business, the previously all-powerful oligarchy, their vast media interests and their friends in Washington.

Despite complete control? The true application of doublethink, personified by the character Syme in Nineteen Eighty-Four, is the ability to be on some level aware of one's use of doublethink yet still use it such that on a conscious level you believe something entirely different from what you know subconsciously to be the truth. It cannot have escaped your notice that there's a glaring contradiction in this sentence, George. If Uncle Hugo has "complete control" of the assembly (the legitimacy of those seven elections notwithstanding), why on Earth does he need these "enabling powers" (another delicate sidestepping of the facts, but I do see how you couldn't possibly have used the word "decree" when you're valiantly trying to pooh-pooh the notion that Uncle Hugo is a dictator, since decree and dictator have more-or-less the same etymological root) to pilot his "reforms" through "entrenched opposition" blah blah blah conspiracytheoryofsocietycakes? Isn't his "complete control" enough to achieve this? Or is complete control not quite complete enough? This arbitrary rule he has acquired is good for one thing only: tyranny.

Among those friends we must include our own prime minister, who only last year declared Venezuela to be in breach of international democratic norms - though when I pressed him in parliament he was unable to list them.

Really? I spent a good while searching Hansard for this. Hansard has only one reference, ever, that you make to Venezuela, and that was in 1998 in connection with mistreatment of two of your constituents. Hansard has no record of your ever having used the phrase "democratic norms". Hansard has no record of your ever having used the word "Chàvez". Looks rather like your penchant for frivolous, fact-free grandstanding got the better of you again, George.

The atmosphere in Caracas is fervid. The vast shanty towns draping the hillside around the cosmopolitan centre bustle with workers' cooperatives, trade union meetings, marches and debates. The $18bn fund for social welfare set up by Chávez is already bearing fruit. Education, food distribution and primary healthcare programmes now cover the majority for the first time. Queues form outside medical centres filled with thousands of Cuban doctors dispensing care to a population whose health was of no value to those who sat atop Venezuela's immense wealth in the past.

You apparently forget, though, that while this all sounds completely unexceptionable and, nudge-nudge, wouldn't you have to be such a total heartless bastard to dispute the righteousness of any of this, the sad fact remains that it is wealth creation, not socialistic conviction, that funds the welfare state. And Uncle Hugo has just driven any sensible entrepreneur running screaming from Venezuela, taking with him all he can carry and, if he has any sense, setting alight to that which he can't - particularly after those ridiculous antics with the supermarkets and the meat wholesalers last week. And the revenue from cheaply-sold oil will only go so far.

Chávez, who regularly pops over to Havana to check on the health of Fidel Castro, is at the centre of a new Latin America which is determined to be nobody's backyard. Reliable US allies are now limited to death squad ridden Colombia, Peru and Mexico - and latterly then only by recourse to rigged elections.

Sure, so Mexico's elections are rigged because you find their outcome unfavourable - but never let any doubt be cast on those seven election victories Uncle Hugo has won! I can't think of a single party, leader or political entity of any kind, anywhere, ever, which has won seven elections on the trot without a significant degree of "assistance" at the ballot box.

But Chávez's international ambitions are not confined to the Americas. He became a hero in the Arab world after withdrawing his ambassador from Tel Aviv in protest at the bombardment of Lebanon by US-armed Israeli forces last summer, and has pledged privately to halt oil exports to the US in the event of aggression against Iran. This all represents a challenge to US power which, if Bush was not sunk in the morass of Iraq, would be at the top of his action list.

It's always comforting when a populist, economically ignorant leader has "ambitions". In fact, if one were to review the history of government ambition of any political stripe, one would, I think, have to conclude that it is invariably bloody.

And I'm not sure what kind of a recommendation the esteem of the Arab world (or more accurately a certain sect of the Arab world) is supposed to be, given that that sect of the Arab world celebrated the fall of the Twin Towers (as, no doubt, you did, secretly); it is essentially the mediaeval, tribalist respect accorded a local strongman after a wanton display of strength. You overlook, magnificently, the fact that Israel was retaliating for an unprovoked act of war constituted by the kidnapping of two of its soldiers; you overlook the fact that Israel was not attacking Lebanon but an unelected, widely unsupported minority terrorist faction operating out of the southern territories of Lebanon, funded and directed by Iran precisely to provoke Israel, and committing the gravest war crimes imaginable by placing military assets in civilian areas to maximise the Lebanese body-count; ... but, of course, you do not overlook the provenance of the ordnance with which Israel exercised its right to defend itself against the sworn enemies by whom it is almost entirely surrounded. Let's take a break for a West Wing moment:

SAM
You mind my asking how the meeting with the Chinese ambassador went?

BARTLET
Well, how do you think it went?

SAM
I think they said if Taiwan tests the Patriots, they'll start their exercises.

BARTLET
That's right, except they didn't call them Patriots. What did they call them?

SAM
US-made Patriots.

BARTLET
Right.

When a show as fluffy and left-wing as The West Wing is making my point for me, you're in a real muddle, George. Back to your drivel:

Not that his supporters are marking time. The mendacious propaganda that Chávez is a dictator and human rights abuser is being spread with increasing urgency by the Atlanticist right and their fellow travellers, such as leftie-turned-neocon Nick Cohen who told his London newspaper audience last week that Livingstone's relationship with Chávez was making him think of voting Tory.

We've already established that you avoided using the word "decree" precisely because you realise that he is, in effect, a dictator. He is unchallenged and unopposed, and his word is law. That's a dictator. He rules by decree. That's a dictator. He's in the process of building up his personality cult and shutting down all means of sedition. That's a dictator. It is equally plain that he is a human rights abuser. The tradition of property rights is among the most fundamental of human rights, and is in fact a guarantor of other rights - if we cannot "own" ourselves, what is the point in claiming other rights? Yet Uncle Hugo is merrily trampling all over property rights. There's a reason they're the first to go when tyranny looms. They're the foundation of a free society. Get rid of them and the rest of your task is that much easier.

I see you're using your favourite swearword again, too. It's not an argument in itself, you know. And the parallels between Marxism and neo-conservatism are rather interesting. Both, for example, turn on the delusion of historical inevitability, part of what Popper called historicism. You should maybe read about it.

Chávez's decision not to renew an expired licence for an opposition television station involved in a coup attempt - there are plenty of others - is being portrayed as the beginning of the death of democracy. It's as if Country Life's diatribes against the fox hunting ban were taken as irrefutable proof of totalitarianism in Britain.

When a leader who has recently awarded himself absolute power, including the right to alter his country's constitution and make himself president for life, starts arbitrarily banning unfavourable TV stations (let's not pretend that the decision "not to renew" the expired licence is in any way conventional behaviour in a free society), he is clearly seeking to consolidate power by removing or silencing as many opposing voices as he can. He is undermining the independence of the press by forcing them to give him more favourable coverage if they want to avoid being nationalised. A free press is essential for those human rights you're so confident aren't being undermined.

And, needless to say, the fox-hunting ban is not on its own proof of totalitarianism in Britain. But you beg the question; the arbitrary criminalisation of perfectly legal activities is a small part of a totalitarian ethos, as the most cursory of glances at the history of Nazi Germany will amply demonstrate. That was, after all, where fox-hunting was first banned.

The so-called "dictator" Chávez is nothing of the kind. He has won election after election, validating his radical course. Still the fear of a coup - such as in 2002 when Chávez was removed and imprisoned for three days before millions descended to the presidential palace to reinstate him - is everywhere. One Englishman abroad who welcomed the 2002 coup as the "overthrow of a demagogue" was the foreign office minister Denis MacShane - a humiliating correction had to be issued following Chávez's restoration. That tale underscores the importance of the links being forged between revolutionary Caracas and anti-war London. Chávez is well aware that the people were defeated in Chile, the fascists allowed to pass in Republican Spain. Just as in Venezuela, the defence against counter-revolution lies with the poor and the working people who are shaping the world they want; so too must all those internationally who want to see this ferment reach its potential rally to Venezuela's side.

Yawn. You've said all this stuff already. Bored now.

The Elephant in The Room

2007-02-26T09:42:00.000Z

Sorry, I know it's a cliché. Just be grateful I'm not about to start banging on about "global warming". (The boy Tremayne at Samizdata has a rather amusing little vignette skewering Hollywood's dreary obsession with green causes.)

No, the elephant to which I refer is the one that goes unmentioned in this Sunday Times piece. Apparently, we're entering another golden age of the super rich. Millions are being made and ostentatiously spent every day. Champagne, Porsches, hedge funds, private equity, blah blah blah idlerichcakes. The point of the piece is that whereas the last time this kind of money-making was prevalent, apparently in the Victorian era (like, not the Eighties? Come on, surely we haven't exhausted the Eighties' bogeyman potential yet?), when the super-rich were possessed either of a sufficiently strong social conscience or a sufficiently well-developed sense of preservation to do a great deal of charitable work, this time around no-one's giving anything away (except Bill Gates, of course).

There are two reasons for this. One of them, that poverty is these days to a large extent relative as opposed to absolute, the article notes, in passing, before ignoring it and getting back to the point of the piece, which is subtly to warn that rich that unless they start ponying up they can expect another revolution, because God knows everyone deserves to share in others' success, right? So far so predictable (it is staggering to me that certain "progressive" friends of mine consider the Sunday Times unacceptably Tory in character). The other is not mentioned at all, despite the article running some 3,200 words.

It is, of course, the welfare state. In the Victorian era there was still the concept of noblesse oblige, the idea that one indeed had a responsibility to help those less fortunate than oneself. But the general feeling that the nobles weren't feeling sufficiently obliged led inexorably to the establishment of the welfare state, and the consequent eradication of the custom, long passed down the generations, of charitable work or donation. The metacontext these days tells us that the state will do all the work - after all, it taxes the rich enough. Is it any wonder that they have simply lost the habit of charity?

Shit, get BSG off the ceiling!

2007-02-19T15:34:00.000Z

My all-TV-all-the-time lifestyle continues - certainly all the time I don't have anything better to do, that is. Since my House post I've watched nearly all of the new series of Battlestar Galactica, two-and-a-half seasons of it. This is not something I necessarily thought I would ever find myself doing, based as BSG is on that total acid-casualty of a series from 1978 of the same name, in which space pilots wear suede jackets (in space), the units of time are ostentatiously different for no apparent reason, everyone says "by your command", like, the whole time and whenever a Cylon was on screen they had to get hold of another 750 spotlights to shine at his head so that it would have hundreds of pinpricks dancing on it at all times. Quite what sense of unease or dread this last was supposed to attach to the humourless killing machines remains unclear.

Thankfully, new series exec-prods Ronald D. Moore and David Eick were able to deduce that underneath all that foolishness was the germ of a decent story waiting to be rescued from its prison of kitsch and kite-high writers. Out went the suede jackets and laser guns; in came the rather more realistic military dress and projectile-based firearms. Out, mercifully, went a system of time-notation featuring centons, sectons and yahrens (how foolish the actors must have felt delivering these lines) - although the slightly arch faux-swearword "frak" has been retained; conjugated exactly like "fuck" (including "motherfrakker", although I've yet to hear it used as a noun), it theoretically allows dialogue to be slightly more realistic to the setting yet still get past the network censors. Unfortunately in practice it renders allegedly "realistic" dialogue lumpen, since it always intrudes on the flow of the words and reminds you that you're watching a TV show. (In Iran, apparently, until 1994 the film censor was blind. Likewise, these days Standards and Practices seem to be deaf.) Apart from a single homage instance, the vaguely fellatial phrase "by your command" is also absent; the Cylons are CG; technology's outdated even by our standards because the Cylons are all t3h l33t hAx0Rz, and Starbuck and Boomer are women (although Starbuck still contrives to have less hair in the new version).

Sundry other changes give this new BSG its greatest advantage over its predecessor: because the Cylons can now mimic human form, and have twelve humanoid models, each model having many copies, each copy having a unique consciousness, the show plays on themes of mistaken identity and psychosis for both human and Cylon. In particular Gaius Baltar, formerly the willing traitor, is in the new show tricked by the scheming (and never knowingly overdressed) Number Six, who manipulates him on the home planet Caprica to give herself access to defence computers, gives her life to save him in the ensuing nuclear holocaust and haunts him throughout the series, either as Baltar's guilty subconscious or as a result of Cylon chicanery in his head - we're never sure. Meanwhile, her consciousness downloaded into an identical new body, her fellow Cylons come to know her as Caprica Six, and she is often at odds with the other Sixes.

BSG is also ripe with allegory for these post 9/11 times - although gratifyingly, and by no means expectedly, it is not prepared simply to gloss and snark and take cheap shots. It takes pains to acknowledge that often the military is right, the the decisions it takes are hard and its task thankless, and it's never shy to show the unfortunate consequences of a populist, pacifist decision where other shows might be content with pat platitudes. Plus it has Edward James Olmos, best know to me as Judge, soon to be Justice, Roberto Mendoza from Season 1 of The West Wing. That's enough gravitas for anyone, and he brings a vital degree of sympathy to what could easily have been a distinctly fascict portrayal of Adama.

I'll catch up with the Sci-Fi Channel's transmission schedule some time this week. Next stop, Roswell. This one seems a little B-List, but we'll see.

It's for your own good and you've got it coming.

2007-02-19T09:30:00.000Z

Anyone continuing to believe that this government any longer considers itself accountable to the people that elected it - in fact has ever considered itself accountable to the people that elected it - is very clearly soft in the head.

Several years ago, despite howls of entirely legitimate protest from almost everyone that the law would directly affect, and with the only support coming from people whose lives would not be altered by it one whit, this government passed a law banning (or, in retrospect, attemping to ban) hunting with hounds. Its justification for this (as distinct from its actual reason, which was indisputably class vengeance) was that it was apparently the democratic will of the people that the "barbaric" activity be outlawed. Who was this government, went the rhetoric (when it wasn't pushing the envelope of sanctimonious anthropomorphism), to stand in the way of the will of the people? This despite the very obvious fact that most of the people that willed it so didn't know the first thing about the evolution of the practice or the function it performed; still less did they care about its correspondence with the laws of nature (it requires a spectacular moralistic contortion to claim that hunting an animal, which may therefore escape, is more cruel or unnatural than shooting it in the head from a distance or setting a snare for it): the people knew best and that was all there was to it.

The lamentable Douglas Alexander last week gave the lie to that notion in memorable fashion. Presently, this government aims to implement a "road pricing scheme", or "movement tax" to those of us not afflicted with the Newspeak disease. The justification for this, as again distinct from the actual reason, is that our roads are too congested and there's all that nasty carbon to think about. (The first is meaningless, since no-one holds a gun to our heads and makes us go out on the roads. It is drivers' choice to drive. As for the second, China has over 30,000 coal-fired power stations. I wonder how long Britain's drivers would have to sit in traffic jams with their engines running to match the carbon output of just one of those, even assuming that carbon is the bogeyman the watermelons would have us believe it is.) Meanwhile, over on Tony's petitions site, someone set up a petition calling on him to scrap the planned road pricing scheme, which at the time of writing has received 1,594,909 signatures and is due to close tomorrow. By comparison, the next most popular petition, in the equally worthy cause of scrapping inheritance tax, has received 73,820 signatures, or less than 1/20th the number.

But Mr Alexander knows better. He has already announced that it doesn't matter how many signatures the petition gets: it won't make any difference. The scheme will go ahead. He knows what's good for us, see, and all of a sudden the democratic will of the people counts for nothing. Let's not forget that when it comes to actually going to a website and signing a petition, you can take it as read that most people can't be bothered. A good rule of thumb is to reckon that for everyone who bothers to sign a petition, five others are of the same opinion but never get round to signing. The opinion of the thick end of 10,000,000 people, in other words, is about to be marginalised by a junior minister.

Clearly, the democratic will is only respected to the degree to which it enables this government to practise class warfare. Plus ça change....

NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!

2007-02-06T19:18:00.000Z

Reading this excellent post at Samizdata, I chanced to follow the link for the Black Book of Communism. Inevitably, I ended up looking for a paperback edition, given that the choice is between paying £42 for the hardback from Amazon.co.uk, or $30 for the hardback from Amazon.com and making up the difference in iniquitous import taxes. Having googled "black book communism paperback" I chanced upon this rather hysterical page belonging to the Maoist Internationalist Movement, whose members I can only assume are greatly enjoying their trip back to 1976.

In their cosy parallel universe in which Karl Popper never published The Open Society and its Enemies and Friedrich von Hayek never published The Road to Serfdom (or perhaps the members of the MIM are actually enjoying a trip back to 1942), there is nothing laughable about referring unironically to "the bourgeois press"; there is no savage irony to their putting freedom in inverted commas. Whatever - self-delusion is like a warm shroud for the tenacious adherents to a dishonoured and discredited political dogma that has turned so many lives to ashes. They can keep their outdated, meaningless rhetoric - and they can continue to pay some big capitalist telecommunications company for the privilege of disseminating it on the web.

But in among it all is possibly the funniest thing I've seen yet this year - in a bleak, black, Black Book of Communism way, of course. The author is protesting that during translation a symbol meaing "per thousand" was interpreted as "per cent" and that consequently the book has "[overestimated] deaths by a factor of 10". Still unironically (I can only assume), he goes on to say that this is why the book is so famous - the "claim that communism killed 100 million".

The Maoist Internationalist Movement wishes to make it perfectly clear that their political ideology did not, in fact, kill 100 million people, but a mere 10 million. Much better. I think there comes a point when the number of deaths involved becomes meaningless, and it's probably at less that 10 million, but for the sake of argument: 10 million people is still 100,000 people per year for the whole of the 20th century - and since communism lasted essentially from 1917 to 1989, what is sometimes called the Short Century, that figure rises to just shy of 140,000 people per year. That's 380 people per day. More than 15 people per hour. More than a person every four minutes for 72 years - that is what the MIM wants the Harvard University Press to acknowledge while they ramble on about "self-censored bourgeois 'freedom'". Can you say cognitive dissonance?

Still, it has put me in mind of a classic moment of comedy. In the Waldorf Salad episode of Fawlty Towers, Basil is getting chewed out by an obnoxious (though ultimately correct) American fellow, who states that, "What I'm suggesting is that this place is the crummiest, shoddiest, worst-run hotel in the whole of Western Europe!" To which the dotty old Major, staunch in his defence of Basil, interjects, "NO! No, I won't have that! There's a place in Eastbourne!"

Cottage Industry

2007-02-06T14:36:00.000Z

It's been all TV, all the time for me recently. Such is my backlog of shows to watch (I'm on to my sixth 25-disc DVD cake, and still have stuff in the second that I've yet to see. That's not to mention the 120GB HD in my downloading machine and the 80GB HD in my watching machine - yes, they're different - that are both also full) that I've had to step it up from merely three or four eps a night before bed - I've had to start much earlier, breaking only for dinner. I'm determined to greet the start of the new US TV season in September with nothing outstanding to watch.

It's Rapidshare's fault, of course - Rapidshare and BitTorrent. A Rapidshare premium account is a dangerous thing for someone as helplessly addicted to long story arcs as I am. I watched Invasion in sodding HRHD, for example - High Resolution HDTV, 700MB per episode: 17GB for a 22-ep season. Good stuff it was, but the knowledge that you get another 3,000MB every day from Rapidshare just means that you end up scouring the web for forums with rapidshare links for TV shows. I found some good ones, downloaded some stuff I'd never heard of that came well recommended - now I've got to watch it all.

Not falling into that last category is House. I've been aware of House since midway through its first season, and continued to download it despite having watched the first few eps and then not stuck with it. It was good, but had the feel of a strict procedural which makes for a tedious "monster/crime/case/disease of the week" feel which plagues much American TV since the networks are unshakeably convinced that their audience comprises exclusively drooling morons incapable of remembering story threads week to week. This fatuous assumption having been comprehensively blown out of the water by the success of 24, not to mention later seasons of Buffy and Angel, the networks unsurprisingly insisted that their showrunners continue to waste the potential for complex, involved stories of episodic television and instead make standalone eps (see Season 5 of Angel after the astonishing achievement of Seasons 2, 3, and 4).

It took several comments on the front page of Television Without Pity to alert me to the fact that House had not been condemned to this fate. So I watched nearly two seasons in a fortnight, and am glad to say it lives up to the promise of the early episodes, promise that nonetheless seemed destined to drown in procedurality. We still meet the case of the week before the credits (a formula from which the show has deviated only two or three times), but increasingly less screen time is devoted to its solution in the episode, the writers evidently realising what a rare and brilliant combination of character and actor they have in House and Hugh Laurie and therefore preferring to get their money's worth rather than simply having him standing around regurgitating medical terms.

However, the show nearly tripped up recently. Spoilers follow, for those thousands of House fans beating a path daily to this blog who might not be entirely up-to-date. I say "tripped up" - I'm sure nothing of the kind was ever likely, but the audience only realises this at the very end of the arc. House becomes the target of a vendetta by a policeman whom he humiliated, leaving him in an exam room with a thermometer up his rectum with no intention of returning (this before House knew his occupation, of course). The cop, ably (ie hatefully) played by David Morse, responds by exploiting House's belligerence and his Vicodin dependency to bring him within a whisker of disbarrment and jail. No sane TV show, of course, would ever send its main character to jail for more than a night, which is exactly what happens, because "at the last minute" the principal witness against House alters her statement just enough to derail the prosecution.

The point is, we know House is a prick. He's rude, and insensitive (the recapper at TWoP, whose name is Sara M, is convinced House is racist because he doesn't overlook that fact that one of his assistants (whom she memorably calls The Cottages) is black. He's not racist, Sara - it's just your hairtrigger cultural assumptions. If he were racist, he wouldn't employ Foreman, or he would pay him less than the others, or he would routinely denigrate his ability as a doctor on the basis of his skin colour. None of these he does. I notice you don't get upset when House mocks Chase's Australian accent. This is no less racist, but because Chase isn't black, you let it slide), and he's a drug addict - but we also know that that is how he functions and how he performs his difficult tasks better than anyone else. The risk the show ran, or appeared to be running, was that it seemed House was going to get his comeuppance, so beloved of Hollywood hackery, for his abrasiveness and unorthodoxy. By comeuppance, I don't mean that House would have to go to jail - as already noted, that's not an option for a TV show. But what I didn't - with a passion, I didn't - want was to have House chastened, muzzled or emasculated by the experience. So the sight of him, fresh out of rehab, knocking back Vicodin in the cell in which he was spending the night for contempt of court, was a tremendous relief. I would have had to stop watching the show otherwise.

Sundries

2007-01-26T19:53:00.000Z

Not much going on here lately, largely because through a combination of tiredness, lethargy and apathy I haven't bothered to write anything, and certainly not because there aren't things going on in this city, this country or indeed the world on which I have a strong opinion. Too tired/bored/uninspired to write.

In fact, this is just a placeholder, to make sure that my archive doesn't have any more missing months like last summer when I went on a "too hot/stoned/busy to write" sabbatical and lost July and August.

In the meantime, it remains only for me to wish my infrequently knickerless but perenially beautiful friend D a happy birthday for a few days ago. Not that she reads this blog, and not that she'd recognise herself if she did (her initial isn't D, for a start, but it does have meaning for me) unless she followed that link to read about her knickerlessness, and even then there's no guarantee, the scatty bint. ;)

No shit.

2006-12-18T11:04:00.000Z

So after little more than 450 days of stewardship of the Ashes urn, we have surrendered it to the Australians. Who'da thunk?

Still, I don't consider this too much of a relapse by England. The Australians are oddly cock-a-hoop, which sits rather uncomfortably with their swagger as the natural owners of the urn. "IT'S AS GOOD AS OURS," screamed a headline yesterday, the byline promising the imminence of the Ashes returning to "where they belong". Yet if it were so much the natural order of things, you wouldn't think it would be such a big thing - particularly since the achievement of taking the Ashes back from a team shorn of Michael Vaughan, Marcus Trescothick and Simon Jones, and carrying numerous other injuries, has all winter had me thinking, unsurprisingly, of a line in The West Wing:

BARTLET: You know, I got elected to Congress by this state. This state sent me to Congress three time and elected me Governor, all without your help.

LEO grins.

BARTLET: Don't start!

LEO: No, seriously, that's a real political accomplishment considering that your family founded this state. Were you even opposed in any of those elections?

Indeed, the Australian reaction appears to have been one of relief more than anything else. It would be one thing to lose the Ashes in England, as it were in a surprise attack, when the Australians could easily point to a certain complacency - but in Australia, after weeks of intensive training and fired by the determination to regain them, against a decimated English team? That would have been humiliating. Fortunately, anyone even remotely connected with English cricket in a non-playing capacity appears to have fallen over himself in order to hasten the return of the urn to the Australians.

1. The ECB. England, by virtue of being the only country in the Northern hemisphere to play Test Cricket, is the only country to spend both summer and winter playing Test Cricket. Every other country gets at least the occasional (Southern hemisphere) winter off, since they can't all tour England at once. With no thought for the players' longevity whatsoever, the ECB has become hypnotised by the potential income on offer and has committed England to some 14 Tests a year for the last few years, not to mention a truly farcical number of one-day matches, at which England hardly excels, and which therefore merely acquaint the players with the losing habit. 14 Tests a year are particularly hard on fast bowlers, with the result that merely two years after finally having managed to put together a fast bowling attack worthy of the noun, it is in tatters due to injury and overwork. Andrew Flintoff's left ankle will from now on probably be permanently suspect; Stephen Harmison has sore shins and back trouble even when his radar and rhythm are working properly; Simon Jones has been out since September 2005 and may never play again. Only Matthew Hoggard, of the first choice pace quartet, remains unfettered. This has been a sharply exposed weakness in Australia, with England struggling to bowl Australia out twice in any match so far.

2. The ECB (again). When touring a country like Australia, players need to acclimatise and get a feel for the conditions before playing a Test series. Unfortunately, England were detained dicking around in various one-day competitions on the sub-continent and played one first-class match in Australia prior to the First Test. What idiot signed off on that touring schedule, wondered Australian fast bowler Brett Lee, and I with him.

3. The ECB (yet again). England's Australian bowling coach Troy Cooley did a great job with the aforementioned pace quartet in 2004 and 2005, culminating in their total neutralisation of one of the world's best batting line-ups, including Matthew Hayden, Ricky Ponting and Adam Gilchrist, who between them managed two centuries in five Tests in 2005. Naturally, the ECB felt that the thing to do was offer him less money than he was earning at present to stay on, so he took himself back to Australia. The blooding of a new attack to replace the injured parties has not been quite so successful without him.

4. Duncan Fletcher. Ian Botham called him pig-headed, and that is likely to be an edited-for-television version. The star debut of 2006 was Monty Panesar, whose left-arm spin claimed some of the most heavyweight wickets in Test Cricket, including Sachin Tendulkar, Mohammad Yousuf, Younis Khan and Inzamam-ul-Haq, was dropped from the first two Ashes Tests because Ashley Giles was back from injury after more than a year out of the game. His performances reflected that long sabbatical in the First Test, yet Fletcher picked him again for the Second Test, where once again he failed to shine and managed to drop Ricky Ponting on 40 into the bargain. Finally getting the point, he picked Panesar for the Third Test; Monty promptly took twice as many wickets in Australia's first innings as Giles had managed in the first two Tests.

5. The ECB and Duncan Fletcher. I can pinpoint the moment England lost the Ashes. It was back in September and I was on the DLR, reading about how Andrew Flintoff would captain England in Australia - this in spite of his demonstrably lacklustre performances as captain in India and Andrew Strauss' unmistakeable relishing of the role in England against Pakistan. Flintoff is like Botham. Captaincy doesn't suit him. It suits Strauss.

Roll on 2009.

Drinking with the Enemy

2006-12-15T14:10:00.000Z

I always feel like a spy when I meet my friend P for a drink. This is because he's a hardened campaigner, in the self-righteous, we-know-best, climbing-on-power-stations sense. Yes, he's a greenie, with an unshakeable faith in the benign potential of ever-more oppressive legislation to achieve his aims and a not unrelated instinctive hatred of business. Honestly, if we hadn't been at school together, in a hideous market town, where intelligence and discerning brought people together simply by virtue of their astonishing rarity; if we hadn't, in other words, forged our friendship in the fires of provincial school hell, I very much doubt we'd have enough in common to become good friends now. I love the guy, but there it is.

Before embarking on a career of directing others' lives to his personal satisfaction at Greenpeace, he cut his teeth trying to prevent them from defending themselves at the Campaign Against Arms Trade, and it was with a pair of CAAT newbies that I found him last night, giving them an informal seminar on activism - running meetings, soliciting funds from rich soi-disant "progressives", differentiating between internal and external politics, etc.. I was impressed with his fluency and grasp of technicalities (anyone can spout meretricious arguments, of course: it requires a greater acumen to do so successfully in the public arena) - although no doubt P would feel, given my notably unstellar record in the professional sphere, that my approbation is on the worthless side.

This is all by way of saying that, inevitably during such a conversation, they digressed briefly into an actual discussion about arms - which, equally inevitably given the philosophical pedigree and employment history of the three involved, was not so much a discussion as it was a mutual reaffirmation of adherence to the "progressive" line. When they'd gone, I asked P if he knew what the Second Amendment says. He didn't. From memory (it should be "well-regulated"), I said,

"It says that a well-ordered militia being necessary to the security of a free state the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

This is, in legal terms, shockingly ambiguous language, particularly for so vital and latterly so divisive a clause. There's an interesting page here that discusses the possible interpretations of several of the words - "militia", "well-regulated", "the people", "keep and bear" and "arms" - but in my view it misses out the most important and consequently the most ambiguous of the lot: "being". Is the statement declarative or conditional?

"A well-regulated militia is and always will be necessary to the security of a free state and consequently the right of the people...."

"While and only while it remains the case that a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, we accept that the right of the people...."

Personally, I go with the first: I simply don't trust government enough for them to have all the guns. An armed citizenry is a powerful disincentive to tyranny. This is, of course, to interpret "militia" as a private group of individuals on whom the government may call if necessary but who are in no way beholden to it and are therefore free to act in their own interests and in the interests of a free state - and that's without discussing the value of an armed citizenry in matters other than insurance against an overmighty state, such as protection of the person and of property. An armed citizenry is, famously, a polite citizenry.

The difficulty of going with the second interpretation is that it raises a whole raft of new problems, most of which come under the auspices of arbitration. Who shall decide if the time has come that a well-regulated militia is no longer necessary to the security of a free state, say with the establishment of a professional military and police force? By whose judgement should the people relinquish their right to defend themselves and their freedom on the basis that those are now adequately defended for them? This, of course, overlooks the fact that certainly the military and to a lesser extent the police force are under the control and in the pay of government anyway, so are hardly likely, except in extreme matters of conscience, to place others' liberty ahead of their own security. The assumption, in other words, that such a time might come to pass that individuals could safely surrender their right to protect themselves is as naïve as it is egotistical to assume the right to pronounce that time as having arrived.

So what of this country, with its knee-jerk handgun bans that have kept Olympic shooters safely out of the world rankings but spurred the criminal underworld to greater heights of gun violence, safe in the knowledge that they have nearly all the guns? To be honest, it's too depressing to bother with.

P might argue at this point that this is not CAAT's primary aim; rather it is to stop the international trade in arms to regions of conflict and the (insert emotive but intellectually empty word like "grotesque" here) profits being made from it by (insert Masters of War lyrics here). I would say: sorry, it's all part of the same thing. People want arms to protect themselves from people who already have arms. This applies to people you like as well as people you dislike. And expecting them to lie back and wait for government to come and protect them is like me lying back and waiting for Jennifer Connelly to fall out of the sky on to my dick. She was 36 a couple of days ago, by the way. Happy Birthday to her.

Manual Cant, Part II

2006-11-15T20:55:00.000Z

The Indifferent isn't showing any signs of loosening its grip on my Manual Cant Award for Masturbatory Self-righteousness.

"It is a fact of considerable importance that ... in more and more fields of policy nearly all the recognised 'experts' are, almost by definition, persons who are in favour of the principles underlying the policy. This is indeed one of the factors which tend to make so many contemporary developments self-accelerating. The politician who, in recommending some further development of current policies, claims that 'all the experts favour it,' is often perfectly honest, because only those who favour the development have become experts[;] the uncommitted ... are not counted as experts." - F.A. Hayek

In other words, anyone who has troubled to acquaint himself, insofar as that is possible, with the tremendous complexity of the science of climate change (such as it is), had probably decided, long before studying so much as a single graph or satellite image, exactly what the problem was and how to go about solving it; the science (such as it is) of climate change merely provides the excuse.

Brown vs Rule of Law

2006-11-13T11:35:00.000Z

So Gordon wasted no time in promising a change in the law following the acquittal of that deeply unpleasant pair, Nick Griffin and Mark Collett. Gosh. I am, in the words of Die Hard 2's Carmine Lorenzo, stunned. I gotta lie down. If there is insufficient evidence to convict, or if a jury can't be persuaded to convict under the existing law, why, just change the law! Surely there can be no doubt that these two are criminals? The law must surely be at fault if we can't make people like them prisoners of conscience? No, ridiculing them and exposing their arguments for the thinly-disguised bigotry and ignorant proto-supremacy that they clearly are will simply not do! They must be made examples of, so that people will learn that it's only OK to believe what you believe if you exist in sufficient numbers to make it politically convenient to support you.

They will, as someone, somewhere, quite rightly said, keep trying to put this guy in prison even if they have to make it a crime to be called Nick and Griffin at the same time. Which puts me in the awkward position of having to support this cockroach.

Like, actually, Saddam untied Iraq, man....

2006-11-13T10:57:00.000Z

The Manual Cant Award for Masturbatory Self-righteousness, had I not just invented it this moment, would be won consistently by the Indifferent for the increasingly implausible exercises in shrill hysteria that it appears to believe constitute headlines these days. Clearly believing that function should follow form, the Indy has, since its reincarnation as a tabloid (or fraudsheet, as I like to call them), steadily lost all the characteristics of a quality newspaper in favour of nuance-free war ranting and the continued employment of Robert Fisk.

All that headline means, after all, is that yesterday was Remembrance Sunday and there happens to be an extant combat situation in which British troops are participating and in which the enemy chose not to observe Remembrance Sunday. Apparently this proves the Indy right about the Iraq war. Go Indy! By "futile", can we infer that in your desperate anti-American zeal you've managed to convince yourself that Iraq would be a better, nicer, fluffier place with the bloodthirsty tyrant still at the wheel and that your strident moralising serves any other purpose than providing your editorial staff with the sub-erotic thrill of "righteous" dissent?

Nothing to hide. Everything to fear

2006-11-06T10:14:00.000Z

An illuminating conversation with a friend yesterday.

The fast encroaching surveillance society has worried and infuriated me for some time now, the explosive proliferation of CCTV cameras - now one for every 14 people - being only the most obvious example on a list that includes the terrifyingly imminent National Identity Register; the NHS database to which one appears to need at best only a nodding acquaintance with the practice of medicine to qualify for access and which will by law contain the entirety of an individual's medical records; the stated policy of the Serious Organised Crime Agency (which doesn't require its agents to swear the standard British Policeman's oath but does empower them to work in secret, unmarked and nonuniformed, with the power of arrest explicitly denied the similarly-attired intelligence servcices: in this respect SOCA is indistinguishable from a secret police) of reviewing public- and private-sector databases to find data-matching opportunities that could highlight suspicious behaviour by individuals that implies that they are involved in organised or financial crime; the use of individually-registered data cards as transport tickets enabling the tracking of individual movements and travel patterns and the accompanying fiscal punishment in the form of higher prices meted out to those that prefer untrackable paper tickets; the imminent passing of the Safeguarding Vulnerable Groups Bill which would prevent "listed" individuals (don't ask me what the criteria are for being listed, or why there is no oversight of such listing, or why there appears to be no legal recourse for those accidentally or maliciously listed for no good reason) from engaging in regulated activities, among the practical effects of which would be to enable the state to elbow its way into every personal transaction such as the paying of a trusted party to look after a relative without both parties involved having first gained offical sanction - I could go on. Well, I have, rather.

The most worrying aspect of this is not these transparent attempts by the state to control every aspect of everyone's lives in the most minute detail, although that is, in the scheme of things, a cause for grave concern; the most worrying aspect is the ignorant, incurious, blindly trusting acquiescence with which the majority of the populace greets each fresh assault on its self-ownership. The mantra is, of course, "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear" - the motto of fascists everywhere. It is, needless to say, only true if a) the thousands of individuals involved in the day-to-day running of the state's institutions are, to a man, utterly incorruptible; and b) the systems and technologies behind all these means of surveillance work perfectly, all the time. These are, I don't think I'm being unfair in suggesting, two monstrous unlikelihoods, even if you believe that there are people with nothing to hide - which there aren't. Everyone has something to hide. It might not entail blowing up rush-hour trains or sneaking back into a foreign country to ride its benefits gravy-train, but everyone has things that they'd rather not be made known to anyone else, particularly officialdom. The seemingly inexorable rise of the surveillance state will increasingly make such harmless secrecy (read: dignity) impossible.

Neither do people seem overly concerned about the rapidly-changing relationship between the individual and the state. The proliferation of surveillance on this level suggests nothing so much as an abandonment of the presumption of innocence: if in a free society only suspects are surveilled, then we are all becoming suspects - moreover of crimes we have not yet committed. Not so free.

The fatuous Charles Clarke, who clearly still hasn't either contrived to bump into a razor or found the time to grow a full beard, despite the considerable easing of his schedule in recent months, made perhaps the most ludicrous of all such claims in the middle of a Question Time of considerable vapidity last week. Casually dropping into his point the recent death of his mother (yes, Charles, our instinctive human sympathy will easily over-ride our intelligence), he asserted that the NHS database was absolutely vital because it enabled doctors as quickly as possible to access information about any drug courses a patient may be on; his mother, he said, had not had such a facility available to her ... it was coyly left hanging whether this had resulted in her passing.

What nonsense, anyway. If people are taking drugs which may cause an adverse reaction to others, or to a surgical procedure, or anything like that, why can't they simply carry a card which says so? Why can't doctors who prescribe these fabled drugs inform the patient that they are at risk if given other drugs in an emergency situation and therefore they must make this known to any other attending physician?

Because they can't be trusted to, of course - despite the fact that they'd only be putting their own life at risk.

This notion of cradle-to-grave tracking has more in common with the notion of cradle-to-grave welfare than may at first seem apparent. Just as the idea of a national health service begets the enforcement of nationalised health standards ("Why should we pay for your lifestyle?"), so the notion that the state will look after you from birth to death inculcates in people the idea that only the state can look after them, and that whatever the state wants to do in the ostensible furtherance of this aim must be not only sage but also benign.

Cradle-to-grave will keep you in the cradle until you go to your grave.

The "Speed Kills" cash cow

2006-11-02T10:48:00.000Z

This is what happens when you're slack, like I am, and let slide various things up over which you can't really be bothered to get worked (as Churchill might have said): it all happens at once.

First of all, Diane Abbott. Miss Abbott is not someone for whom I ordinarily would have a great deal of time, icon of the Left and die-hard Brownite as she is. Nonetheless, seeing her every week on This Week, with never so much as a glimpse of sofa between Michael Portillo and her, has left me with a certain respect for her; muddled and misguided though she may well be, she is articulate, sharp and honest (not to mention highly amusing when appearing on This Week at least halfway in her cups).

Not all the time, unfortunately. At this point I would link to the article that has exercised me, but it was in the Evening Stranded which rather pathetically doesn't archive its opinion columns; I've looked on Diane's site but it hasn't appeared there, at least yet. It was an article about speeding, in which Miss Abbott professed herself serenely unconcerned with the habit of endlessly ripping off drivers for minor (and usually accidental) infractions of ridiculous laws, indeed claiming, in a remarkable display of straw-manning, that is was both justified and necessary.

The crux of her argument was that since the widespread introduction of speed cameras and the imposition of arbitrary speeding fines, they have had the desired effect and brought speeding down, and that therefore it is pure selfishness on the part of the anti-camera lobby to gripe about the methods employed by this government to fund its endless schemes and initiatives (she didn't mention the last bit, of course; the speed camera does exactly what it appears to do and the millions pouring into local governments' coffers are merely an embarrassing by-product of the system which - hey! - might as well be put to "good" use). She suggests that it is absurd for criminals (as she sees speeding drivers) to complain about the spread of speed cameras, and likens it to the notion of shoplifters getting upset when stores employ extra security guards.

Of course, there is a mendacious elision, as it were, at work here. Speeding is not a crime, per se. There is nothing intrinsically wrong, morally speaking, with moving across the surface of the planet above a certain speed. In that sense it is not like theft, which we hold to be fundamentally wrong, to infringe on another's rights to property: moving above a certain arbitrarily-defined speed does not automatically infringe on another's rights.

Why, then, is speeding illegal? Naturally, because it is held to be dangerous: it is held to cause accidents which cause harm and injury to others, which does infringe on others' rights, and insofar as that is true then it is perfectly proper that we should restrict speeding in order to minimise the likelihood of causing harm or injury to others through motor accidents.

But exactly how far is it true? Diane grandly informs us, as I say, that since the widespread introduction of speed cameras speeding had inexorably declined. That may well be so, but the actual objective of speed cameras is not to reduce speeding (in itself not undesireable) but to reduce accidents which, it is claimed, are caused by speeding. So you'd think Diane would rather trumpet the achievement of the intended objective than the rather obvious and inductive news that speed cameras reduce speeding. But she can't, of course, since accidents have not been reduced; only speeding.

Speed does not kill. Bad driving kills. Poor concentration kills. Lack of anticipation kills. Poor judgment of speed and distance kills. Drunkenness kills. Insufficiently stringent examination of new drivers kills. The ridiculous situation, whereby a learner is not allowed to practise on the motorway and so generally his first experience of driving on the motorway will be alone, as a newly-qualified driver, kills. Irresponsibility kills. I should far rather that the roads were filled with well-driven cars at speeds higher than are presently allowed than that the present situation be allowed to continue. But it will be, because, as usual, the government believes that as long as it noisily proclaims its committment to achieving an objective, and makes a big fuss about how it's going to do so, in the end it doesn't really matter whether it genuinely achieves it or not, as long as people think they are doing so - and in this case, of course, there is the added bonus of the constant influx of fines from speed cameras. I am incidentally willing to bet that cameras cause as many accidents as they allegedly prevent, when drivers who are proceeding at a speed entirely appropriate to the conditions which happens to be higher than the posted limit (which doesn't, of course, vary day or night, rain or shine, fog or clear, busy or quiet) notice one ahead of them and are forced to brake for no reason, or when constantly being on the look out for them, or when constantly worrying about creeping over the limit and so spending far too much time watching the speedometer and not enough watching the road.

Gosh, that took a while. Can we take my bitter tract on the surveillance state into which we have blindly wandered as read, for the moment?

Hate Crime is Thoughtcrime

2006-10-26T09:13:00.000Z

On a bus this morning, I read the following, plastered to the back of the bus in front of me.

"A Hate Crime is any behaviour (verbal or physical) that is motivated by hatred of another person simply because of a particular characteristic of that person. Typically, hate incidents are related to a persons [sic] race, colour, religion, faith, gender, disability, age and sexuality."

Interesting. Historically, so far as I know, the notion of motive has been used to establish only the likelihood of a particular person having committed a crime, i.e., motive is assessed only insofar as it indicates guilt. This is, of course, a tenet of equality under the law: all citizens should receive an equal measure of protection by the law. Insulating certain sociological groups from "hatred" seems to me clearly to contravene this maxim; likewise, commit the same crime as someone else and you should receive the same punishment.

But no. "The Criminal Justice Act 2003 introduced tougher sentences for offences motivated by hatred of the victim’s sexual orientation (this must now be taken into account by the sentencing court as an aggravating factor, in addition to race or religious hate motivation)." (What a terrifying website, by the way.)

So, if I went out now and assaulted a straight man, I might get, say, five years (more like five months, but never mind). If I assaulted a gay man, I might similarly get five years. But if I assaulted a gay man while explaining to him that I was doing so because he was gay, then I would get, perhaps, seven or eight years.

It's not just a question of violence either. "Abusive gestures" are apparently hate crimes, if they are motivated by hate. Flipping someone off is now illegal if the sentiment behind it is, for example, racist. But flipping someone off is not, to my knowledge, illegal per se.

I can't see how this isn't thoughtcrime. The crime is the same; the only thing different about it is a perceived motivation, which results in a higher sentence. The extra time on the sentence is punishment for thinking a certain way.

To be sure, I don't particularly like people who think that way; still less do I like people who commit violence based on such ignorant thoughts. But the thoughts cannot be punished.

The crowning absurdity, however, is this inconspicuous little sentence, explaining the Home Office's definition of a hate crime: "Any incident, which constitutes a criminal offence, which is perceived by the victim or any other person as being motivated by prejudice or hate." (My italics.)

Wonderful. The interfering busybody's charter. I love my country.

Elitist populism

2006-10-22T12:08:00.000Z

An astonishing conversation with two friends on Friday night. I learned, in rapid succession, that there were moves afoot to instigate a ban on the playing of music on mobile phones on public transport, and that my friends thought this was a capital idea and could see nothing wrong with it. "It's anti-social behaviour," said one. Well, duh.

Where to begin? Of course, I'd prefer it if idiotic children didn't pollute the atmosphere of a bus or tube with the pathetic, tinny attempts at reproducing music made by the average mobile phone loudspeaker. Their music is almost universally awful; and even when it isn't, no enjoyment can be gained from hearing it in such low quality. There can really be no denying that the primary purpose of playing it in public is not, therefore, to enjoy it (even though they actually like it) but to impose it on others: it's the 21st century version of swaggering into a peaceful diner and choosing some obnoxious rock n' roll on the jukebox. But I'd also prefer it if they were gagged when on the public, so that neither did we have to hear their obnoxious conversations about inanities conducted in appalling accents. That, to me, is just as annoying and if anything more intrusive, yet I can't see anyone campaigning for bondage on the buses.

The answer to life's little problems is surely not to keep banning things we find unfavourable, something that you'd think would be appreciated by my friends, both of whom work in the creative arts. No doubt both would argue until blue in the face that no piece of art, however objectionable or transgressive, should be banned no matter how many people clamoured for it to be so - as would I. Equally certainly, both would at this point argue that art is not the same thing as a bunch of chavs on a bus listening to drivel and forcing everyone else to do the same. Leaving aside the notion that public art leaves people equally little choice in observing it, and that much of it (e.g., Alison Lapper pregnant) is dreck and politically-motivated dreck at that, the question is merely a matter of perspective. As the elitist snobs we are, naturally we consider artistic freedom to be of greater importance than that of feral juveniles to listen to music on buses - and so it is, in cultural terms. But the law must be above culture: it must be objective.

Such a law would be arbitrary and would discriminate against a stratum of society, which is undesireable regardless of how much that stratum of society is disliked by lawmakers or "the elite". The best guarantee of freedom of expression in the arts is to observe the same for the feral juveniles - it is the old principle of equality before the law, the maxim that the law is applied equally to all, blindly and without favour. Laws passed to eliminate specific forms of behaviour that are not in themselves illegal but are merely annoying, that do not in themselves cause physical or financial injury or institute coercion, cannot be said to be just under the rule of law, no matter how many people find that behaviour irritating. I personally, as I have said before, find the niqab offensive in the extreme, but I appreciate that banning it is probably not an option, even though the niqab is representative of coercion in a way that crappy music on buses simply is not.

"If it is to survive, democracy must recognise that it is not the fountainhead of justice and that it needs to acknowledge a conception of justice which does not necessarily manifest itself in the popular view on every particular issue." - F.A. Hayek

Tell me about your mother

2006-10-12T09:02:00.000Z

Sir Clement Freud today gives a perfect example of how to forge a career in journalism despite having nothing to say but a famous name under which to say it. See also Peaches Geldof, George Monbiot, Celia Walden, Paul Foot, Poppy Sebag-Montefiore, Harry Mount ... in his youth Sir Clement despaired of being famous solely as Sigmund's grandson and yearned for a solid basis for his fame; naturally, he became an MP (which, implausibly enough, appeared to satisfy this desire for legitimacy) and after 14 years undistinguished by much in the way of achievement, other than being "out-grandfathered" in China by Winston S Churchill, was knighted. Clearly feeling he had put paid to any suspicion that his name had opened any doors, he became a journalist. This morning's article was the first of his I can remember seeing in the Telegraph, possibly ever - although I dimly recall a few Times articles a decade or so ago.

With such a rarefied workrate, you'd think that when this giant of the Press vouchsafed to comment on a piece of news, it might contain a germ of an argument, painstakingly conceived and honed over a considerable period - but that would presumably be rather too modernist and would therefore jar with the real thrust of the piece, in which Sir Clement rails against the infuriating habit language has of evolving and the way most people, lacking his own patrician certainty of superiority (which is nothing to do with having such a famous name, of course), manage to keep half a thumb on such developments.

Salman Rushdie offered his own opinion on the niqab: "Veils suck". As a connoisseur of foppish belletrism, I can certainly think of more impressive ways to phrase such a proposition, but the sentiment it expresses is second to none. Sir Clement, conversely, clearly feels that as a successful and much-admir'd author, it is incumbent upon Mr Rushdie to use better words and dismisses as "attention-seeking" undertaken by those who feel the limelight is beginning to desert them such inapt uses of modern slang. The notion that Mr Rushdie is seeking any more attention from, for example, the kind of people that force their women to wear sacks on their heads is among the most preposterous and laughable as has been advanced for many years.

Sir Clement is clearly not short on attention himself (because of his glittering political and journalistic career, you understand, and nothing to do with his name) and so needn't trouble himself to think of language as a living thing. Unfortunately the same appears to apply to the women behind the veils. Having innacurately defined "suck", for the benefit of the moustachioed Colonels spluttering into their marmalade, as a word popularised by its similarity to a well known expletive, ie having failed to realise that saying that something bad "sucks" is merely a shortened version of saying it "sucks cock", Sir Clement deigns in his last paragraph to proffer an substantive proposition, opining that veils do not, in fact, suck, unlike "bad plays, excruciating opera [natch] - and, in this instance, Salman Rushdie". He does not, of course, trouble to defend this opinion. It is surely enough that it has come from a Freud and has been elegantly expressed (one assumes his advice that Mr Rushdie "keep [his] gob shut" was offered in the spirit of irony).

So, keeping women hidden in bin-bags is OK, but using modern slang despite being a successful author merits an article castigating the miscreant? I should go into psychoanalysis, if I were you, Sir Clement. You've got nothing to say here.

The return of the cokehead

2006-10-11T10:56:00.000Z

Here we are then. After an absence from our screens (or monitor, in my copyright-infringing case) of three whole US TV seasons, he's back with a new show. Of course, I'm still smarting that the ingrate NBC network, unforgivably, fired him from his last show, thus depriving us of the chance to see the entire arc of Bartlet's presidency realised according to his considerable vision and, of course, with his unmatched writing skills. Instead we got the Soap King John Wells and his team of scratching hacks.

Bygones. Apart from having Brad Whitford in glasses and not having yet found a role for Janel Moloney, Studio 60 has the makings of a classic Sorkin series. His customary astonishing writing and seemingly endless invention are present and correct. It is as carefully and as flawlessly cast as both The West Wing and Sports Night were - and I admit to throwing four separate devil-horns during the opening credits for the pilot: one each to greet "Music by WG Snuffy Walden"; "Director of Photography: Thomas Del Ruth"; "Written by Aaron Sorkin"; "Directed by Thomas Schlamme". We're puttin' the band back together....

Still, it's hard to see how he can ever top The West Wing: not only because I don't think even a genius such as he can hit such a run of form again (those first two seasons ... gah) but also because, simply, nothing he can choose to write about can possibly have the built-in electricity or emotional and intellectual weight of a series set in the White House - especially Bartlet's White House. To get his audience to care about the Studio 60 characters half as much as we came to care about Bartlet and his senior staff will be some considerable feat. I look forward to watching him try.

You'll find out when you reach the top: you're on the bottom

2006-10-09T09:47:00.000Z

Gosh. Three weeks since a post about Islamist insanity. Anyone would think they're developing a facility for pluralism.

No such luck, of course. It's simply too exhausting and too depressing to summon the faculties necessary even to try and make sense every day of the knots into which we as a society tie ourselves in an attempt to pacify extremist opinion. That's why it's so cheering, particularly so given the source, to hear Jack Straw's comments on the niqab.

Of course, he's positioning himself for a run at the deputy leadership of the Labour party. Whatever. There could scarcely be a worse person to occupy that post, which while Labour is in power means being Deputy Prime Minister, than John Prescott, for whom the word "yob" is perhaps an overestimation of his gentility and intelligence. If self-interested profile-raising is the only thing that will rouse politicians from their trough (of which more later) and get them to raise unpopular issues, so be it. It is particularly noteworthy in Mr Straw's case, since no-one gets elected in his consituency without carrying the Muslims. (Mr Prescott's attempt to slap Mr Straw down for his remarks merely betrays his (Prescott's) inability to come to terms with the fact that his time in high office is, blessedly, nearly at an end.)

But! Surely as one with strong liberal (ie libertarian, for the avoidance of confusion) leanings, I frown on attempts to dictate dress, whether forcing women into or out of the niqab? Well, yes. The difference is that whereas women forced to wear bin-bags are generally themselves the objects of coercion - from their hypocritical menfolk who are happy to wear all the relaxed Western clothes they can get their hands on while trying to shield themselves from the horror of temptation by forcing the female form to conceal itself - any law banning or restricting the use of bin-bags would merely codify our disapproval of such coercion; since so few women wear them voluntarily, it can hardly be said to be an infringement on choice. The state has the monopoly on coercion, and that coercion is best used only in the prevention of other, illegitimate, coercion.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Mr Straw has been untypically brave enough to start the debate, and we must now lean back and give gangway to the blast of self-righteous opprobrium that will signal the Left's attempt to stifle the debate by branding racist or bigoted anyone who doesn't buy into their orthodoxy. So much we know. Thereafter, however, ground must not be conceded.

Much the same can be said of, or more accurately should be made clear to, David Cameron, who in one of his recent "Webcameron" vidblogs asked, inter alia, three questions you'd never expect to hear from a Conservative: in fact I'd never expect to hear them from anyone but the most dyed-in-the-wool statist. "Should we ban advertising to children?" "Is it time to end cheap air travel?" "Are companies a force for good or not?"

The first two are reasonable enough points to raise. The targetting of non-adults by advertisers is certainly ethically questionable, and there are of course concerns beyond the economic regarding the proliferation of cheap flights. However, Cameron's mistake, one he makes worryingly often for an alleged Conservative, was, of course, to suggest that it is the place of the state to do anything about these problems. Children, of course, can be advertised to as much as advertisers like, but without the parents' involvement it would be a total waste of money since children get the vast majority of what money they have from their parents. It is surely therefore the parents' responsibility to ensure either that their children don't spend their money unwisely or simply to refuse to buy them the things they saw advertised and consequently want. As well as keeping the state out of family lives, this might teach children who would otherwise never learn anthing about it a little about the value of money. Similarly, "ending" cheap air travel, even on non-economic grounds, clearly entails price-fixing and would be yet another step on the road to a command economy and the concomitant state. Far better to continue to try to inform people about the true cost of their choices and try to persuade them to make different ones. Anyone at this point suggesting that most people are incapable of making the "correct" choices without coercion (coercion which would not, let it be noted, serve to prevent any more fundamental form of coercion, and would therefore be undesirable) I can safely denounce as an elitist with no understanding of liberty.

It is the last question that is truly staggering. "Are companies a force for good or not?" Uh, "Dave"? You're asking this question on a video that's being recorded on a tiny device prior to being uploaded on the Internet to be downloaded in minutes by people all over the world, who will then be able to transfer it to small portable devices and then watch and listen to you while they go to work! Who pioneered these technologies?

"Never mind that," is the answer. "The really important thing is, can I make political mileage out of exploiting people's ignorance of capitalism? Can I persuade them that companies desperately need regulating more severely and that I'm just the chap to do it? Can I make myself and my party seem indispensible while continuing to enjoy all the perks that come from my vocation being treated like a job?"

Companies are nearly always a force for good. Ambitious politicians are a much greyer area.

An avalanche of sanctimony

2006-10-02T20:08:00.000Z

Oh dear.

It would seem Little George has misbehaved. He is in disgrace. He has "misbehaved". He is in disgrace.

Oh dear.

What nonsense it all is, of course. It is tolerably widely acknowledged, to say the least, that one of the most readily identifiable, not to say most widely recognised, traits of autism (or at least a certain type of autism) is an unusual, even freakish, mental facility, whether that manifest itself in ability as a human calculator or as an instinctive musical genius. Strange feats of memory certainly fit into this overall theme: I first heard of autism watching a documentary many years ago about a boy who could draw, from memory after one look, the facade of any building, even the most floridly over-designed Gothic styles (which I love, but they are indubitably overdesigned). The conversation in question, let us not forget, was about Mr Osborne's peculiar feats of memory - and it was his interlocutor, not the shadow Chancellor himself, who first described it as autism. The Chancellor, of course, is also renowned, rightly or wrongly, as a man of considerable intellect and a devastating command of figures in support of (if not actually germane to) his argument.

Not that this mattered to any of the heroically pompous commentariat that were invited to opine. It is apparently OK for the journalist in question casually to describe as autistic an unusual mental or mathematical facility (which is accurate) but not for the shadow Chancellor to say the same of Gordon Brown. Even assuming that Mr Osborne was referring instead to Mr Brown's equally renowned social maladjustment and inability to work with others (which is also accurate), why is it OK for the journalist to offer one lazy stereotype of autism and not for Mr Osborne to offer another? Because one's perceived as negative and one isn't? Please. Can you say cognitive dissonance?

The difference is, of course, that beating a journalist's imagined slight into the ground isn't going to do anyone's career any good - but not so the shadow Chancellor. Lib Dem spokesmen have a living to make, after all. Nick Hornby was just being his usual idiotic self, one assumes.

See you in court, Lotus....

2006-09-27T13:26:00.000Z

Apparently, we have now become so finely attuned to the sound of racism that we can even detect it in cars' engines. It is now possible, it seems, for the casual observer to discern a difference between opening the throttle a few times in neutral with no discriminatory agenda and doing so in a manner which implies belief in the inherent superiority of one's own race. Gosh. Chief Inspector Jenkins must have quite some ears: a kind of universal absolute pitch for noises of hatred. No doubt Lotus will soon find themselves under investigation for making racist-sounding V8s.

It's comforting, too, to know that the blurring of the line between race and ~~Islam~~ religion continues apace. Having failed, for the moment, to get much traction for the laughable Religious Hatred Bill, which attempted to codify ~~Islam~~ religion in the same terms as race, which is to say a condition into which one is born and over which one has no control and no option to change (which one might, in fairness, think describes tyrannical Islam tolerably well; nonetheless in theory at least religions are elective institutions, unlike race), it seems Plan B has been adopted, which is to treat ~~Muslims~~ religious people as though they were of a race anyway.

Such is the nature of the farcical routine of self-abasement and moral cowardice in which we, as a country and a civilisation, are presently engaged.

Yet more simulacra of ecstatic fury and crocodile tears

2006-09-16T13:42:00.000Z

Another day, another effigy-burning.

And, naturally, it displays a wilful, almost autistic urge on the part of Muslims to misinterpret - or perhaps, more accurately, credulously to allow to have misinterpreted for them by clerics - anything said about them, their holy text, or their prophet. Are we really to believe that they are all so universally stupid as to consider that when Pope Benedict XVI quoted Byzantine Emperor Manuel II Paleologus, in dialogue with "an educated Persian" on the subject of the rationality of religion and its compatibility with the Greek spirit of philosophical inquiry and who considered the early (pre-Mohammedan) Koran's injunction that "there is no compulsion in religion" incompatible with the Prophet's later teaching concerning the spreading of the faith by the sword (which cannot be said to be any tremendous theological insight, frankly), as saying, "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached," they all thought it was the Pope saying these things directly and that he subscribed to such notions?

Presumably not. Unthinking subscription to mediæval cults doesn't necessarily presuppose a total lack of higher brain functions. Whether or not any of them had individually happened across those words, they had nonetheless been written down for some 600 years, which is much older than even the most deluded, sub-Brown Catholic-conspiracy theorist nutbox can possibly believe that the Pope is. So, assuming we can take it as read that the billion "alienated" Muslims do not, in fact, believe that the Pope was using his own words to describe his own opinions, what are we to make of their reaction?

Another opportunity to kick up some fuss, presumably. Another opportunity to prance around like magnificent poufs waving signs urging severe physical punishment on those who dare to take a different viewpoint. ("Behead those who mock Islam" makes, if you ask me, a pretty efficient mockery of "the religion of peace" all on its own: does that mean the chap waving it around should be beheaded too?) Another chance to drive for more lily-livered appeasment from the terrified, morally uncertain Christian/secular West. Another little tap on the Sharia nail in the coffin of freedom. It doesn't hurt that it's the Pope bearing the brunt of the ill-considered opprobrium this time, either.

The price of liberty

2006-09-11T09:29:00.000Z

Five years ago today I was approaching the end of a summer of no little indolence. I'd stayed on in my hall of residence over the summer rather than return to the clam and filth of London in July and August (consider, if you will, the impossible conditions prevalent here recently) and apart from having made half-hearted attempts to find employment (item: working in newly-opened bar - completed training weekend (! - surely "training half-hour"?) then blew it off on account of the deliberately hideous uniform; item: working in bars and restaurants around the Open golf tournament - blew it off on account of 5am reveille; item: did a few days' jobbing work in and around my hall - blew it off on account of it being severely infra dig and on account of my rapidly mounting distaste for the disastrous effect of the summer heat on my stout and deeply, wildly unattractive lady boss) had for the most part stayed up late, slept late, made the occasional trip to the supermarket to stock my newly-acquired fridge and more-or-less single-handedly kept the local Deals-on-Wheels™ skunk supplier in business while attempting to write a film and engaging in a correspondence seduction of its putative star, who was at the time exposing much of her extremely becoming form to the Los Angeles sun.

I don't mention any of this in order to contrast it with any seriousness of my response to, or any fundamental shift in my attitude inspired by, the attacks of September 11th 2001. I'm merely setting the scene. (The film was made, by the way, some 14 months later, by which time I had been fortunate enough to experience its star in all her fearsome glory (although I must admit to having exerted very little influence on the final approach, as it were); we're still friends, though not so much with the nudity these days.) There I was, then, only just dressed on that Tuesday afternoon (it being barely later than 2pm BST; I had, of course, been up until six or so that morning smoking furiously and writing slowly) - when thundering down the corridor came the colossal form of one of the few other people in my hall at the time. We were mostly on the same corridor (for the ease of the cleaning staff) and so he was simply banging on doors, yelling, in what even for a flamboyant, 20-stone, homosexual Swiss was a shockingly loud manner, that we should all "come and look at the fucking TV!" Which we did.

There's nothing that can at this point be said that hasn't been said already by writers far more talented than I. I was disbelieving (although, being still slightly fugued from the previous night, slow to grasp the sheer enormity of the spectacle unfolding in New York and its far-reaching implications which we are, of course, still feeling today and will continue so to do for some considerable time yet); we watched, smoking heavily, the occasional "Christ" or "Fuck's sake" punctuating the equally stunned though rather more eloquent commentary on the TV. Then I went and made an entirely fatuous post to a newsgroup I read, which remains to this day available in Google's archive, and was deservedly utterly ignored, receiving not one reply while the group experienced its busiest day in history.

The reaction of others in the group, though, should have been an indication of what was to come. Barely had the second tower fallen but the arguments that would come to dominate the next five years had already been soundly thrashed out, rehearsed and turned any number of different ways. People had fallen into clichéd roles: the arrogant rednecks (one actually invoked the "you'd all be speaking German" canard), the lily-livered appeasers, the supercilious Europeans ... friendships and emnities that survive to this day were formed in the heat of the immediate aftermath of that surreal New York morning.

Afterwards: blah. The world changed: duh. Clash of civilisations, oil grab, fuelling radicalism, blah blah blah Usenetconspiracytheorycakes. I'm not particularly comfortable with the War on Turr, but I know a mediæval theocracy of repression when it flies a plane into a building; I know that I prefer an open society to a closed one; I know that I prefer women in skimpy clothes to women in bin-bags - and not just becaude I'm a perv but because it means they are free to dress like that if they wish; I know that I like my science up-to-date and, you know, scientific; and for all that I can't draw to save my life I know that I like being able to draw whatever I like, however badly I do it. I know that all these things are in danger at the moment, from within and without. I also know that:

War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.

So said no less a pacifist utilitarian than J.S. Mill, who knew from Spinoza that peace is not merely the absence of war, "it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice." We will not have peace merely by stopping fighting; neither will we have security.

Classic Italian corruption.

2006-09-10T12:22:00.000Z

As I type, the Italian Grand Prix is in full swing at Monza. Michael Schumacher, in a Ferrari, is trailing Renault driver Fernando Alonso by 12 points in the Drivers' Championship, with every chance of overhauling him if the disparity between the two cars' relative performance remains at present levels. Yesterday, Schumacher qualified second on the grid for the race; Alonso fifth. Qualifying takes place in a time-limited session, but as long as a driver has crossed the line to start a new lap within that time, he may complete the lap and have the time stand even if the session time has meanwhile run out. A flat-out lap at Monza, crossing the line at full speed with tyres at operating temperature, takes roughly 1m 22s, so when Alonso emerged from the pits at 50mph on cold tyres with 1m 30s remaining in the qualifying session, he wasn't going to have to hang around if he was going to cross the line to start his hot lap before the time ran out. So it proved: Alonso posted his fastest sector times of any lap in the 2nd and 3rd sectors of this particular out lap, and in the end he crossed the line to start the clock on his hot lap with barely 2 seconds remaining in the qualifying session. Unfortunately for him, it so happened that some 3- or 400 yards behind him for the duration of his out lap was the second Ferrari driver, Felipe Massa. The Ferrari F1 team is an extremely efficient organisation dedicated to securing as many points as possible, and is certainly not above a spot of bureaucratic wrangling, particularly at its home circuit. A complaint was lodged, breathtaking in its gall and utterly fatuous in its conception, that Alonso has blocked or impeded Massa while on his out lap and that Massa had consequently lost "up to 0.3s". The facts that Massa was never remotely close enough to have been impeded by Alonso and that Alonso was clearly driving absolutely flat-out in order to cross the line in time, which he barely managed to do, clearly weren't going to prevent Ferrari from shamelessly appealing to the (Italian) circuit authorities, who obligingly stripped Alonso of his three fasted qualifying times (an appropriately arbitrary punishment, never before imposed for qualifying infractions real or imagined as far as I can remember), which demoted him to tenth on the grid.

If the Championship ends up being decided in Schumacher's favour by fewer then three or four points, it's a pretty good bet that this piece of partisan manœuvering will have decided the outcome. Still, it won't be the first time Schumacher has won a title in thoroughly questionable circumstances, and I doubt he'll let such sporting considerations trouble him in the slightest.

Cameron delenda est?

2006-09-10T11:11:00.000Z

I rather hope that this is simply an artless sop to the kind of ill-informed person who thinks No Logo was a book that had anything valuable to say, rather than an indication of the kind of ignorance with which we can expect to be goverened should he win.

Watching things die, from an uncomfortable proximity

2006-09-09T17:51:00.000Z

Back in April, I looked forward with slight trepidation to the release of the new Tool album. In May, I'd heard it but wasn't ready to offer an opinion.

As I suggest in those posts, there was a time when this admission would have been utterly earth-shaking: but I haven't listened to 10,000 Days voluntarily (that is to say, of my own volition; I don't mean that I've been tied down and forced to listen to it, simply that there have been times when someone else has put it on and I've listened to it) since, I would think, the middle of June.

Part of the reason for this, to be sure, has to do with the experience of seeing them live at the Hammersmith Apollo on the 13th and 14th of June. The album had only been out a week, which some would consider a problem, especially for music as dense as Tool's - but then, Lateralus had barely been out for three weeks when I saw them in 2001, and that was a thoroughly unforgettable experience. No, the problem with the gigs was threefold.

1: Length (a common enough complaint, hur hur). Previously, when I have seen Tool, they have been supported by instantly forgettable (at best) bands seemingly selected (by Justin Chancellor, on the British dates, apparently) for the easy contrast they provide between their own stunning mediocrity (or worse) and Tool's overpowering genius. This, more than anything, has left me with a great antipathy for support bands, since the time they spend pissing about in front of an unreceptive crowd and then having their gear removed eats heavily into the time the band everyone's actually come to see can spend on stage before contravening the venue's no doubt fatuous curfew. Hence, no doubt, the rise in popularity of "An Evening With..." shows in the last few years, now a staple of, for example, Dream Theater's tours, where they take full advantage of the extra time allowed them by not having a support band and play for at least two-and-a-half hours. So I was pleased to learn that there would not be a support band at these Tool shows. At last, I though to myself, I'll get to see Tool play a decently full setlist.

More fool me. On the way into the venue (of which more, vitriolically, later), we were informed by notice that Tool would take to the stage at 8 and be off by 10. I knew from reading reports of previous shows from this tour that this would include a break, during which the members of Tool would congregate near Danny's drum riser and sit down for a rest, which depending on your point of view is either a touching moment of congregation with the fans or a staggeringly self-regarding opportunity to be cheered at wildly for sitting down. As it turned out, they took to the stage at closer to 8.20, had their break and were gone by 10.10: a bog-standard hour and forty minutes - not exactly pushing the boat out for fans in a city where they've played 6 times in 14 years before these dates and who always give them a raturous reception. It's easy to conclude that they were going through the motions, but the alternative reflects scarcely any better on Tool: that they were careful to get off the stage in good time because of the absurd conditions of entry they had imposed on their fans.

2: Absurd conditions of entry. As someone who had finally, after a good decade of concerted sybarism (including a heavily narcotic five years at university), recently acquired a working habit, I came straight to the first night from work, complete with bag. I, along with, needless to say, a good 35 or 40% of the crowd who were, for various reasons, in exactly the same position, was stunned to discover that, rather than simply having our bags searched (for recording equipment, one assumes), as is quite normal and widely accepted, we would be required to hand them in at the cloakroom. Initially I was mainly concerned that, this action being compulsory, we wouldn't be charged for the use of the cloakroom, and indeed we weren't, but after the show I queued for at least an hour to reclaim my bag. I had also assumed, when depositing my bag before the show, that this was a venue-enforced policy.

More fool me. The venue's security staff were at great pains to make sure we all knew that this was entirely Tool's policy (presumably to stave off the inevitable riot that would otherwise have kicked off). This struck me, I have to say, as completely pathetic, head-up-your-ass, self-important precious rockstar bullshit. Clearly Tool were trying to prevent the gig being recorded, but I have to say to them, the gig will always be recorded. People will smuggle in equipment up their asses if they have to. Fucking get over it. If you think it's OK to alienate and seriously inconvenience a bunch of fans (I missed the last train home as a result of queueing for my bag for nearly as long as Tool played in the first place and had to walk the last two miles home, getting in at 2am for a 7.30 start) just on the off-chance that it might stop one or two of the ten people who inevitably will have recorded the gig, then you have definitively become that egomaniac rockstar caricature that you probably found so pathetic in your early days.

3: Setlist. For the first time I was able to see both nights Tool played in London. In 2002 (the last time they toured the UK) I had exam commitments and struggled to make it to one show; in 2001 I saw them in Manchester and missed both London shows; they were sold out in 1997 (one show) and I wasn't aware they were playing in 1994 (one show: those are the six shows they played in London between 1992 and 2006). In 2001 and 2002, they mixed up the setlists of the two London shows to great effect, including a world premiere of The Patient for the second night of the 2001 shows and rare performances of H, Flood and 4° in 2002. So I had high hopes for the second night after a first night setlist almost dreary in its predictability.

More fool me. The songs played were exactly the same, and the only way the order was different on the second night was that the opening song was pushed back to the middle of the first set. It threw Maynard's first night question, "How many of you are coming tomorrow?" (half the crowd, at least, cheered), into sharp, ironic relief. What was the point of ascertaining that so many people were coming the second night only to give them exactly the same set? More egomania, I suspect.

A disillusioning experience all round, then. (Tool themselves were, it must be said, tight as toast (although that can hardly be surprising given the rigid nature of their setlist) - but nearly everything else about the shows was underwhelming to say the least.) But I also wonder if I'd not have been prepared to cut Tool a little more slack over the whole farrago if I'd been getting on better with 10,000 Days, an album with 11 tracks yet only 6 recognisable songs.

It starts off promisingly enough, Vicarious bearing Maynard's trademark pith as it discusses our current widespread addiction to others' suffering, whether sought (reality TV) or unsought (war, famine, disaster: "I need to watch things die, from a good safe distance" is a classic Tool lyric set, it must be said, to a flat-out classic piece of Tool instrumentation. (Not for nothing are Tool referred to as the thinking man's AC/DC, who have been making the same album for thirty years. Nothing wrong with that: find a style that works for you and make it work for you, is what I say.) The next track, Jambi, seems rather unfocused, save another storming pile of riffage - and that's the end of the heavy section of this album. Again, nothing wrong with that per se - there are plenty of non-heavy songs I like - but here's where the matrimonial beatification begins.

Maynard has already written a couple of great songs about, or for, his mother, Judith Marie Keenan: A Perfect Circle's Judith, which took her to task for her continued religious faith in the light of her devastating stroke ("Fuck your God, your Lord, your Christ. He did this: took all you had and left you this way - still you pray, never stray, never taste of the fruit, never thought to question why. It's not like you killed someone, not like you drove a hateful spear into his side. You praise the one who left you broken down and paralysed.") and Tool's jimmy, concerning his own reaction to the stroke in his childhood ("What was it like to see the face of your own stability suddenly look away, leaving you with the dead and hopeless?"). Nonetheless, her recent death some 27 years (or 10,000 days, geddit?) after her stroke has apparently caused him to look afresh at this personal tragedy, and he appears to have concluded, in the diptych Wings for Marie and 10,000 Days (Wings Part II), that his mother pretty much ought to be canonised, which is fair enough I suppose - but the joke is the more-or-less direct comparison he makes between her and Mary of Nazareth. Which, of course, casts him as Jesus.

Easy enough, I suppose, after a decade or more of being cast in that role by alarmingly obsessive fans - but surely less than we expected from someone who has so consistently confounded our expectations. The Pot certainly does that, opening with Maynard a capella, somewhere between chest and head voices. Unfortunately, the second half of the album descends into segue hell, with just two songs in the last six tracks, one of which is so wilfully "difficult" that it barely counts as a song at all. And it's this which is ultimately the problem, not Maynard's faux-Messianism or Adam's ill-advised Talkbox excursions. Their masterpiece, Ænima, may have had 6 segues in 15 tracks, but at least two of those also function as songs, and most if not all were anyway vital to the theme and intellectual coherence of the album. 10,000 Days' segues appear to be pretty much random, and as such are symptomatic of a wider laziness to which their perfunctory set and unchanging setlist also point. Sad to say, here seems to be a band that is now content to appear to be pushing the envelope, while in fact barely troubling themselves to write a whole album.

As long as they destroy the Labour Party too, I don't care any more

2006-09-08T10:15:00.000Z

What is there fresh to say about the Blair/Brown farrago? Part of me wants to unleash reams of disgust at the childish antics of the holders of two of the highest offices in the land - but part of knows I'll be repeating myself and about a thousand other people. And part of me, of course, simply can't be bothered.

The centre: where conviction goes to die

2006-09-05T09:42:00.000Z

Yesterday, I allowed the consideration that my comment at the end of this post was "shockingly naive" (by which, of course, I meant naïve). Back in April, while admitting that Cameron's leadership of the Conservative Party had not been everything for which I had hoped, I suggested, essentially, that Cameron was too well steeped in the liberal tradition and had too great a respect for the traditions of his country, as well as his party, to go too far (i.e., to go much further) along that path with which he had been ostentatiously toying.

A grave misjudgment of the man, it seems.

Way back when, I said (though I was by no means the first) that Blair's leadership was an exercise in following and making it look like leadership. His obsession with focus groups, dedicated to finding out what people want rather than demonstrating an ounce of conviction (at least in domestic policy: no-one could argue he has not shown conviction in the geopolitical theatre, for which I applaud him), made him, essentially, into the man that says, "There go my people. I must find out where they're going so I can lead them." Cameron, in the spirit of his rather fatuous new slogan, "Change to win ... win for Britain", appears to have swallowed unthinkingly the same canard. (Mixing my metaphors there, sorry.) Cameron believes that people are unshaking in their belief in the inherent virtue of public services, and so the only way to get the Tories back into power is to embrace that whole corrupt statist edifice wholeheartedly, abandoning ideological opposition to it as the mere baggage of a bygone era when this country actually managed to create a dash or two of wealth.

Even assuming he is right (and let's not forget that it's not Conservative policies to which people object: it's the fact that they are Conservative policies), that by no means indicates that in order to win elections Cameron shouldn't challenge this particular piece of staggering collectivist complacency. He has done the hard work of making the Tory leader trustworthy again: now, surely, he must use that trust to tell people the truth about the public sector. The only reason people are so convinced that public services are inherently good is that they have been so relentlessly conditioned to look to only one place for so many of the things they need: the state. They have no experience, even during that brief period when the inexorable expansion of the state was, if not actually reversed, at least significantly reduced, of living in a country where the state doesn't perform a great many of the functions of day-to-day life, so they have no experience of how it might be possible to do them better and cheaper without the state taking its cut. The state, like any other organism, is primarily self-serving. It must ensure its own survival first. In the case of the state, part of that task is accomplished by making itself seem indispensible when in reality it is entirely superfluous.

Fame at last

2006-09-04T09:08:00.000Z

Turns out I have had at least one or two readers in the past. Gosh.

A pity, though, that Gareth chose the post he did, or at least to quote that part of the post which he did. My style was apparently somewhere near its zenith of insufferable self-regard that day. Similarly, the folks at Backing Blair chose a post that ends with a comment that now looks shockingly naive. Still, these things are sent to try us. It's almost enough to make me start blogging regularly again.

What to make, then, of the last couple of months? I could here try to make an excuse stick about the silly season, but it's been anything but silly. I just haven't been bothered. Events generally overtook my ability to write about them, so that by the time I'd conceived and written a stinging post about something, it would already have been rendered obsolete by some further outrage. I speak, of course, of the conflict in the Lebanon and the astonishing worldwide reaction to it, which placed a rogue terrorist faction of an unpopular and unmandated political party funded and directed by a third party state on the same moral footing as - not to say a higher moral footing than - a nation state and its professional army.

Probably the real reason I've not updated in a while is that all my rhetorical energy has been absorbed in a long running email debate with a friend of mine, covering many topics (we have five threads running concurrently, I think, and the longest mail I've sent him was 70K of plain text), this one not the least of them. Therein, I argued that the obsession with "proportionality" that emerged during the conflict, aside from belying a confusion between "proportional" and "proportionate", reduces warfare to an accountancy of the dead and casts Israel as the villains for not letting their civilians get killed enough while overlooking the genuine war-crimes committed by Hezbollah by placing military assets in civilian areas. And so on.

The real story of that war, at least in the context of what I suppose I must call the blogosphere, was the steady stream of what Thaddeus Tremayne over at Samizdata, in a rather fabulous neologism, referred to as fauxtographs. (Perhaps it's nothing of the kind and I have just never come across it before, but heigh-ho.) Numerous stories leaked out of that region concerning the increasingly absurdly stage-managed nature of more-or-less all journalism going on there, from the hilariously amateurish doctoring of Reuters' photographs of bomb-damaged Beirut, to the chap with the green helmet creating tableaux of the dead; from the photogenic bomb victim who died cap in hand yet later that day was photographed clearing rubble, to the Lebanese woman who had two homes bombed inside three weeks yet hadn't even managed to change her clothes, all of which is not to mention the alarmingly brazen manner in which various national media outlets attempted to perpetrate their view of events. The difference, for example, between a BBC and an independent news report concerning bomb damage in the same town was staggering. One wonders how the BBC reconciles its mission for impartial reporting with its habit of advertising its vacant positions in the Guardian only, but there it is.

Some links, then.

Telegraph's Hannan borrows heavily from Mark Steyn.

Pictures worth a thousand lives.

Media Missiles.

No, this isn't a geopolitical ploy by Iran at all.... (login may be required: www.bugmenot.com)

Adnan Hajj.

Other photographic controversies.

Where nations go to die

2006-06-29T08:59:00.000Z

Here's Mark Steyn's review (more or less) of Melanie Phillips' Londonistan.

Steyn is a born writer of boundless energy and incorrigible robustness. He can turn a fabulous phrase and express an idea with the kind of revelatory clarity that - depending on the idea - can be both terrifying and exhilirating. As a fan of good writing I love reading Steyn. As a political animal it's often incredibly depressing.

Tasty Words

2006-06-24T12:30:00.000Z

Some moons ago (and now I understand why that phrase isn't as popular as "many moons ago") I wrote, in passing, that among the BBC's compendium of techniques for subtly insinuating their institutionalised subjectivity into their ostensibly objective reporting was the way that people who argued for things of which they (the BBC) approved were supportively dubbed "campaigners" whereas those who argued for things of which they (the BBC) disapproved were dismissively dubbed "lobbyists". Lobbyists, I noted (I didn't so much note as imply, mainly because I'm pretty sure no-one but me reads this and I already know what I meant) are professionals, but the BBC was quite ready to call a lobbyist anyone who advanced an agenda inimical to BBC values, paid or otherwise.

However, I imagine I must now eat a good portion of those words, since the BBC yesterday published an article describing the latest setback in the courts for pro-hunt campaigners, describing them in exactly those terms. It is, of course, inconceivable that the impeccably metropolitan, "modern", inclusive, diverse BBC could, as an institution, possibly have any sympathy whatsoever for the nasty Tory aristocracy and the class-betraying, forelock-tugging lickspittle peasantry who participate in the hunt (and who, if you think about it, together comprise an insituition far more diverse and inclusive than the slumped-in-homogeneity BBC, which believes that diversity consists in it not mattering if everyone thinks the same as long as they look different). But it would at the same time be cynical to assume that it was just a slip by some hapless subber and that it'll be changed to "lobbyists" or "seal-clubbers" as soon as someone in authority notices it, so I'll just stick to eating my words.

Gosh, Old Nick, it's cold in here....

2006-06-22T18:32:00.001Z

Gah. I find myself agreeing with Gordon.

It's understandable in its way, of course. I only agree with him because he's come round to my point of view: the really alarming part was when I had the urge to defend him having read all those whining, atavistic, betrayingtheleftcakes comments.

Here's what I think. He was probably wrong to call a nuclear deterrent "unacceptably expensive, economically wasteful and militarily unsound" back in 1984. It was, after all, the height of the Cold War, and frankly no expense was too great to ward off the malignant embrace of communism. It's hard, too, to understand what esoteric military thinking Gordon was applying to the issue to deduce that the deterrent offered by the assuredly catastrophically Phyrric nature of any victory claimed by the Russians was militarily unsound. We are still here, blogging away uselessly, after all.

What is certainly true, however, is that any arguments put forward along those lines today would undoubtedly be many, many times more foolish. The Soviets, for all their rather rum ideas about managing an economy and ensuring the freedom of their people, were nonetheless a comparatively civilised bunch and on the whole rather unlikely to embrace any kind of death cult just for the sake of it. Mark Steyn wrote,

The Left is remarkably nonchalant about these new terrors. When nuclear weapons were an elite club of five relatively sane world powers, the Left was convinced the planet was about to go ka-boom any minute, and the handful of us who survived would be walking in a nuclear winter wonderland. Now anyone with a few thousand bucks and an unlisted number in Islamabad in his Rolodex can get a nuke, and the Left couldn't care less.

If Gordon, usually so absorbed in the cock-hardening amounts of "good" he believes he's doing, turns out not to be so stubbornly convinced of his own righteousness as to be incapable of accepting the increased threat of a nuclear attack since the Cold War, then there may be a little hope for him - and us - yet.

The inevitability of tyranny

2006-06-21T18:12:00.000Z

Back in the halcyon days of the pending ID Cards legislation we could rely on the Lords, whatever the futility, to take a robust approach to individual and civil liberties against an increasingly intrusive, not to say megalomaniacal, panopticon state in the Commons. No longer.

For all that he was vilified at the time, to the extent that he quit economics entirely for many years and became a full-time social scientist, Hayek's predictions in The Road to Serfdom are, once again, spot on. His premise was that collectivism, however nobly or benignly envisaged, slides inexorably towards totalitarianism. Give a person or a group of people responsibility for a decision that would otherwise be taken subconsciously by the dispersed, tacit knowledge of the market, and arbitration - that is to say, the taking of decisions based on considered criteria whose importance and relevance have, necessarily, been considered and, as it were, ranked by importance by the committee or individual - is inevitable. In the situation that arises, not only is it possible that a decision could be influenced by one who stands to benefit in a manner that would be impossible in a genuine free market, but also thereby the currying of favour and influence becomes institutionalised. Decisions must thereafter be defended to those who lose out by them. Unpopular ones must be enforced. And soon enough the possibility is raised that so much good is being done, though it be against the will of hoi misguided polloi, that it might be too much of a risk to bother with an election this year.

Fortunately we had one just last year (although don't expect another until the last possible moment once Gordon Brown gets his hands on his birthright in that "smooth and orderly transition of power" that we're all excited about - and who wouldn't be, given that we haven't seen power transferred in this manner since the fall of the Roman Empire. It'll be like a political Haley's Comet, but much more infrequent), so in fairness I can't really consider the smoking ban totalitarian, as such. But there's an interesting angle to it.

In the end, the best reason they've got for the ban is one of money. A proponent (say a junior Labour minister, greasily ambitious) might suggest to you that the majority favours a ban on smoking, and that it should be done for that reason. To that, I would only point out that by every poll on the issue ever conducted, a majority of Britons favours a return to capital punishment (I am not one of them, except perhaps for treason) but there hasn't exactly been a legislative stampede on the issue; and that a majority of Britons (to return to my favourite hobby horse for a second) looks askance upon the idea of an MP elected to a Scottish seat becoming Prime Minister, passing (as he would) laws that affect his own constituents not one whit on a number of issues, yet Gordon Brown continues impatiently to go through the motions of Chancellorship with that colossal air of entitlement. That grinning junior minister might thereafter suggest that it's all being done to protect the non-smoker, to which I would remark that he shows remarkably little faith in the intelligence and autonomy of the typical non-smoker if he doesn't believe him to be capable of taking the choice to remove himself from a situation if he considers it harmful. Similarly he (our apparatchik, not our non-smoker) might choose to defend the rights of the barmaid or waiter, as though an entire industry were in fact being chained behind bars in smoky pubs and forced to pour drinks, or blackmailed into serving food for a living.

Then, perhaps, his face might light up. "Ah!" he might say, "but think of the amount of money it will save the NHS!" This, of course, will have been saved up, as a bone to throw the small-government types who believe that the amount of money poured down the various black holes that constitute the NHS has passed from the outrageous to the simply farcical, a good source of black humour on a Monday morning. Even assuming the accuracy of such a statement (as opposed, say, to making the point that perhaps it will just cost the catering and pub industries a shitload of cash while all the smokers stay home and smoke fuckin' more, blackening their lungs at the same rate as they would have before, except maybe now they won't be walking to the pub), there are still sound reasons to laugh it out of court.

The NHS is funded by taxpayers, and I have no doubt that when it was envisaged and instituted it was with the most benign and compassionate motives. (Who could argue, after all, with the extension to all of access to quality healthcare previously only enjoyed by the idle rich? Not even I could, although it must be said that the NHS of 1948 would be unrecognisable to a doctor from that time were he to walk into a hospital run by today's superannuated, sclerotic, politically wracked and desperately sluggish organisation.) But fast forward 60 years, and now it's a reason to intrude further in people's lives. First we are taxed to fund the body, then, in order to save us our own money that they confiscated, our lives are subject to ever-higher degrees of control and scrutiny. The existence of nationalised healthcare begets the notion of nationalised health. Since they make us pay for one thing, they have the moral authority to make us stop doing another. Classic mission creep, and exactly the kind of thing Hayek foresaw without actually predicting.

Kraft durch Freude

2006-06-19T10:40:00.000Z

Further slackness from me. All too predictable, frankly: I impressed myself keeping up the blogging for five months with rarely more than a few days' gap.

Good old Polly. Always with our best interests at heart. Once again it occurs to me to wonder whether she can possibly be for real, or whether she is, in fact, some kind of joke perpetrated by the Right to remind people what the Left is really like when it gets going, fuelled by hubris and spite. Such an idea was touched on in an early, yet infrequently bettered, episode of The West Wing, Take This Sabbath Day. Of course, the idea as expressed therein was a political inversion of my idea of The Toynbeast:

JOEY [KENNY]: Mr. President, I’m here ‘cause I’m running a campaign for Bill
O’Dwyer, who’s running...
BARTLET: In the California forty-sixth?
JOEY [KENNY]: Yes sir.
BARTLET: O’Dwyer’s an empty shirt.
JOEY [KENNY]: Sir?
BARTLET: I don’t like guys who run for congress because they think it’s a
great gig. Find yourself a live one and I’ll get interested. In the meantime,
the devil you know beats the devil you don’t. And I like the devil I got.

Bartlet prefers to leave a fulminating Christian Republican in post in the 46th rather than step up funding for his Democratic challenger because, as Josh puts it, every time he opens his mouth he's "good for a couple of million dollars" in contributions to the Democratic party. Similarly, I'm sure that every time Polly Toynbee writes another one of her tedious great-enabler, tax-and-spend, redistribution=progressive, blah blah blah IsleptthroughtheEightiescakes articles, what's actually happened is that somewhere, a few classical liberals sat in a room and wrote the most terrifying, illiberal things they could think of and stuck it under a picture the smuggest-looking woman they could find. Must be good for a few thousand pounds' contributions (this is Britain, not the US!) to the Conservatives.

The Swedish Model

2006-05-24T13:17:00.000Z

As previously noted, Britain is on the road to becoming the new Sweden. Just two months ago, the ghastly Polly Toynbee wrote an article effectively bemoaning how long it would take her messiah, Grodon Brown, to remould Britain on the Swedish model. Incredibly, which is to say in the face of all that history has to teach us about the perils of trusting government, she writes, with all appearance of a straight face and earnest intent:

Brown will not turn Swedish in one spasm. It took the Social Democrats nearly 70 unbroken years of steady progressive government to reach this civilised state of relative equality, high living standards, excellent public services - and high happiness ratings. It needs citizens who want to travel that way. It needs trust in government, which semi-anarchic Britain and its poisonous rightwing, anti-state press forever undermines.

The irony of having such wilfully ignorant, prejudiced, ostrich-like remarks published on the internet, that triumph of deregulation in the face of state interference to which were the state still running the telecommunications systems in this country our access would be both unreliable and desperately slow, is almost certainly lost on Pol, who is unlikely ever to have read this article by Nick Herbert which outlines the situation in Sweden far more dispassionately (and therefore accurately) than Brown's head cheerleader would ever be capable of. Eww, Polly in a cheerleader's outfit. What a thought. I'm tempted to Fisk her entire article, but I think it can be dismissed in its entirety by pointing out that 70 unbroken years of one party rule is generally a terrible thing for a country, particularly as statist a party as Sweden's Social Democrats. Your colours are showing, old 'been.

Tempting and delightfully easy as ridiculing the Seventies throwback Polly Toynbee is, this is not the thrust of my point today. Anyone with the merest independent streak to his thinking knows that the Swedish model is a thin disguise for the wholesale purchase of votes from supplicants (as Janet Daley says, if you pay people to be poor, you'll never run out of poor people) rather than any truly "progressive" policy. But since Brown's independent streak pretty much runs out of steam after wanting to be PM because he "stood aside" for Blair in the Labour leadership election of 1994 (and is he actually foolish, arrogant and hubristic enough to believe that this entitles him to become PM by right of inheritance? Can he possibly give any credence to the notion that had he become Labour leader in 1994 there would still be a Labour Premiership to inherit at all?), he's charging ahead with this remodelling, which brings me to the less savoury aspect of the Swedish model.

Like Britain, Sweden has taken in hundreds of thousands of immigrants in the last twenty years, and their experience of combining the multiculturalist ethic with an overweening welfare state does not appear to have been a happy one.

Just one of the many pages linked from that page is this one. Or as Polly says, "how it would raise spirits if the chancellor would suggest Sweden as the chosen model for his coming time."

You wanna incur the wrath of ... whatever, from high atop the ... thing?

2006-05-22T19:05:00.000Z

I've been slack here lately for a number of reasons. I suppose the first one is that recently everyone seems to have come round to the whole Labour-hating horse I've been flogging for years (or months, to be more accurate, in terms of this blog). It's not so much fun when most people would agree with what you write. I've also has less time available at my computer, and it's enough work simply to read the stuff I want to read, let alone to write about any take I have on it. A friend of mine was given his notice at work recently, and not before time in my opinion: not because I think they should have fired his ass a long time ago but because they never gave him anything to do, and had he been generally less timorous on such matters he would have quit months ago. The reason I know this is that when I, gloriously "between projects", log into Gmail around noon, he'll be online and will immediately hit me up on Gmail chat. All well and good, except very quickly the impression is formed that when I sit at my computer, unemployed, I'm busier than he is. I have more shit to do at my computer than he does at his, and he's getting paid!

So, a few links then.

Believe in nothing, until it has been officially denied.

Someone's off-message! Your job's none too safe!

I need to watch things die, from a good safe distance.

I had a big eulogy half-written out for this, but it just sucks too much to write about. Maybe another time.

Looking forward to the National Identity Register, then.

At present, the West Wing line making me laugh the most, including the title of this post, is:

SAM: The GAO needs a little housekeeping, and that's my nickname, okay? I'm "The Housekeeper."

TOBY (interrupting): Hey.

SAM: God, that's a terrible nickname ... I'm not going with that nickname any more.

Whispering Death

2006-05-13T16:02:00.000Z

I caught Sajid Mahmood's opening spell yesterday afternoon. My knowledge of such things is incomplete, but I wouldn't be surprised if he were the first Muslim to play for England, as Monty Panesar recently became the first Sikh. Both had pretty ausipcious débuts: Panesar's maiden Test wicket was that of his boyhood hero Sachin Tendulkar, but Mahmood's yesterday was surely dreamlike for him. Presented with his first England cap that morning by Andrew Flintoff (the man he beamed in the nets in 2004), he waited 21 overs in Sri Lanka's first innings before being tossed the ball. His second delivery was cracked for 4 and he dropped the ball as he began his delivery stride for his third. Yet at the end of his second over, he was edged to slip and the safe hands of Marcus Trescothick. Another wicket in his third, and a run-out and a third wicket in his fourth over left him with a first Test spell of 4-2-9-3. Can't complain.

He looks the part too. Although his run-up is somewhat less extravagant, he is similar to Michael Holding in the sense that he fairly jogs to the crease like a medium pacer, only to unleash a fearsomely fast delivery. Sky Sports, absurdly, billed his as "fast medium". His loosener was 84mph and his was the fastest delivery of the day at 90.2mph. Allan Donald, at one time considered the fastest bowler in the world, rarely got much above 90, so I don't know what kind of crack the Sky Sports team is on. (Mind you, they continue to give David Lloyd gainful employment, so their mental deficiencies can't be too surprising.)

Well done Saj.

Internment Acquisitions?

2006-05-13T14:13:00.000Z

For some reason I have an undefinable reservation about expressing delight at the imprisonment of these four. Perhaps I'm just wary of becoming a hang 'em and flog 'em type. Nonetheless, as someone whose family has been a target of these self-righteous pricks, I am extremely pleased. My stepfather used to run a company that worked with HLS, and found that the cost of doing legitimate business with a leading pharmceutical research institution whose work has doubtless saved, eased and prolonged hundreds of thousands of lives was to have his credit cards cloned and unwanted goods and services ordered and paid for on it, as well as to have his phone number published in Tweaky Self-Importance Monthly so that "campaigners" could phone us up and harass us whenever they were having trouble maintaining erections. None of this, of course, comes even close to the kind of distress foisted upon the family of Gladys Hammond, so I can only assume that those people are even more pleased about this sentence than I am. Long may they remain there.

The BBC, of course, has managed to report this news without actually reporting it, if you see what I mean. Rather than report that extremist terrorists with no respect for common decency and no concept of human compassion have been put away for many years, they report that the case "didn't help animal rights". In the words of Leo McGarry, I would think! (It's all in the delivery though.) Note how they manage to squeeze the "campaigners'" message into the third paragraph, yet it's not until the fourth that it's even mentioned that they pleaded guilty. Plus ça change....

I need to watch things die, from a good safe distance.

2006-05-08T15:38:00.000Z

So, a week between posts (apart from that one earlier). Pretty slack.

This week being what it was, however, I'd expect not to make any posts. Had I been writing this blog five years ago, there'd've been no posts for about a month after May 14th. Five years ago next week, Tool's Lateralus was released and I went into hibernation: the only logical, the only conceivable course of action in response to this event. As the follow-up to the greatest, the most terrifying, the most beautiful, the most agonising and the most exhaustively cathartic record ever made - Ænima - Lateralus could only be greeted in such a manner. I listened to it compulsively for weeks, forsaking all else. I believe I've mentioned this before.

But if its release was epochal, it could never live up to Ænima in the long run. Staggering though it is, in all its fearful fury, cool rationality and boundless hope, it could never live up to Ænima. It gives me goosebumps and what certain irony-free Tool fans like to call Toolgasms every time I listen to it: Ænima makes me want to die. There will never be anything like Ænima from any band ever again, not even Tool, and the inevitable disappointment Lateralus caused me, for all its brilliance, has lowered my expectations for the new one.

A little too much, actually. I've simply been lazy and uninspired this week. I've not been sequestered somewhere absorbing each and every note numerous times on the first day. I've had it a week and I've listened to it twice.

I do like it though, I think. My friend asked me what I thought, mid-way through the first listen. I said, "I'll let you know in a couple of months." At least.

Clod-hopping

2006-05-08T14:23:00.000Z

Much hoo-haa recently about the BNP, with everyone pretty much conforming to type. As previously mentioned, Labour tried desperately to energise its base by predicting that "eight out of ten" voters in certain boroughs might vote BNP. (In fact, it was eight out of ten "families", which raises interesting questions itself. I thought the family-as-block-vote gag was only pulled by those least likely to vote BNP, but whatever. Apparently the white working class, too, likes to discourage independent thought in its children. No wonder Labour keeps getting elected.) As a piece of electioneering, it was generally held to have been an unmitigated disaster (in terms of generating free publicity for and sparking debate about the BNP and thus fixing their name in voters' minds), so no change there for Margaret Hodge. The BBC forgot it was supposed to be impartial and had David Dimbleby destroy Nick Griffin live on air. The Conservatives appeared to have all undergone procedures to remove the words "asylum" and "immigration" from their vocabularies, thus ensuring that any stray Labour votes from the white working class really would go to the BNP. The Lib Dems continued their policy of studied irrelevance, neither gaining nor losing much ground in all the fuss. And everyone continued to insist on referring to the BNP as a far-Right party.

This suits Labour, of course, since the Conservatives are (or at least used to be) a Right-wing party, and nothing is more likely to frighten centrists or swing-voters away from the Conservatives than the idea that they're essentially of the same stripe as the BNP. It suits the BBC, too, for the same reason. As long as this fatuous meme can be perpetuated, half the battle against the Conservatives is already won.

It's slightly alarming that I have to reply on the cadaverous Lord Tebbit to back up this argument, but mostly I do. There was a brief exchange of correspondence in the Telegraph, in which Tebbit pointed out the fallacies inherent in the description of the BNP as Right-wing, Unison General Secretary Dave Prentis displayed his ignorance (as befits a trades unionist) and reflexive acceptance of said fatuous meme, and Tebbit elaborated, with a little back-up.

Then Toby Roberts got in on the act. I've never heard of him before (I rarely read the Sunday Telegraph), which is clearly because he's not that bright and isn't allowed to write for the serious papers very often. His article consists almost entirely of a cheerful description of his background, before carefully constructing an elaborate straw man argument and tearing it down quite emphatically. In the last paragraph (the only part of the essay that contains any actual propositions) he concludes that because the BNP "would institute legal distinctions on ethnic grounds ... would make policy by labels [and] ... really are haters", they must be an extreme Right-wing organisation. This doesn't contradict anything said by Tebbit, of course, but that didn't stop him descending into abuse. Tebbit's point was only ever that racism, in and of itself, is not Right-wing any more than it is Left-wing. It is simply racism. The BNP takes its racsim and dresses it up in Left-wing policies. Ah, fuck it: Tebbit said it better anyway. But I'll just quote the best bit:

The fact, which even the most confused clods should be able to understand, is that nationalism, racism and anti-semitism are not uniquely of the Left or Right but can be found on either side of the spectrum. The misunderstanding of this goes back to 1939, when Hitler and Stalin were allies, and the Communist Party in Britain opposed the war with Hitler by fomenting strikes in the mines and the docks.
Our efficient propaganda machine labelled the Nazis "Right-wing", both to counter the far Left's efforts to assist Stalin's ally Hitler, and to help Attlee bring the Labour Party into Churchill's wartime coalition.

Labour, and the Left in general, has been buying into this misapprehension ever since, and has been persuading the voters to do so too. Freddy Salinger isn't deceived.

Spare the snark, spoil the self-hatred

2006-04-30T17:14:00.000Z

I'm a big fan of TelevisionWithoutPity, which pretty much invented the art of the TV episode recap and over the years has honed an inimitable house style, despite having somewhere north of 30 writers. Often (particularly when the series you're watching goes downhill) the recaps are more fun to read than the eps are to watch. Like for Seasons 5 and 6 of The West Wing.

At the moment I'm watching Season 2 of Lost. I know, it's still on, so technically anyone who watches Lost is watching Season 2 "at the moment"; what I mean is, I've watched all there is so far in the last week. I do that with most things: I can't bear to watch TV at the rate of one a week - I'd go crazy, particularly with cliffhanger TV like Lost. But the other day I caved and, unable to wait for the end of the season before starting it myself (although I'm still holding out with 24), I got going.

One of the recent episodes was called One of Them, in which we flash back to Sayid's days in the ("elite") Republican Guard ("not quite so elite as we may have led you to believe...") during Desert Storm. Sayid's a torturer (that's not to say that that's his job, but I think one's either a torturer or one isn't, and Sayid is). He put Sawyer to the question early in Season 1 over something that now escapes me (although TWoP could tell me! If I could remember in which episode it occurred, of course), and now he's got someone else to extract information from. So he flashes back to how he became a torturer.

Here's the point: his first experience of torturing was at the behest of the US Army, and he tortured his commanding officer in order to obtain the location of a US pilot who was shot down a day or two previously. The following never occurred to me, but I guess that's why I'm watching Lost and writing a blog nobody reads, and not watching Lost and writing for TWoP. The byline for this epiode's recap reads:

For anyone who thought it was weird that a soldier in Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard somehow acquired torturing skills, this episode addresses that burning question: it was the U.S. Army who gave them to him. Naturally.

OK, so my critical faculty is probably slightly impaired at three in the morning or whenever I watched this episode. And I suppose it's possible that the writers didn't want Sayid to be seen to torture an American, which would undo all his hard-won sympathy. But it seems to me that if he has to torture someone in the flashback he either tortures an American, or he tortures a fellow Iraqi at the behest of an American. So in order to maintain him as a sympathetic character, the writers must turn the US Army into a mobile torture school. No big step for Hollywood, I suppose.

Go, Johnny, go.

2006-04-29T19:20:00.000Z

Leaving aside what Tony Blair means when he says that John Prescott is absolutely vital to the Labour Party - that John Prescott is absolutely vital to the continued survival of Tony Blair, in the sense that Mr. Prescott pacifies the socialist throwbacks that still make up the core of the party's grassroots, and does this in retun for Mr. Blair's having given him a high-profile job at which he is, demonstrably, almost criminally incompetent - this article in today's Telegraph contains an interesting snippet:

...after pledging that he had had no other mistresses since Labour came to power.

One grows accustomed to these pedantic, legalistic constructions, and it can be taken almost for granted that when Mr. Prescott affirms having strayed only once "since Labour came to power", the line is drawn where it is for a very good reason. So all that political hay made in the mid-Nineties at the expense of Tories like Steven Norris - "Life's better under the Tories" suggested to be one of his chat-up lines, for instance, or the suggestion that they believed ethics to be a county near Middlesex - was not only cheap, politically irrelevant and opportunist, but is now more-or-less revealed to be entirely hypocritical.

I've never held with the notion that adultery makes a man unfit for public office, and I don't believe that Mr. Prescott should be sacked for it, although the list of things for which he should be sacked has probably needed updating pretty much weekly since Labour came to power, so I'd be quite happy to see him go over this matter if public opinion is strong enough (which unfortunately I don't believe is the case). I don't, in other words, believe many people agree with the father of the friend at whose house I had dinner last night, who opined that of the three Labour crises this week - Clarke, Hewitt and Prescott - this was the worst of the three. I'm not sure whether he meant it would prove the most damaging or whether he meant that he personally found it the most dishonourable, but either way I think he was flat-out wrong. No-one cares about affairs any more - or at least the majority are these days capable of distinguishing the straying husband from the competent (or otherwise, in Mr. Prescott's case) minister - and even if they did, in a week in which the Home Secretary admits to having lost track of 1,000 foreign criminals who should have been considered for deportation on their release from prison, and in which the Health Secretary is booed and heckled by a group so generally pliant and placid as nurses, it could hardly matter less. Adultery is indeed dishonourable, and my friend's father, from what I know of him, places a high premium on fidelity, but in political terms surely the dishonour is greater in having known, for example, of the release of, and subsequent failure to monitor, hundreds of prisoners who could have been deported and instead were left free to recidivate, for some ten months, and neither said nor done anything about it until the whole murky matter was dragged into the light.

Clarke should definitely resign for his mess. Prescott, were he remotely able, shouldn't, but if this is the only way to rid ourselves of this knockabout yob, so be it.

In the courtroom of honour, the judge pounded his gavel...

2006-04-29T17:23:00.000Z

All of this article is worth reading, but of particular interest is the description of the first two incidents and the response of the British criminal justice system thereto. One can't help but be put in mind of the last verse of one of Bob Dylan's most affecting songs, The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll. Sung gently, but with a barely disguised fury, Dylan tells the true story of a 51-year-old black maid who died following an assault by a local white landowner, who was subsequently (allegedly to spare him the attentions of the black inmates at the state prison to which a longer sentence would have condemned him) sentenced to six months in county jail for manslaughter. But that those responsible for the crimes described by Dr. Dalrymple are not "nobles" by any stretch of the imagination, Dylan's words are all too applicable to these outrages.

In the courtroom of honour, the judge pounded his gavel
To show that all's equal and that the courts are on the level
And that the strings in the books ain't pulled and persuaded
And that even the nobles get properly handled,
Once that the cops have chased after and caught 'em,
And that the ladder of law has no top and no bottom;
Stared at the man who killed for no reason,
Who just happened to be feeling that way without warning,
And he spoke through his cloak most deep and distinguished
And handed out strongly, for penalty and repentance,
William Zanzinger with a ... six month sentence.

The pause before "six month sentence", articulated by Dylan as might a conjurer, does more, I think, than all the foregoing words to convey his disgust at this idea of justice. I am disgusted that it wasn't until I read Dalrymple's article that I had even heard of either of these crimes, but of course I was well aware that a drunk student in Oxford suggested a policeman's horse was gay. Admittedly I had heard it in the same context as Dalrymple now relates it: as an example of the lunacy of our justice system; nonetheless the fact that neither of these infintely more serious crimes was widely reported is all the evidence that I need of the decadence to which Dalrymple refers at the end of his article.

Bloody oath!

2006-04-29T17:15:00.000Z

What are the odds that the gentlemen who took matters into their own hands in order to remove trespassers and resume the work they were being paid to do would, had they done the same thing in this country, currently be languishing in cells somewhere awaiting the delicate attentions of Her Majesty's Constabulary?

Angelina acquaints a man with strange bedfellows

2006-04-28T13:40:00.000Z

Samizdata reports that Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie are poised to take the leading roles in a screen adaptation of Atlas Shrugged.

The report describes Angelina as a "long-time devotee" of Ayn Rand. Can this possibly be the same Angelina Jolie that just more-or-less endorsed Gordon Brown as our next Prime Minister? I can't quite see Gordon settling down for an evening's Objectivist reading. Rand developed a philosophy of, essentially, righteous selfishness (she called it rational self-interest); Brown's is more self-righteous compulsory charity. Rand was a confirmed anti-statist; Brown is, at heart, the very definition of an old-style collectivist.

Assuming the article's accurate (dangerous, admittedly), then either Angelina's a bit stupid and doesn't understand a word of Rand's writings, or I pretty much need to make the acquiantace of her dealer.

Back in the USSR

2006-04-28T11:19:00.000Z

Several questions raised by the foreign prisoners non-deportation affair.

Perhaps the most obvious is what, exactly, a minister must now do that warrants resignation. The days when the Home Secretary would resign whenever some lush hopped the wall at Buckingham Palace are of course long gone and little missed (at least for that reason), but some kind of absurd inversion of those attitudes appears to have taken root these days. Clarke, apparently, offered his resignation but Blair didn't accept it; the line Clarke then adopted was that it was his mess so he should clear it up. An admirable sentiment, perhaps, if he'd got drunk and thrown food everywhere before falling asleep face down in a tub of ice cream, but not one that makes any sense managerially; it was comprehensively skewered by David Davis on Question Time last night with a little reductio ad absurdum. On that basis, he said, a minister could keep his job forever by periodically making an horrendous dog's breakfast of his brief.

But Blair has a history of reluctance to fire allies, more and more so as he has fewer and fewer: it is to Clarke's credit that he was one of the few to at least offer to resign. David Blunkett was made to resign twice, yet Blair stubbornly insisted, with that classic petulance, that he left "without a stain on his character". Except the corruption, the illegitimate fatherhood, the coveting of another man's wife, the bearing false witness ... sorry, wrong blog. I went a bit West Wing there.

So, for the moment at least, Clarke's not resigning. Various people have opined that his resignation would if anything be counter-productive since it would serve as an indication to people that the affair was over and we could all, as Blair urges us to whenever he wants to diminish the importance of some scandal or fuck-up, "move on" or "get past it", when in fact what really needs to happen is that people focus on this problem minutely, fiercely, and for some time yet, until it is fixed. Again, this seems like an oblique way of saying that ministers should never resign, and even leaving aside the institutional resistance to reform that is the hallmark of all self-perpetuating bureaucracies, the Home Office would need to be focused on for a very long time indeed.

The obvious counter-argument, apart from the evidently outmoded notions of honourably accepting blame and taking responsibility, and the analogy with a private sector organisation, from which Clarke would have been ignominiously sacked last July when the issue first came to light internally, is to point out that if ministers are never sacked, or even if ministers are only rarely and begrudgingly sacked, only to be eulogised to the skies immediately thereafter, a culture is created amonst ministers where no-one is to blame and their jobs are never in danger no matter how woefully their department performs. Hold it, I'm getting West Wing tingles again.

I was wrong. I was. I was just, I was wrong. Come on, we know that. Lots of times we don't know what right and wrong is. But lots of times we do. And come on, this is one. I may not have had sinister intent at the outset, but there were plenty of opportunities for me to make it right. No one in government takes responsibility for anything any more. We foster, we obfuscate, we rationalise. 'Everybody does it.' That's what we say. So we come to occupy a moral safe house where everyone's to blame so no one's guilty. I'm to blame. I was wrong.

Of course, the real reason I want Clarke to resign (apart from the shuddering, wincing, toe-curling embarrassment I feel every time I see him on TV or in pictures and remember that he, the man the otherwise fairly ghastly Jo Brand described just last night as looking as though he'd just been paroled without deportation from a twenty-year stretch himself, is a Minister of the Crown) is that it will remove from his brief the responsibility for all those things the press are being so mean about at the moment. That said, it's not as though any Blairite replacement will be less committed to this onrush of Stalinism, it's just that they might be a little less competent in the debate. The Brownites are equally committed to it, of course, but the lover of Schadenfreude in me still wants the man who's brought it this far to resign.

And speaking of Stalinism, apparently one of the most alarming things about this whole affair is the breakdown of communication between the Prison Service and the IND. Frankly, so far as I'm concerned, the most alarming thing about this whole Government is that the IND isn't the Immigration and Nationality Department: it's the Immigration and Nationality Directorate. Like, seriously? Wasn't it just the Soviets that had directorates? Are we now so inured to government control of our lives that we don't even notice when departments become fucking directorates?

Bad choice, Andy...

2006-04-27T10:50:00.000Z

[Andy Burnham] is clearly intent on riding the scruffy, unshaven coattails of Charles Clarke all the way to the top [...]

Hmmm. Perhaps it's time to hitch your trailer to another tractor, old boy.

PIPS [en masse]: Squeak, squeak.

2006-04-25T11:08:00.000Z

Today is Tax Freedom Day in Australia. And they seem pretty pissed off about it.

It might console them to know, then, that here in Great Britain Tax Freedom Day hasn't come this early - in fact, hasn't even come in April - since 1963. We're on the yoke until June 3rd.

Litigation. Guaranteed to reduce humiliation.

2006-04-24T13:59:00.003Z

Former Special Agent Lee Paige, who would certainly have been mentioned here had he had the decency to make a total idiot of himself and subsequently end up on the net after the 10th of January, is suing the DEA, for which he used to work, claiming his notoriety renders him useless as an undecover operative and that he no longer has the respect of his colleagues after shooting himself in the leg in front of a load of children. (It's possible that even the children were able to discern the delicious irony inherent in Paige injuring himself immediately after stating, "I am the only one in the room professional enough to use one of these.")

Brilliant. Clearly the DEA is at fault here, since there's nothing they like better than spending many hundreds of thousands of dollars training a man like Paige for undercover work and then blowing his cover with one of the Net's most downloaded videos. This is transparently a DEA conspiracy, and it's not in the remotest sense likely that some guy at DEA stole the tape against express orders, or at the very least against clearly stated protocol, and put it on the Net either to settle a grudge or just for a laugh. Certainly the DEA needs to identify this guy and fire, and probably prosecute, him. But, given the almost autistic level of bureaucracy and offical paranoia for which the US' institutions are renowned, it's clearly a waste of money and time to pursue this case, and it's hard not to conclude that Paige is simply compounding his humiliation with a blind, instinctive swing at the first thing he can think of.

What? You don't like lackey? Hmm. Or how about, uh, toady? Or lickspittle? Lickspittle's nice. Oh, wait, I got it. Flunky. That's it.

2006-04-20T22:58:00.000Z

I'm becoming quite the fan of Andy Burnham. This Home Office lickspittle is clearly intent on riding the scruffy, unshaven coattails of Charles Clarke all the way to the top, so earnest and full-throated is he in his support for ID Cards.

The intent expressed therein should come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the methodology of this increasingly bankrupt and oppressive government. But I can't help wondering if he's been a little over-eager in the actual expression. For a government usually so secretive, it's a startlingly frank admission of intention: not just to force this totalitarian initiative on an unwilling nation, not just to invert the relationship between state and individual, making the latter answerable to the former rather than being accountable itself, not just to implement the political oppression, so redolent of unspeakable crimes, of numbering people; but openly to admit to the intention to make it as near as dammit unrepealable. Perhaps such unwonted transparency may in the end prove his downfall: maybe even ID Cards'. Or we could always rely on the incompetence of the state to implement such an enormous and complicated scheme inside three years. With a bit of luck it will become such a farrago that no-one in his right mind could possibly continue to support it (which will not, of course, mean that it goes without support...).

In the meantime ... and in case you (silent, invisible reader) didn't make it down to the comments section of the first link, check this out.

Bad karma

2006-04-18T13:16:00.000Z

I'm not going to pretend that David Cameron has so far been the leader I would have wanted the Conservatives to have. He's spurned numerous gaping opportunities to attack the Government from extrememly firm ground, and in so doing has allowed them to get away scot-free with many things any one of which would have done significant damage to the last Conservative government. Many think he's doing this to keep Blair in office as long as possible because a) most people hate Blair now - I was here first - and the longer he stays the fewer people will want to vote Labour, and b) if Gordon Brown is still Chancellor when his house of cards economy collapses, people will know whom to blame and won't want to vote for him as Prime Minister. Perhaps these are worthwhile tactics, but right now I'd rather see someone stand up for grammar schools, for example, and also take this institutionally corrupt government down a few pegs.

The really frustrating thing is that, despite, or perhaps because of, Dave's questionable tactics and notable lack of, well, Conservatism, the Labour party appears to be scared. Scared enough to pay various people to conceive, design and host this total-waste-of-time website (actually hosted at labour.org.uk, you may note), for example, and to write the 12-page Word document you can download therefrom. And certainly scared enough to resort to their classic get-out-the-vote tactics for the May 4 council elections. The merest mention of the BNP is usually good for an extra couple of percentage points on Labour's vote tally.

But the question is, which approach would yield better results? Cameron thinks he can win more votes by aping the statist policies the people in this country have been conditioned relentlessly to admire and expect from government. But the trouble is, if he wins votes this way he'll actually have to act like it in power, and I think he's too smart and, behind all the gloss, a man of too much conviction to betray his country in that manner.

Meanwhile, in countries that still have a free press...

2006-04-15T14:31:00.000Z

Mark Steyn, as I previously intended to note, but apparently never did, has suddenly found himself non grata among the British press Establishment. Having disappeared unremarked from both The Telegraph and The Spectator, mere days after both organs were advertising his writing on their front pages (The Telegraph even managed to advertise his Tuesday column on the Monday; the Tuesday column was nowhere to be found and he hasn't been back since), we Brits are now reduced to reading him on the Web. Doesn't make his writing any less compelling, of course.

Citizens caned, indeed

2006-04-15T14:25:00.000Z

Were I Motoring editor at The Daily Telegraph, I'd've sent this one up to the actual editor. The points it raises are far too wide-ranging and important to be tucked away near the bottom of Honest John's agony column, deep in Saturday's Motoring section.

Parking Charge Notices (PCNs) appear to deny citizens access to a court of law should they wish to challenge them. Is this not contrary to the Bill Of Rights 1689? The Bill is constitutional law and above any parliamentary law. It does not differentiate between civil and criminal offences and is quite clear on this. This Bill, and charters such as the Magna Carta (1215), Act of Settlement (1701) and so on, are not grants from the monarchy to the people.

We own them and any law that infringes them shall be of no force or effect. They cannot be repealed or subverted and are not subject to votes. To quote from the Bill of Rights presented to William of Orange: "All grants and promises of fines and forfeitures of particular persons before conviction are illegal and void."

It seems quite clear. You cannot levy fines or forfeitures on any person before a conviction. The only people who can convict and issue fines are the courts of law. If this were not true, people would have no protection from the might of the state, which would be able to wield all the power it liked (as now seems to be the case).
M.W., via e-mail

Relativist recidivism

2006-04-12T10:56:00.000Z

The BBC link I gave in my last post now leads to something approaching the actual story, which is intriguing. I've been trying and failing to dig up Google's cache of the page from Monday afternoon (it seems that the BBC requested their pages not be archived, which is comfortingly transparent for a news organisation: "No, we never reported that. This page always said this!"), when Mr. Livingstone's fatuous remarks were almost dismissively mentioned towards the end of an otherwise entirely unremarkable article about his trip to Beijing. This is particularly odd, since I got the story from the print media on Monday afternoon, which means it had to have been a story for getting on for 24 hours by the time the BBC were making absolutely nothing of it. Now that it's refused to go away, of course, they have to make grudging efforts to be seen to be actually reporting the news - but see how the story is trivialised, even dismissed, before you've actually read it by the use of inverted commas around 'comparison'.

That's the first time I've had cause to type "Beijing", by the way, which reminds me of a pet peeve of mine. I very nearly typed "Peking", for the same reason I would type Cologne instead of Köln, Moscow instead of Muskva, Prague instead of Praha, etc.. Wikipedia points out that it was the traditional Anglicisation prior to a sound change in Mandarin (how does that work, by the way? Is there a decree? "This character now sounds like this. It never sounded like that!"), so I suppose the modern use of Beijing is just about acceptable, but for the fact that no-one seems to realise it's not pronounced bay-jing (soft J) but is, in fact, pronounced by-jing (hard J). (However, I still delight in the reproachful looks I can generate from a certain type of person should I ever have cause to talk about Bombay, Madras or Bangalore.)

Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold

2006-04-10T15:50:00.000Z

Much more alarmed this afternoon, and naturally our buffoon of a Mayor is to blame. Apparently, the cold-blooded slaughter by a brutal totalitarian regime of some 2,600 Chinese hunger-strikers, along with the injuring of some 10,000, is somehow comparable with the control of a riot in Trafalgar Square initiated by violent anarchists. Perhaps Mr. Livingstone genuinely believes that the generally non-lethal use of a few riot police vans and mounted policemen in the face of some 200,000 protesters represents an equivalent exhibition of the crushing repressive power of the state to a massacre wrought by the declaration of martial law and the use of tanks, infantry and flamethrowers. But he is surely an idiot if so. Perhaps he's been talking to Alan Moore. Or perhaps in his addled morality, the abominations of Communism are mitigated for having been performed in the name of the state?

On a side note, this story is barely mentioned on the BBC. Funny, that.

Spurty knowledge

2006-04-10T10:53:00.000Z

One or two things are alarming me this morning. The first is that Buffy was someone's specialist subject on Mastermind. I love Buffy, but Mastermind specialist subjects are supposed to be things like, "The creation of intrusive, ultrabasic, peraluminous ingenous rocks in North America between 5,000,000BC and 3,000,000BC". Somehow a thorough working knowledge of a TV programme, however widely lauded, however fully realised and thematically weighty, seems a little feckless in comparison with the Mastermind I grew up with. Still, times change. The second alarming thing is that I knew all the answers but one off the top of my head.

1) What was the address Buffy gave when she phoned for an ambulance in The Body?

2) Who was Xander’s best man in Hell's Bells?

3) In which episode was Dawn introduced?

4) To whom did Anya think was she engaged in Tabula Rasa?

5) How did Flutie die in The Pack?

6) How did Buffy kill The Judge?

7) How did Buffy prove that Kathy was a demon in Living Conditions?

8) What did Anya think, apart from bunnies, might be causing the singing in Once More With Feeling?

9) What was Ted’s job?

10) What was the name of the oracle that Giles and Anya consulted in Showtime?

11) In which episode did Giles and Joyce kiss, Buffy drive a car and the doctor body surf?

12) How many hearts did the Gentleman have to get in Hush?

13) What happened to Amber the cheerleader in The Witch?

14) Who played Joyce?

15) What kind of statue did Brad steal for Harmony in Real Me?

16) What was the name of the character who was Buffy’s boyfriend between Angel and Riley?

17) What three word message did Ethan Rayne leave behind in Halloween?

If you're curious, the one I didn't know was 9.

Business as usual

2006-04-06T10:27:00.000Z

Right. Back to bitching. The usual objects, I'm afraid: Ken and the BBC.

Ken's latest wheeze, in his ongoing mission to be informally deified by London's bien-pensants, involves promoting his extension to the Congestion Charging zone (ie, his application of the screw to yet more small businesses in the name of buggering the motorist) with a poster that shows the London skyline, the left half of the picture in daylight and the right in darkness (or perhaps that should be, "the Left half of the picture in daylight and the Right in darkness"). The caption is "7am - 6.30pm". Now that the clocks have gone forward and summer's on the way it doesn't get dark by 6.30 any more, but Ken would never let the facts get in the way of an arresting image. The crowning glory of this image, however, is the C logo perched on the horizon, clearly intended, with its terribly subtle glow effect at the edge, to resemble the sun, rising above the city and imperiously burning away the frost and dew of congestion and immeasurably improving our lives the way all Ken's initiatives have, don't you know.

BBC News 24 is a pretty shambolic affair occasionally. The guy presenting last night stumbled over his words five times during a 90-second piece to camera (and when you consider that he is also frightfully well-spoken the question arises how in the world he holds onto his BBC job, being both crap and posh (the BBC hasn't consciously employed anyone without an impeccably egalitarian regional accent for many years now, barring a few superannuated institutions like Dimbleby and Paxman)) and that was just what I noticed in between playing Day of Defeat and rolling Js. But here's a thing. Going through the headlines of tomorrow's (ie today's) papers with an analyst, I was intrigued to note that he instigated discussion on the front page stories of The Scotsman, The Guardian, The Independent, The Times and The Sun. The Scotsman had bird flu, The Grauniad (first edition) had a link discovered that solved a mystery of evolution, The Indy had the peace protesters accused of terrorism (natch), The Times had credit card charges being "slashed" ... The Telegraph, which in its first edition ran with Gordon Brown's new retrospective "wealth tax", apparently didn't merit discussion of its front page story; instead presenter and pundit spent an animated couple of minutes discussing the story on page 3, which was a report that JK Rowling thinks girls worry too much about being fat and she'd never allow her daughters to become so obsessed with being skinny, which led the pundit to remark that JK was a "fine figure of a woman" and then hastily recant as though he could already hear the armies of humourless feminists sharpening their nibs. A good laugh was had by all and with a bit of luck no-one really noticed that they declined to comment at all on the front page story.

Am I ridiculous in finding that odd? Am I paranoid in considering it yet more evidence of the BBC's inherent soft-Left bias? After (rightly) working themselves up into paroxysms of righteous anger about the two sexagenarian women accused of terrorism for civil disobedience, are we to believe that they genuinely thought JK Rowling's opinion of our diet-obsessed culture was a more important talking point than a retrospective tax on wills that could impinge upon one in ten households?

L

2006-04-05T10:50:00.000Z

So it turns out it takes cancellation and the untimely death of one of their stars in order for the team of writers responsible for never being anywhere near as good as that one guy virtually on his own actually to raise their game and write a few decent episodes.

Yes. I've actually been enjoying The West Wing of late. For sure, it still looks like it was shot on a cold afternoon in Norway, but it's almost been possible to overlook that. And occasionally I also manage to forget that this election should be taking place next year. In fact, since it came back from Christmas hiatus following John Spencer's death, it's been totally gripping. And I'm not just talking about Josh and Donna.

Those two were always symptomatic of the loss in quality of this show. Clearly utterly devoted to one another, if unable or unwilling to admit it, the genius of their scenes together was in the unresolved sexual tension they injected into Aaron Sorkin's beautifully rhythmical banter. Not until his penultimate episode, Commencement, did Sorkin even come close to making explicit the dynamic between the two of them (and even then it was only an unanswered question Amy asked of Donna: "Are you in love with Josh?"). But it was all there from day one.

John Wells, on the other hand, clearly wasn't so into the whole suggestion thing. Following Donna's experience as collateral damage in the Season Five finalé explosion that killed Fitzwallace (a mindless aping of 18th and Potomac in terms of being a meaningless death to get Bartlet to a certain space, and not done as well), Josh spends a fraught couple of days in a German hospital trying to figure out what went on between Donna and the Evil British Photographer. Then, in Season Six, he quits, ostensibly to go and help Santos get elected but really so that he's no longer Donna's boss and they can fuck like minks. Now, as any self-respecting X-Files fan will tell you, it's not as good once they fuck. So they didn't: their attraction was just made lots more obvious, and consequently less delightful. But now, with cancellation looming, finally, on Sunday night, Josh and Donna went to bed.

Fair enough, I suppose. In the end it was handled pretty well. I like the idea that Josh is still totally unsure of how to handle a woman he just slept with, like we saw with Amy. I like the idea that Donna understands this - after all, if she doesn't, having worked with him for nine years at this point, who would? Looking at the wider picture I've enjoyed the Santos/Vinick rivalry, their debates, their intrigue (the briefcase scene in Two Weeks Out was great). I still don't understand what the hell Bruno is doing campaigning for the Republicans, and I understand even less how we're supposed to buy the idea of a man with hair like his being attractive to hot Yale graduates, but these are carps. It's been good. And when Annabeth went into Leo's hotel room at the end of this week's episode I, knowing what she was going to find, had something no Wells episode has given me before: a lump in the throat.

Politburo fun

2006-04-04T13:09:00.000Z

Who wants a Zil?

1805 Days

2006-04-04T12:10:00.000Z

While those self-righteous, deluded narcissists in Westminster apparently take a break from undermining a millenium's worth of hard-won liberties, I can talk about something less depressing. Like the new Tool album that's out in a month or so. So far they're telling us it's called 10,000 Days, which means nothing so much as it probably isn't called 10,000 Days. They've sent cover art to Amazon, but I still don't buy it. 10,000 Days just isn't a very Tool title. It's not a made-up word, for one thing. And the tracklist looks like an entirely different band wrote the songs. They always do this though.

The question is, how much do I care? The last album (2001's Lateralus - don't even get me started on their glacial output) was an utterly epochal moment in my life. I've been entertaining the nagging suspicion, however, that I just don't care that much about this one. Maybe when I hear the real titles I'll start getting excited. On the off-chance that they are the real titles, maybe when I hear the songs I'll remember why Lateralus was such a huge deal.

But I'm not sure I haven't simply got past Tool. Sure, the other night The Grudge randomly came on on my mp3 player, and it's still amazing and it still got me gritting my teeth and throwing metal signs in the street, and it still brought the hairs on the back of my neck to attention at the climax. But the fact that this is news is the point. My mp3 player hasn't been on shuffle for ages, and that's because I've been listening to Opeth literally all the time. Of course, when you consistently don't get new material for five-year stretches (Lateralus, likewise, arrived after a five-year wait. That time they had an excuse: they'd been getting sued. This time it pretty much seems that singer Maynard James Keenan was too busy with his more accessible, and therefore more popular, and predictably enough, therefore, far less interesting, other band, A Perfect Circle, who managed one good album before greasing themselves up, finding the very steepest part of the slide into mediocrity and hurling themselves down it with all dispatch, only to find when at the bottom that their own banality wasn't quite banal enough and so soggily embracing predictable political themes and topping it all off with a disastrous cover of the tedious Imagine. None of this, of course, bodes particularly well for new Tool material) you can get pretty bored with what you've got.

But if it's really called 10,000 Days, I'll eat my hat.

I don't actually have a hat, but I'll undertake some forfeit or other.

You are free ... to do as we tell you!

2006-03-30T12:44:00.000Z

Gah.

So, I've got until 2014 (my passport's expiry date) to emigrate. Maybe New Hampshire. In the meantime, cheer yourselves up with this interesting fact.

Doesn't that make you feel better about the National Identity Register? Most of the time they can't even code a fucking website.

That's Smith, with an S.

2006-03-30T09:54:00.000Z

Two (more) reasons Geoff Hoon's an idiot.

An intrusive press is to blame for the public's lack of trust in politicians, eh, Geoff? I suppose technically that's inarguable, since if the media weren't intrusive we wouldn't have much of an idea of what you lot get up to when you're not snoozing away on the green benches - but guess what? If you weren't so venal and iniquitous, so self-serving, so self-righteous, so profligate and so treacherous away from the green benches, maybe the press would have no ammunition with which gleefully to destroy our trust in you in the first place. I think politicians' utter lack of trustworthiness is to blame for the public's lack of trust in politicians. It's especially astonishing to me that these beautifully aggrieved-sounding comments could come from a senior member of this Government, elected promising to be whiter than white and having left a filthy grey trail of slime, patronage and corruption everywhere it has slithered. If this doesn't show how sociopathic politicians are capable of being, I not sure what will.

That's one reason you're an idiot, although in fairness to you I doubt you were acting independently. No doubt someone in Number 10 decided they'd taken enough of a battering from the press this month and it was time to break out the wounded innocent act. Whatever. You all stink and you know it. That's so obvious as to have been a waste of keyboard wear and tear.

Here's why you're really an idiot though. In the words of Captain Dudley Smith (the excellent James Cromwell) in LA Confidential, reciprocity is the key to every successful relationship. You are part of a Government that has presided over the greatest encroachment over a person's right to self-determination in the history of this country. From ludicrous Health and Safety regulation to an insistence on dragging even successful, moderately wealthy middle-class families into the benefits trap (£50,000pa and you can still claim tax credits!); from your obsession with directing our lifestyle choices by banning perfectly legal activities like hunting and smoking to the greatest expansion of CCTV capability ever seen, such that London is now by far the most heavily-monitored city in the world; from laws attempting to regulate what we can say, joke about or laugh at to laws, agreed only yesterday, that force us to submit our identity to your control, and pay for the privilege of carrying a card we will still not own. The message overall is unmistakable: you do not trust us. Without your benign guidance and loving protection we should wallow in ignorance, poverty and criminality like the degenerate, recidivist pigs we inevitably are. Only the state can make us genuine citizens. Only through the state are we validated.

So why should we trust you?

Me and Henry Porter...

2006-03-28T23:52:00.000Z

Via Samizdata, a link to a worthwhile read about ID cards.

The last refuge of the scoundrel (21st century)

2006-03-28T19:09:00.000Z

Here comes that epoch-making fourth invocation of the Parliament Act.

The realisation that a lie remains a lie no matter how many times or with what wide-eyed conviction it is repeated is one that usually strikes children of seven or eight. Clearly it has yet to strike the Labour Party, which as an institution appears to have the mental age of a five-year-old and the scruples to match.

Home Office minister Andy Burnham earlier said it had been "absolutely clear" from before the election that the cards would be linked to passport applications.

From the Manifesto:

We will introduce ID cards, including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports. [manifesto p54; document p27]

Disregarding the lawyerly, bet-hedging "initially", this sentence is likely to be interpreted by most capable speakers of English, of whom I am certainly one, as meaning that when one renews one's passport, one has the option of "registering for" (ie purchasing) an ID card. "I'm here to renew my passport, please." "Certainly, Sir. Would you like an ID card with that?" "No, just the passport will be fine, thank you." - that sort of thing. But no! Turns out we're all dunces! That stuff you learned at school about subject/verb/adjective agrement is meaningless! Now there's the new Equivocal Wriggle-Room style!

Here's my thing, Andy: taking the subordinate clauses (still with me?) out of the sentence I quoted from the manifesto leaves us with:

We will introduce ID cards, ~~including biometric data like fingerprints, backed up by a national register and~~ rolling out initially on a voluntary basis as people renew their passports.

The meaning of the sentence has not been altered, but it helps us to see the agreement more easily. Clearly, it is the ID cards that are "rolling out" and, equally clearly, the basis on which they are rolling out, initially or otherwise, is voluntary. Unquestionably, the adjective "voluntary" describes the basis on which ID cards will be rolled out. Passports are simply mentioned in passing, as though to suggest that this happy transaction will simply take place at the same time as passport renewal and will not be codependent. The "voluntary" has absolutely nothing to do with renewing passports, and anyone reading that sentence would be hard pushed to infer that ID cards and passports would be inseparable.

Still, revisionism's like a warm shroud when you're losing the argument, eh Andy? The idea that the manifesto means what you now claim it means is only slightly less laughable than the notion that everyone studiously went out and picked up a copy and voted on the strength of it. That is what you imply when you and that unshaven buffoon Charles Clarke talk about the Lords "frustrating the will of the people" in such sanctimonious, highfalutin tones. It is demonstrably not the will of the people that ID cards be compulsorily introduced on pain of never leaving the country again, and it wouldn't be so even if you had a popular vote majority or more than 21% of the electoral roll on your side.

Well, then forgive me

2006-03-22T12:50:00.000Z

I'm all for Marxist-bashing, but this is ridiculous.

I mean, sure: few things have made me as angry recently as the inability of anyone writing about V for Vendetta to refrain from propogating Alan Moore's ignorance of the meaning of the word Fascism. Moore originally wrote the graphic novel in the mid-Eighties, he has said, as a "rebuke" to Thatcherism, stating,

We had supposed that it would take a nuclear war to make England veer towards fascism. In the end all it took was giving people the right to buy their own council house.

I find it distinctly odd that he should attempt to rebuke the least statist government Britain has had since, probably, Gladstone's by setting V in a dystopian statist Britain. This appears to have occurred to precious few of those whose job it has been over the last month or so to come up with copy about the new cinematic version for various publications, who have, to a man, perpetuated the fatuous meme that Thatcher's was a fascist government because a writer of graphic novels said so. They may be interested to read this list of fourteen defining characteristics of fascism (I know, I know: they'll have to get the link from a blog they actually read. Permit me the posture, at least), on which I suggest they will find two or three, certainly no more than four at the outside, evinced by the Thatcher Government. (At least as many, if not actually the same ones, are characteristic of the Blair Government.) A corresponding list of defining characteristics of free societies would certainly bear far greater resemblance to Thatcher's Britain.

Ideological muddles aside, however, V for Vendetta has one great thing going for it: it's about the struggle against oppressive government, something that usually gets American conservatives all tent-trousered. This one, unfortunately, is a religious conservative, which means a full sense of humour bypass, the attachment of an overactive sanctimony gland and the graft of a blind spot for allegory.

Let's go back to that list. There at number 8: Religion and Government are intertwined. In other words, in V's world, because religion is a tool easily used to manipulate public opinion, Christianity has become part of the fabric of the Fascist state. Is this a slur on Christianity, "Dr." Ted Baehr, or is it merely an honest depicition of the underhand tactics of a repressive regime? You fuckin' dolt.

Charlie and the Consent Factory

2006-03-21T23:16:00.000Z

I apologise for the doubtless alarming and upsetting reference to Chomsky in the title of this post. As a confirmed anti-idiotarian I spotted it as soon as I thought of the title; I left it in, however, because in this case (ie for once) I think it's actually quite an appropriate notion, although I doubt the great "public intellectual" would agree with me.

Speaking on the Today programme yesterday morning, the Lord Chancellor, Charles, Lord Falconer, opined thus:

Everybody recognises that political parties should be state-funded if we want a healthy democracy.

This is, of course, the same Baron Falconer of Thoroton, PC, who recently rejected calls for an English Parliament to represent the people of England. He would, of course: an English Paliament elected by English voters would be Conservative-controlled and as such is inconceivable. Far better, as under the current system, to take advantage of the corruption of funding whereby Scottish and Welsh constituencies receive significantly more public funds per capita while privately earning rather less. Quite happy with this state of affairs as they are, they are quite prepared to elect and re-elect Lord Falconer's cronies in Scottish constituencies from where they can run English affairs as they like to: with Scottish votes.

Ah, cronies: that's where I came in. Lord Falconer is hardly an exemplar of a healthy democracy. He holds the increasingly questionable distinction of being the very first peer created by Tony Blair, an honour for which, as he cheerfully admits, he qualified by dint of his long and distinguished public service as Tony's flatmate in their Bar days. Following an unremarkable few years in the Lords, unsullied by excellence of any kind, he was made Lord Chancellor, which lest we forget is one of the most senior and important functionaries in the government of the UK, after the previous one objected to Blair's class-war attempt to destroy the office. Not bad for yer basic QC. Clearly Blair, unable for the present to destroy the office, thought he could do worse than with a pal in there.

And so to this pronouncement, this transparent attempt to influence opinion by pretending it's already been formed in his image. What is it about state-funded party politics that he feels would be so healthy for democracy, exactly? Perhaps by his evidently warped standards, as detailed above, it would be ideal, but to people with a more received definition of "democracy" and "health" it could only be disastrous. How long until guidelines were laid down detailing within exactly what ideological boundaries a political party would be eligible for state funding? If that sounds outlandish, try and imagine impeccable progressives like Gordon Brown consenting to state funding of the BNP, or again humourless crusaders like Gordon Brown consenting to state funding of the Monster Raving Loony Party. There are few who would rejoice as heartily as I (a sometime Anti-Nazi Leaguer in my teens) at the prospect of the BNP going broke, but the price in this case would be far too high. What Lord Falconer actually means is, "Pretty soon, what with all this dreadful exposure of our funding scandals, we won't have any cash to run the next election. Just as membership of and donations to the Conservatives are on the increase. Curses!" He wants to nationalise party politics before his party runs out of money. That's healthy democracy. Honest, Noam.

Rubicon

2006-03-18T20:06:00.000Z

This is a partial list of Acts that the government refuses to rule out being subject to the pending Legislative and Regulatory Reform Bill.

Act of Settlement 1700; Anti-Terrorism, Crime and Security Act 2001; Bail Act 1976; Bill of Rights 1688; Church of England Assembly (Powers) Act 1919; Church of Scotland Act 1921; Civil Contingencies Act 2004; Claim of Right 1689; Constitutional Reform Act 2005; Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994; European Communities Act 1972; Freedom of Information Act 2000; Government of Ireland Act 1920; Government of Wales Act 2006; Government of Wales Act 1998; Habeas Corpus Acts 1679 to 1862; House of Lords Act 1999; Human Rights Act 1998; Identity Cards Act 2006; Immigration Act 1971; Local Government Act 1972; Magna Carta 1215; Ministerial and Other Salaries Act 1975; Ministers of the Crown Act 1975; Northern Ireland Act 1947; Northern Ireland Act 1998; Official Secrets Acts 1911 to 1989; Parliament Acts 1911 and 1949; Parliamentary Constituencies Act 1986; Police and Criminal Evidence Act 1984; Prevention of Terrorism Act 2005; Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Act 1706; Public Order Acts 1936 to 1986; Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act 2000; Representation of the People Acts 1981 to 2002; Scotland Act1998; Security Service Act 1989; Statute of Westminster 1931; Succession to the Crown Act1707; Terrorism Act 2000; Terrorism Act 2006; Union with England Act 1707; Union with Scotland Act 1706; Welsh Church Disestablishment Act 1914.

So much for joined-up Government: 16 of these 44 Acts were Bills presented by this Government, but their schizophrenia isn't the issue. Neither, for that matter, is the fact that this Government, which has invoked the Parliament Acts like it's going out of fashion to force some fiercely-opposed laws through, includes both Parliament Acts on the list, although the likelihood of those laws being repealed if the law used to create them is changed is, of course, slim in the extreme. And let's just gloss over the fact that Magna Carta effectively created the English Parliament: so good luck tidying up that one.

What does it mean to introduce such a Bill? The Cabinet Office page linked says, reassuringly, that the Bill will make it "quicker and easier to tackle unnecessary or over-complicated regulation and help bring about a risk-based approach to regulation". Whatever that means. They used the word "tackle", so they must be doing something. Then "deliver" later on. And - ah! now I see it. It's to tackle unnecesary and over-complicated legislation. No wonder their own legislation featurs so prominently.

But, of course, it doesn't really go into any detail about how this alleged streamlining will take place. One could, of course, have a look at the Bill itself - but easier, surely, to let someone else do the hard work.

Ooof!

It gives ministers power to alter any law passed by Parliament. The only limitations are that new crimes cannot be created if the penalty is greater than two years in prison and that it cannot increase taxation. But any other law can be changed, no matter how important. All ministers will have to do is propose an order, wait a few weeks and, voilà, the law is changed.

Yikes!, as Boris might say. But the question, surely, must be: who asks for this kind of power? In a Parliamentary democracy that can, or could until recently at any rate, be more or less proud of the laws it has passed and the legacy of freedom it has engendered, what could possibly give someone the idea that such a thing would be necessary or desirable? Only, and I do mean only, if the laws that this Bill will be used to pass quickly, without scrutiny or debate, are completely unacceptable to the vast majority of people, and therefore to their representatives, will a facility such as the one provided by this Bill be needed. The only way of thinking or kind of attitude that engenders such a Bill is the "I know best" approach. The notion that certain people know what's best for us all, and too much scrutiny from other people will only get in the way even if they aren't too stupid to understand what's going on: this is how our masters now think. So accustomed have they become to having ever-greater control over ever more numerous aspects of our lives that we've reached the point where they're making their play, planning that final land-grab to end all land-grabs. They've come too far now, after all, to stop here. The Great Project must be completed, before those nasty Tories even look like they might be electable again. And so accustomed have we become to having our lives micromanaged by the state that we hardly notice when they try to take our brains out.

Scrupulously fair over at the BBC...

2006-03-16T23:47:00.000Z

I'm trying not to let this turn into a one-note blog, but I feel I'm being thwarted in that aim by the BBC.

Question Time was no more than usually boring tonight. (Margaret Hodge was incredibly sanctimonious, patronising and self-righteous. I wonder if she practises her beatific smile in the mirror.) Interesting page on the panel on the BBC site, however. Note that we're reminded, although it was ten years ago and he was merely accused of "dissemblance" in the mire of Neil Hamilton's scandal, of David Willets' resignation over the cash for questions affair. How odd, then, that no mention is made of the far more recent and significantly more serious smear on Margaret Hodge's record, where children ultimately in her care were systematically abused while she was leader of Islington Council. So, we're quite prepared to dredge up the past in the shape of a moderate cash and falsehood scandal to remind people how awful the Tories were, but heaven forfend we mention the systematic child abuse scandal from three years ago for a Labour minister. That would hardly be cricket, what?

Pro-test, Pro-gress, Pro-not-having-a-balloon-for-a-head.

2006-03-15T23:24:00.000Z

Can there seriously be any doubt, in the present climate of fear, intimidation and thuggish self-righteousness, that the condition of these men is in the most part due to the "activities" of the animal rights terrorists? This possibility was, of course, magnificently ignored by the BBC, in the article linked and in various follow-ups throughout the day, but I would not be at all surprised to learn that pharmaceutical companies have been unable or unwilling to keep up a full and thorough programme of tests on animals before switching to humans. In other words, these drugs were probably not entirely ready to be tried on humans, and six people are seriously ill.

Once again, then: www.pro-test.org.uk

Gordon Berlusconi

2006-03-14T11:17:00.000Z

This is encouraging.

Seems like Gordon's really making his play. Not only does he want us to think of him as British so that we forget how his majority will be sustained by Scottish MPs when the House votes on English matters, but apparently he's been learning a thing or two about telescreens and Freizeitgestaltung, because what this country really needs right now is yet another organ peddling government orthodoxy. I know the BBC has its own orthodoxy, and that's tiresome enough (in this article, for instance, they draw a beautiful distinction between the two sides of the debate by carefully referring to people they like as campaigners - tireless, committed, ordinary people forced into activism - and those they don't like as lobbyists - shady professionals in the pay of big business hatching plots to subvert our freedom - just so that we're quite clear who the good guys are, despite mounting evidence of the thoroughgoing failure of any and all handgun legislation), but at least at the moment it's free to change its mind should it ever choose to employ people capable of critically rationalist thought. It is not the BBC's task to "sustain citizenship and civil society" any more than it's government's task to report the news. No doubt Brown's envious of the influence exerted over their countries' media by such beacons of transparency as Vladimir Putin and Silvio Berlusconi (both owners, if you please, of national media organs), but this narrowing of the gap between state and media is ominous in the extreme.

Publish and be damned...

2006-03-09T20:50:00.000Z

This article was taken down "for legal reasons" from the Telegraph website on Tuesday.

The day is coming when British Muslims form a state within a state. By Alasdair Palmer (Filed: 19/02/2006)

© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

For the past two weeks, Patrick Sookhdeo has been canvassing the opinions of Muslim clerics in Britain on the row over the cartoons featuring images of Mohammed that were first published in Denmark and then reprinted in several other European countries.

"They think they have won the debate," he says with a sigh. "They believe that the British Government has capitulated to them, because it feared the consequences if it did not.

"The cartoons, you see, have not been published in this country, and the Government has been very critical of those countries in which they were published. To many of the Islamic clerics, that's a clear victory.

"It's confirmation of what they believe to be a familiar pattern: if spokesmen for British Muslims threaten what they call 'adverse consequences' - violence to the rest of us - then the British Government will cave in. I think it is a very dangerous precedent."

Dr Sookhdeo adds that he believes that "in a decade, you will see parts of English cities which are controlled by Muslim clerics and which follow, not the common law, but aspects of Muslim sharia law.

"It is already starting to happen - and unless the Government changes the way it treats the so-called leaders of the Islamic community, it will continue."

For someone with such strong and uncompromising views, Dr Sookhdeo is a surprisingly gentle and easy-going man. He speaks with authority on Islam, as it was his first faith: he was brought up as a Muslim in Guyana, the only English colony in South America, and attended a madrassa there.

"But Islamic instruction was very different in the 1950s, when I was at school," he says. "There was no talk of suicide bombing or indeed of violence of any kind. Islam was very peaceful."

Dr Sookhdeo's family emigrated to England when he was 10. In his early twenties, when he was at university, he converted to Christianity. "I had simply seen it as the white man's religion, the religion of the colonialists and the oppressors - in a very similar way, in fact, to the way that many Muslims see Christianity today.

" Leaving Islam was not easy. According to the literal interpretation of the Koran, the punishment for apostasy is death - and it actually is punished by death in some Middle Eastern states. "It wasn't quite like that here," he says, "although it was traumatic in some ways."

Dr Sookhdeo continued to study Islam, doing a PhD at London University on the religion. He is currently director of the Institute for the Study of Islam and Christianity. He also advises the Army on security issues related to Islam.

Several years ago, Dr Sookhdeo insisted that the next wave of radical Islam in Britain would involve suicide bombings in this country. His prediction was depressingly confirmed on 7/7 last year.

So his claim that, in the next decade, the Muslim community in Britain will not be integrated into mainstream British society, but will isolate itself to a much greater extent, carries weight behind it. Dr Sookhdeo has proved his prescience.

"The Government, and Tony Blair, the Prime Minister, are fundamentally deluded about the nature of Islam," he insists. "Tony Blair unintentionally revealed his ignorance when he said, in an effort to conciliate Muslims, that he had 'read through the Koran twice' and that he kept it by his bedside.

"He thought he was saying something which showed how seriously he took Islam. But most Muslims thought it was a joke, if not an insult. Because, of course, every Muslim knows that you cannot read the Koran through from cover to cover and understand it.

The chapters are not written to be read in that way. Indeed, after the first chapter, the chapters of the Koran are ordered according to their length, not according to their content or chronology: the longest chapters are first, the shorter ones are at the end.

"You need to know which passage was revealed at what period and in what time in order to be able to understand it - you cannot simply read it from beginning to end and expect to learn anything at all.

"That is one reason why it takes so long to be able to read and understand the Koran: the meaning of any part of it depends on a knowledge of its context - a context that is not in the Koran itself."

The Prime Minister's ignorance of Islam, Dr Sookhdeo contends, is of a piece with his unsuccessful attempts to conciliate it. And it does indeed seem as if the Government's policy towards radical Islam is based on the hope that if it makes concessions to its leaders, they will reciprocate and relations between fundamentalist Muslims and Tony Blair's Government will then turn into something resembling an ecumenical prayer meeting.

Dr Sookhdeo nods in vigorous agreement with that. "Yes - and it is a very big mistake. Look at what happened in the 1990s. The security services knew about Abu Hamza and the preachers like him. They knew that London was becoming the centre for Islamic terrorists. The police knew. The Government knew. Yet nothing was done.

"The whole approach towards Muslim militants was based on appeasement. 7/7 proved that that approach does not work - yet it is still being followed. For example, there is a book, The Noble Koran: a New Rendering of its Meaning in English, which is openly available in Muslim bookshops.

"It calls for the killing of Jews and Christians, and it sets out a strategy for killing the infidels and for warfare against them. The Government has done nothing whatever to interfere with the sale of that book.

"Why not? Government ministers have promised to punish religious hatred, to criminalise the glorification of terrorism, yet they do nothing about this book, which blatantly does both."

Perhaps the explanation is just that they do not take it seriously. "I fear that is exactly the problem," says Dr Sookhdeo. "The trouble is that Tony Blair and other ministers see Islam through the prism of their own secular outlook.

They simply do not realise how seriously Muslims take their religion. Islamic clerics regard themselves as locked in mortal combat with secularism.

"For example, one of the fundamental notions of a secular society is the moral importance of freedom, of individual choice. But in Islam, choice is not allowable: there cannot be free choice about whether to choose or reject any of the fundamental aspects of the religion, because they are all divinely ordained. God has laid down the law, and man must obey.

'Islamic clerics do not believe in a society in which Islam is one religion among others in a society ruled by basically non-religious laws. They believe it must be the dominant religion - and it is their aim to achieve this.

"That is why they do not believe in integration. In 1980, the Islamic Council of Europe laid out their strategy for the future - and the fundamental rule was never dilute your presence. That is to say, do not integrate.

"Rather, concentrate Muslim presence in a particular area until you are a majority in that area, so that the institutions of the local community come to reflect Islamic structures. The education system will be Islamic, the shops will serve only halal food, there will be no advertisements showing naked or semi-naked women, and so on."

That plan, says Dr Sookhdeo, is being followed in Britain. "That is why you are seeing areas which are now almost totally Muslim. The next step will be pushing the Government to recognise sharia law for Muslim communities - which will be backed up by the claim that it is "racist" or "Islamophobic" or "violating the rights of Muslims" to deny them sharia law.

"There's already a Sharia Law Council for the UK. The Government has already started making concessions: it has changed the law so that there are sharia-compliant mortgages and sharia pensions.

"Some Muslims are now pressing to be allowed four wives: they say it is part of their religion. They claim that not being allowed four wives is a denial of their religious liberty. There are Muslim men in Britain who marry and divorce three women, then marry a fourth time - and stay married, in sharia law, to all four.

"The more fundamentalist clerics think that it is only a matter of time before they will persuade the Government to concede on the issue of sharia law. Given the Government's record of capitulating, you can see why they believe that."

Dr Sookhdeo's vision of a relentless battle between secular and Islamic Britain seems hard to reconcile with the co-operation that seems to mark the vast majority of the interactions between the two communities.

"Well, it isn't me who says Islam is at war with secularisation," he says. "That's how Islamic clerics describe the situation."

But isn't it true that most Muslims who live in theocratic states want to get out of them as quickly as possible and live in a secular country such as Britain or America? And that most Muslims who come to Britain adopt the values of a liberal, democratic, tolerant society, rather than insisting on the inflexible rules of their religion?

"You have to distinguish between ordinary Muslims and their self-appointed leaders," explains Dr Sookhdeo. "I agree that the best hope for our collective future is that the majority of Muslims who have grown up here have accepted the secular nature of the British state and society, the division between religion and politics, and the importance of allowing people to choose freely how they will live.

"But that is not how most of the clerics talk. And, more significantly, it is not how the 'community leaders' whom the Government has decided represent the Muslim community think either.

"Take, for example, Tariq Ramadan, whom the Government has appointed as an adviser because ministers think he is a 'community leader'. Ramadan sounds, in public, very moderate. But in reality, he has some very extreme views. He attacks liberal Muslims as 'Muslims without Islam'. He is affiliated to the violent and uncompromising Muslim Brotherhood.

"He calls the education in the state schools of the West 'aggression against the Islamic personality of the child'. He has said that 'the Muslim respects the laws of the country only if they do not contradict any Islamic principle'. He has added that 'compromising on principles is a sign of fear and weakness'."

So what's the answer? What should the Government be doing? "First, it should try to engage with the real Muslim majority, not with the self-appointed 'community leaders' who don't actually represent anyone: they have not been elected, and the vast majority of ordinary Muslims have nothing to do with them.

"Second, the Government should say no to faith-based schools, because they are a block to integration. There should be no compromise over education, or over English as the language of education. The policy of political multiculturalism should be reversed.

"The hope was that it would to ensure separate communities would soften at the edges and integrate. But the opposite has in fact happened: Islamic communities have hardened. There is much less integration than there was for the generation that arrived when I did. There will be much less in the future if the present trend continues.

"Finally, the Government should make it absolutely clear: we welcome diversity, we welcome different religions - but all of them have to accept the secular basis of British law and society. That is a non-negotiable condition of being here.

"If the Government does not do all of those things then I fear for the future, because Islamic communities within Britain will form a state within a state. Religion will occupy an ever-larger place in our collective political life. And, speaking as a religious man myself, I fear that outcome."

© Copyright Telegraph Group Limited 2006.

I don't know why it was taken down: I don't know whom it offends or, more pertinently, what law it breaks. I rather suspect it doesn't break any laws. It certainly wouldn't have got through the Telegraph's legal department had it been libellous or in any way "sensitive". It seems eminently rational and fair-minded. One could hardly accuse it of stirring hatred. I can't help the feeling that it was taken down following complaints from what one might term, in this particular context, the usual suspects.

You're entitled to your own opinion. Just make sure it's the right one.

2006-03-09T14:08:00.001Z

Oh please.

As Hugh Laurie once wrote, Newton's Third Law of Conversation, if it existed, would hold that every statement implies an equal and opposite statement. Laurie made this observation in the middle of a scene in his comic (and utterly marvellous) novel The Gun Seller, in which the narrator is trying to hit on a woman having just nearly killed an assailant in her front room. She tells him to "drop that shit right now. There's a man dying in here." Laurie's narrator observes to himself that implied in that statement is the notion that had there not been a man dying in there, he could have "kept holding onto that shit" and continued chatting up the woman.

Likewise, every time someone like Ang Lee or any of those people quoted in the article linked above complains that Brokeback Mountain only lost because it was a movie about gay cowboys and America wasn't ready to embrace the pink, their statements carry the implication that it should have won because it was a movie about gay cowboys, as though that were reason enough to award a film Best Picture.

It's the same asininity that beset Joss Whedon when he killed Tara in the Buffy episode Seeing Red. Mutant Enemy was inundated with complaints that by killing a lesbian character and sending her lover on a grief-stricken kill-crazy rampage Whedon had fulfilled the poisonous Dead/Evil Lesbian Cliché that has apparently permeated movies for decades. Whedon simply pointed out that Tara's death was merely a function of the story arc that started four years earlier with Willow's spell in Becoming, Part II: Willow's ever-growing power and her ability to control it. Viewed entirely dispassionately, Tara needed to die to bring Willow's ability to control her powers to a head. For Whedon to have held off killing her simply because she was a lesbian was just as offensive to him as killing her simply because she was a lesbian. In the end he had to ignore her sexuality and deal with her entirely independently of it. (Of course, this is what the gay community is supposed to have been after since forever.) Complaints that he had killed off half of the only lesbian couple on primetime TV were likewise refuted with the eminently sensible comment that that was hardly his fault: he couldn't write all the shows.

So everyone thought Brokeback was going to win and it didn't. It's not the first time that different films have won Best Director and Best Picture. Saving Private Ryan and Shakespeare in Love are but the most recent films to have shared the top two awards, if memory serves. I don't think anyone felt Ryan was cheated of Best Picture because it was just too anti-war (Hollywood being as full of anti-war types as it is of gay people). You can't predict how 7,000 people are going to vote and you can't second-guess their reasons for voting how they did when you find out.

It's actually really depressing to be right.

2006-03-07T13:24:00.000Z

Charles Clarke's talking about the Lords again.

Oh, and guess what?

"I hope the Lords will recognise that this manifesto commitment, voted through by the elected chamber, should be respected," Mr Clarke told BBC Radio 4's Today programme.

Yawn. Deal with how Parliament works. Or just use the Parliament Act in a really effective fit of pique like you did for foxhunting and more laws than all the previous governments combined since the Parliament Act became statute in 1911. But stop dropping the dreadful sledgehammer propaganda into your press releases. You sound like an idiot.

Oooh, wilful misinterpretation. That's quality journalism!

2006-03-04T20:05:00.000Z

Once again, the BBC demonstrates that they'll be damned if they can't impose their own agenda on a fairly unremarkable news story.

The opening sentence should, in any sensible world, render the rest of the article utterly fatuous. In essence it reads, "Anti-war campaigners have criticised Tony Blair after he suggested he believed in God." But how easy it must be to get confused when you know with such blazing certainty that you were right! How tempting it must be, subconsciously, to infer that what he really said was, "God told me to go to war, and hang the lot of you!"

So, for the record (inasmuch as a blog with no readers, or perhaps one or two very taciturn readers, can be said to be a record of anything except the amount of time I have spare), Blair only said that he believed his decision would "ultimately be judged by God". Not that God was whispering in his ear. He believes he will answer to God for his decision when he dies, not that he's been following God's instructions all along. This is, in fact, an utterly facile distinction that any theologically competent five-year-old could discern. Not the BBC, of course, with all its graduates and expensively trained personnel. Oh no. Reg Keys' comment that Blair was "using God as a get-out for total strategic failure" is way up near the top of the article, and aside from Stephen Pound's praise of Blair's "painful" honesty (a backhanded compliment, and in no way a defence of Blair's remarks or an attempt to inject any sense into the interpretations thereof), the various reactions reported further down the article are, without exception, guilty of the same deliberate misapprehension. This is gold for the BBC: not only do they get to air their anti-war credentials yet again, but they get to beat Blair with their anti-religion Bush-stick in the process.

Yes, I'm an atheist. Yes, I deplore the religious motivation of much Right-wing politics as much as I deplore the mindless collectivism of much Left-wing politics. But I don't hold it against a politician if he happens to have faith. All I ask is that I don't see his faith driving his politics, and much as I've been hating Tony Blair since long before it was hip I can find very little ground to fault him on this matter (the politicisation of religion, on the other hand...). If he believes he'll be judged by God, fine. I suspect God, if he weren't just a superstitious figment, would find very little problem with the liberation of a people from a violent dictator (a "totally unnecessary conflict" - Reg Keys), and if I were He (not much of a leap for the ego, I must confess), my only question would be, "What about Zimbabwe and North Korea and Sudan and Iran and ...?"

We decided to offend poor people?

2006-03-03T12:35:00.000Z

In his book The Third Way Anthony, Baron Giddens, Professor of Social and Political Sciences at Cambridge, writes, "There will never be a common morality of the citizenship until a majority of the population benefits from the welfare state."

This, as Fraser Nelson points out in The Spectator, is the secret to eternal Left-wing government. Employ or otherwise fund, support, assist or bankroll as many citizens as possible, until eventually a critical mass is reached whereby no party talking about reform stands a chance of being elected, for the very simple reason that far too many people will be aware that to vote for them will amount to voting themselves out of a job, or voting themselves out of a claim to benefit. In other words, what Prof. Giddens terms "a common morality" is really a common voting habit.

The expansion of the state isn't like the expansion of a commercial venture. The latter can only expand at a rate dictated by the success it finds in business: this is not just good business sense but is a constraint of the concern's profitability. Expansion costs money: new employees, new premises, new products, new clients must be sought, bought, developed and courted. Lawyers will inevitably need to be paid. But the state has it slightly easier. With a near-inexhaustible (at least in the short term) supply of money from taxpayers and a near-impenetrable and conveniently opaque accounting system, the state can expand with alarming rapidity, in terms of both employees and clients, not to mention premises and products. (The idea that the state has "products" takes some getting used to, I always feel.) Since 1997 (or the Year Zero Anno Antonii, as much of this Government appears to consider it, at least subconsciously) the state has expanded its workforce by 784,000 to 6.8 million, or by 13% of the original 6m. This is one in four of the working population (as distinct from the working-age population), although it hardly seems like evidence of a grand client-statist project by itself. Consider, though, the unemployed. Officially they are 870,000 in number, although that's because 2.7m are on incapacity benefit, which is paid for life if a doctor says so. 790,000 are on lone parent benefit (did I miss the meeting where it was decided they weren't "single" parents any more?): the total figure, then, of those out of work or on benefits, is some 4.5m. So the total number of people working for the state or clients of it is somewhere north of 10.5m people. This is one third of the entire working-age population. Quite a powerful block vote with quite powerful reasons to continue to vote Labour.

So what's the problem? Aside from the obvious technical complications of an oversize public sector - the stagnant economy and ballooning public debt - there are surely ethical questions to be raised. At what point does a so-called "enabling" state (an offensively Orwellian misappropriation) become simply a bribing state? At what point do people begin to question the electoral propriety of maintaining such a vast proportion of the electorate in supplication to the state?

This is not just a psephological concern either. Labour's effective ownership of such a large percentage of voters has raised once again the sceptre of what Keith Joseph called the Pocket Money Society. The more the government of the day confiscates earnings, the more it seems that what the earners are left with is akin to a children's allowance, with the government making all the decisions and taking care of all the important issues like housing, education, healthcare and saving for retirement: what people are left with is for trivialities and indulgences. The responsibility for shaping their own lives is taken from them - and, of course, only when people are "trusted with responsibility" (as though that trust should ever be government's to bestow in the first place) will they begin to act responsibly.

Instead we have a situation where responsibility is given out grudgingly, if at all. That's why the small businessman must now spend on average an extra six hours a week keeping up with official paperwork, so that the state can be sure everything's being done just the way they want, why doctors have to cancel operations within 48 hours of their due time so that they don't show up on the list of cancelled operations in order to meet targets from Whitehall whch exist so that Whitehall can be quite sure everything's being done just the way they want, why a nursing home manager with 30 years' professional experience must suffer the indignity of attaining an NVQ - a fucking NVQ! - in order to keep the job, because the state knows so much better than the nursing home manager of 30 years' experience how to manage a nursing home and they need to make sure the knowledge benefits of their NVQ have been passed on so they're quite sure everything's being done just the way they want.

The expansion of the state is seen as a moral imperative, because only the state can be trusted to run things. A common, enforced morality is better than amorality. A future in which people are able to provide for themselves independently of government is a dystopia. The title of this post is a line from the West Wing, which as previously discussed I used to love dearly whether the politics were mine or not, in which Josh wants to use in the State of the Union address the line, "The era of big government is over."

"Oh, when did this happen?" demands Toby.

"This morning, we had a meeting," replies Josh.

"We decided to offend poor people?"

The view seems to be that it offends the poor to not give them jobs and money, and certainly that theory seems to be borne out by Labour's re-election off the back of their vast client state - but remember how people act responsibly only when "allowed" to? Conversely, take away their responsibility by offering to do everything for them and how do you expect them to vote? If the poor were allowed to exercise responsibility for themselves more, I suspect we'd soon find that what really offends them is having other people's money thrown at them in return for votes.

A fine display of ignorance

2006-03-02T11:29:00.000Z

Charles Clarke's personal turf war with the Lords continues. This sort of stuff always raises a grim smile. As soon as you realise you're reading an article with the words "Charles Clarke" and "the Lords" in it, there's a sick inevitability to the occurence of a third phrase, "the elected House". Mr. Clarke is an intelligent, capable man, with a fine grasp of his pernicious, malevolent brief and an unflappable (figuratively, at least) manner, which makes him a formidable opponent in debate; but his insistent, cod-oblique references to the unelected nature of the Upper House (and by extension the democratic superiority of the Lower House) are wearisome in the extreme and furthermore betray an astonishing ignorance of the purpose of the Lords. One gets the impression that Mr. Clarke believes that the function of the Lords should be straightforwardly and unquizically to ratify whatever fatuous legislation is burped up from the Commons simply because the Lower House has the dubious distinction of a mandate from our famously discerning electorate. It has perhaps not crossed his mind that the undemocratic nature of the Upper House works in Parliament's favour insofar as it enables the Lords to examine legislation in an entirely dispassionate way, free of the ever-present, nagging fear of a fickle electorate which is the lot of a Commoner MP. In other words, they are able to act entirely in the interests of the country rather than in the interests of the party, as it were with one eye on their majority. Clearly Mr. Clarke considers this a personal insult to his authority as conferred by the estimable folk of Norwich South.

Of course, it is not the only absurdity inherent in these vignettes. The fact that among Tony Blair's first acts of cock-hardening destruction when elected was to remove 90% of the Lords' hereditary peers and stuff the place with like-minded cronies in the guise of life peers should mean that the Lords is just as supine as the Commons has only recently stopped being. But it seems that even Blair's most craven lapdogs have developed a sense of history and of purpose and of civic duty once within the House of Lords. I suppose that's the problem with "life" in this context. Give even your staunchest, most unquestioning ally a meal ticket for life and, having nothing better to do, he might just develop the ability to think for himself.

Buy Carlsberg and Danepak! Wait, Danepak doesn't exist any more. Lurpack! Lurpack!

2006-02-27T12:10:00.000Z

"The strength and survival of free society and the advance of human knowledge depend on the free exchange of ideas. All ideas are capable of giving offence, and some of the most powerful ideas in human history, such as those of Galileo and Darwin, have given profound religious offence in their time. The free exchange of ideas depends on freedom of expression and this includes the right to criticise and mock. We assert and uphold the right of freedom of expression and call on our elected representatives to do the same. We abhor the fact that people throughout the world live under mortal threat simply for expressing ideas and we call on our elected representatives to protect them from attack and not to give comfort to the forces of intolerance that besiege them."

Here.

"We're going to fucking kill you."

2006-02-26T17:18:00.001Z

As previously noted, "animal rights" terrorists are not renowned for their modesty or healthy self-doubt any more than they are for their ability to sustain a coherent debate without resorting to intimidation and outright thuggery. It can't really be all that surprising, then, to observe the boorish, bullying tactics employed against the 16-year-old Laurie Pycroft, founder of Pro-Test, for having the temerity to speak his mind.

Pycroft's successful organisation of a march through the streets of Oxford yesterday to demonstrate and encourage support for the construction of a replacement (as opposed to further) biomedical research laboratory in that city, during which he was hailed as "human excrement" by the terrorists (in another shining example of their willingness to debate civilly), was dismissed by Robert Cogswell, spokesterrorist for Speak (the organisation responsible for that facile, fatuous attempt at a character assassination linked above), with the usual revealing resort to self-aggrandising military vernacular:

It is an indictment for [sic] the vivisectionists if the only forces they can muster against us are led by a 16-year-old boy. We have made clear from the outset that Oxford University is the battleground where the arguments for or against will be won or lost. We are going to pursue Oxford University wherever their interests may be.

Is it, though? Is it not rather an indictment of the terrorists that a) the case against them is so obvious that even a 16-year-old can articulate it with sufficient conviction to inspire hundreds of civilised people to mount a protest, and b) it falls to a teenager, with the adolescent's fine disregard for personal safety, to take up the case against these vicious, violent, self-righteous fascists? Out of the mouths of babes, indeed.

Time to eat the hat....

2006-02-25T18:42:00.000Z

I yield to no-one in my contempt for "Mayor of LondON" Ken Livingstone. As with George Galloway, the primary impression I get of him is of someone so boundlessly impressed with himself that he no doubt considered it nothing less than his very duty to go into politics: I consider the two of them the foremost exemplars of the adage that any man with the kind of self-regard necessary to offer himself as leader cannot possibly deserve such a position. In Livingstone's London it is, for example, almost certainly impossible to make a journey, by any means, of more than about 500 yards, without coming across that fatuous logo of his, usually on posters - or trains - telling us what to think or on things boasting of achievements that are either nothing to do with the office of the Mayor or have been won at staggering cost to the public purse or to individual liberty (I'm particularly fond of the classic Communist style of this and other posters. You used to see them on buses, great Stalinist buses effortlessly crossing the city (itself a triumph of monolithic architecture) with captions like, "Faster through the mighty metropolis", as though saying it made it so, even while one was fuming in a snarl-up caused by badly timed traffic lights. If the style was supposed to be postmodern, they were sailing a little close to the wind; if not, it was spectacularly artless). His abuse of the monopoly on public transport held by Transport for London has led to some truly staggering price rises - well above the rate even of real inflation, let alone the heavily massaged rate Gordon Brown relies on as calculated by his bastardised Consumer Price Index - and, in the last couple of years, the relegation of non-Londoners to the status of second-class citizens by virtue of the introduction of the Oyster card, with which one may pre-purchase Underground travel tickets some 25-30% cheaper than with the cash which is the only option of tourists or provincials (and let's not even get into registration process for these cards, which are of course personalised and therefore make incredibly simple the monitoring of the movements of cardholders. In other words, submit to being monitored or pay the financial penalty, which we'll make stiffer every year). Let's not forget, either, his praise for the mediæval "cleric", "Dr." Yusuf al-Qaradawi, in a classic example of the Left's disease du jour: denial or just plain ignorance of the knots in which it ties itself when it instinctively sides with anyone who hates Israel and ends up allying itself with women-beaters and gay-bashers. Then there's his relentless politicking, such as in the statement he made following the 7/7 bombings where he was unable to resist suggesting that "working-class" Londoners had been the primary target, when of course a) the bombers were utterly indiscriminate and b) people of all classes died that day; his general distorting ignorance, his vendetta against the motor car and those with the temerity to desire the independence of movement they confer (which of course translates as a vendetta against business, but I suppose that's only to be expected from someone with so little appreciation of the roots of prosperity) and, of course, his insane profligacy.

You may naturally conclude that I don't intend to vote for him when (inevitably) he runs again for Mayor in 2008. Quite so. Nonetheless I find it difficult to support (apart from in an immature, gleeful way) the judgement of the Adjudication Panel of England (what the fuck is that?), which has suspended him from office for a month following his casually bigoted remarks (some excellent comments there too) to a Jewish Evening Standard hack. Of course he's a moron. Of course it's good to see his true colours. Of course it's entertaining to see how he believes anyone who disagrees with him is a reactionary bigot (shades of Galloway again). Of course he's a hypocrite, having worked for ES himself when they offered him free meals as restaurant critic. But he's unfortunately right when he says it is not for an unelected body to censure him. More unfortunately still, it may have done him a favour: if he had gone unpunished, in the public estimation, for his pathetic lapse of judgement and decorum, they may have been more inclined to vote him out. Now many may consider the matter closed and may have no qualms about re-electing him. *shudder*

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right....

2006-02-20T21:52:00.000Z

Following the publication of an edited version of this article by Andrew Neil in The Spectator, I was inspired to read F.A. Hayek's The Road to Serfdom, which as well as being breath-takingly prescient in its discussion of the seemingly inevitable Gramscian direction taken by British society in the 60 years since its publication, and generally thoroughly incontrovertible in just about every assertion it makes or argument it proffers, has crystallised an argument that has been germinating at the back of my mind for the last couple of years, and especially since I read in the same periodical a few months earlier an attack on Darwinism and Darwinists by Paul Johnson.

Neil's article dissects Hayek's notions of constructivist rationalism and evolutionary rationalism, the former wherein it is held that "all social institutions are, or ought to be, the product of deliberate design", the latter wherein it is held that "there exist orderly structures which are the product of the actions of many men but are not the result of human design". Needless to say, and while both have wider ramifications, in terms of socio-economics the former boils down to statist/fascist collectivism, the latter to free-market individualism.

So in crude terms the Left buys the constructivist ethos, from Descartes via Marx and Keynes; the Right buys the evolutionary ethos, from Smith and Locke via Hayek to Friedman and Rand. The Left believes in central planning, in the benign, incorruptible magnificence of the state, in the state as enabler and provider; the Right believes that "for all its apparent duplication, unfairness, inequalities and instability, the market economy leads to wealthier, freer and fairier societies than all the great plans of constructivism". (Perhaps that is being excessively kind to Ayn Rand, for whom selfishness was always a philosophical, Objectivist end in itself and not merely a function of the logical axiom that no man can fully understand the entire system and so is better off looking after his own part of it.)

So far, so obvious. "Wow, Novus," I hear you gasp. "Do you really mean to tell us that the Right is into free markets and the Left likes to control stuff?" Like, duh. The very obvitude of these remarks serves only to underscore the paradox I've been mulling over, as personified by the arch-conservative Paul Johnson. Once described, ironically if my 11-year-old understanding was up to the job, as a journalist of "shining human qualities" by Stephen Fry, Johnson represents the closest thing we have to that American cliché, the Christian conservative.

Hayek wrote, in the appendices to his book The Constitution of Liberty, an essay entitled Why I Am Not A Conservative, in which he described himself as a traditional (ie British) liberal, an Old Whig as it were. Nonetheless, it is in modern Britain most likely to be Conservatives (or at least conservatives) who subscribe to his economic theories (or libertarians like me, a state not so far removed from Hayek's own trad. liberalism). We can therefore assume that of Paul Johnson, and indeed it is the case. The Left, of course, is routinely left aghast at the beliefs of a man like Johnson: the concept of divinity is anathema to them.

The paradox, of course, is in the dichotomy between the economic and theological views held by both the Left and the Right. How can a Leftist believe on the one hand that society functions best when guided by the benign, omniscient hand of the state, yet on the other hand believe, according to Johnson, that "everything in nature is random, pointless, proceeding from nothing ... and that there is no more moral significance in a living creature ... than in a pinch of dust"? Conversely, how can a man like Johnson believe in the random, amoral machinations of the market yet reject the same ideas in the natural world in favour of creationism? For surely there is nothing dreamt of in our philosophy so wholly constructivist as the idea of a creator, and there is nothing that so closely resembles the free market as the idea of natural selection?

Hoist by their own petard?

2006-02-18T02:14:00.001Z

According to Edward Fitzgerald, QC, acting for the defence in the trial of Abu Hamza, the "Crown's case against the former imam of Finsbury Park Mosque was 'simplistic in the extreme'." His rationale for this assertion, it seems, was that the statements he made, for which he was on trial for soliciting to murder under the Offences Against The Person Act 1861 (and not, incidentally, under the allegedly vital legislation currently being blithely voted into law), were "drawn directly from Islam's holy book". Mr. Fitzgerald went on to point out that "all the great monotheistc religions had scriptures that contained 'the language of blood and retribution'."

Mr. Hamza was found guilty of the six charges of soliciting to murder, as well as three charges related to the use of threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour with the intention of stirring up racial hatred, and a couple of other charges. (Just as a brief aside: racial hatred? It seems indubitable that Mr. Hamza's words and actions were entirely religiously motivated. Yet a prosecution has been brought successfully under laws pertaining to racial hatred. Hmmm. Who'da thunk it?) To me it seems to follow, entirely logically, that the verses of the Qu'ran that Mr. Fitzgerald went to such pains to quote in open court - that is, 2.216 and 9.111 - constitute, if spoken aloud in a public place, soliciting to murder.

Mr. Fitzgerald was of course correct to point out that the Qu'ran is not the only holy text with bloodthirsty passages, and there can be no doubt that if one were to stand in a likely spot quoting certain verses from Leviticus or Exodus or - why not? - Revelation, one could be arrested with all despatch, and probably tried and imprisoned a good deal faster and with a good deal less media hand-wringing than Mr. Hamza, even without a cache of arms and bomb-manuals back at the crib. I am not attempting here to separate the Qu'ran from the Bible or even the Tanakh or the Talmud, or to paint it as especially troublesome (although its more delusional adherents are certainly another matter). As creation myths go I'm sure they're all equally charming in places, and equally bellicose in others (although I reiterate my previous remarks about the extensive remit, not limited to matters of faith, that the Qu'ran grants itself). My concern is simply this: there is, I am sure, some legal mechanism, which may or may not fall under the definition of precedent, by which the finding guilty of Mr. Hamza, after his remarks were explicitly attibuted to the Qu'ran, by his own barrister, no less, now implicates the Qu'ran itself under the same laws. If a man can be imprisoned for soliciting to murder having stated clearly that he was quoting directly from a certain document, what legal status does that confer upon the document?

Freedom is slavery

2006-02-14T10:56:00.000Z

That's it, then.

I emailed my MP the other day. He's Labour, and a craven line-toer to boot.

"One does not examine legislation in the light of the benefits it will convey if properly administered, but in the light of the wrongs it would do and the harms it would cause if improperly administered," wrote Lyndon Johnson.

This is an approach that this government has signally failed to take with a great deal of its legislation, not the least example of which is the current ID cards farrago. It has blundered on and dismissively waved off every objection to this legislation, fatuously convinced that nothing can go wrong; that for once the monolithic state computer system will work even remotely as it's supposed to; that for once criminal opportunists will, with civic-minded fairness, pass up the gaping opportunity presented for fraud by an incompetently administered database such as the one proposed will inevitably be.

I draw your attention to sections 2.4, 2.5, 2.6 and 2.7 of this report:

http://www.eurim.org.uk/activities/pi/060112pireport.pdf

Good intentions do not on their own make good law, and this law will be in the highest degree odious. I urge you to vote against it.

I received the most vapid possible reply, including a mis-spelling of the name with which I'd signed my email:

Thank for your e mail. I understand you view but disagree with the assessment of benefit/diadvantages and I will be supporting the Bill when it returns, sorry to disappoint you,

No, I couldn't believe you can get elected to the House of Commons with that standard of written English either. Still, he just got made Parliamentary Under-Secretary at the ridiculous ODPM (where his relative linguistic skills are probably in great demand), so you can't blame his sense of preservation for being more attuned to his cushy gig than his country's freedoms. Stands to reason, really.

Run, Saira!

2006-02-10T12:10:00.000Z

Last night's This Week, a programme the BBC does its best to keep hidden away from prying viewers (there is no website, for example, uniquely among BBC current affairs programming) in case any of them should observe that, for 45 minutes a week, BBC editorial policy doesn't reign supreme, handed its Take of the Week slot over to Saira Khan, the self-described "British Asian Muslim" businesswoman who was runner up on The Apprentice last year and of whom, consequently, I had never heard. With passion, vigour, incision and robust insight, she articulated the case for moderate Muslims (those figures conspicuous by their absence that I referred to in my last post) to make known their disgust and their horror at the iniquities being perpetuated in the name of their faith. Naturally, it being This Week, seventeen people were watching; inevitably, Kahn having had the nerve to show up on TV, without feeling intimidated or browbeaten into covering her face or hair, and to expose the insecurity, the hypocrisy and the thuggery at the heart of Islamic fundamentalism, she will soon be the subject of a fatwa issued by some cavebound blockhead like Anjem Choudary, inexplicably given a platform many times larger than his poisonous, insular, misogynist vitriol warranted on Newsnight on Monday. We need many more like her, on better-promoted programmes, particularly if in the name of lurid sensationalism the press are going to continue to ignore what ranks among the sagest advice ever offered by Margaret Thatcher: deny terrorists the "oxygen of publicity" and their message will suffocate.

Institutionalised sense of humour failure

2006-02-04T22:57:00.000Z

It's hard to know where to begin.

I'm aware that this is my third post in a row that could be construed, by an idiot admittedly, as anti-Islamic. But I'm at the mercy of the news cycle. The other day Parliament decided the transparent purchase of Muslim votes with unjust laws that favour them unnecessarily was a step too far even for that finely-honed extremist-pandering, vote-buying machine, the Labour party. I applauded that decision not because I am anti-Islamic but because I am against the wholesale purchase of votes - anyone's votes - with bad law. Shortly thereafter a demented "statesman" announced that, "Allah willing", George W. Bush would stand trial in an Iranian peoples' court. I observed that this was lunacy not because I am anti-Islamic but because it is patently absurd: because Ahmadinejad is a delusional lunatic, and not because he chose to invoke his deity whom many perfectly civilised, peaceful people worship their entire lives in nothing but joy.

Unfortunately, none of those civilised, peaceful people is much in evidence at the moment.

Charles Moore makes a very good point today. In the middle of pondering where, exactly, all those Danish flags came from that were getting burned in Palestine this week - a very good question when one consideres that those cartoons were originally published in October, and it wasn't until now, subsequent to the circulation by Danish imams among their counterparts in Muslim countries of a package containing the twleve cartoons plus an extra three of uncertain provenance and far greater offensiveness, that there has been any kind of international outcry - he pointed out, in a throwaway, parenthetical remark, that in burning the Danish flag, "they offered a mortal insult to the most sacred symbol of my own religion, Christianity, since the Danish flag has a cross on it, but let that pass."

"Let that pass." Moore's Catholicism has the ferocity of a convert's (which he was ten years or so ago, I believe) and yet he is capable of taking an inferred but deadly insult in perfectly good part. The parallel is instructive, for the insult to Islam or to Mohammed that the flag-burners et al have perceived in these cartoons is also an inferred one - and one inferred far less accurately than that of Moore's burned cross. My personal favourite, as an admirer of the satirical cartoonist's art, is the one with the queue of suicide bombers at the gates of paradise, and the caption, "Stop, stop! We've run out of virgins!". Leaving aside the implied criticism of the casual, brutal misogyny of Islam's insistence on virginity, which characterises women not as individuals to be loved (or not) for themselves but as goods that are soiled or damaged if they have been "used" previously, the only objects of ridicule in this cartoon are the unimaginably stupid suicide bomber who believes that he will be rewarded for mass murder of the innocent and the inexpressibly sinister and coldly manipulative clerics who pervert the minds of impressionable students of Islam by telling them that in the first place.

Alexis de Tocqueville said, "Mahommed professed to derive from Heaven, and he has inserted in the Koran, not only a body of religious doctrines, but political maxims, civil and criminal laws, and theories of science. The gospel, on the contrary, only speaks of the general relations of men to God and to each other - beyond which it inculcates and imposes no point of faith." In other words, while Christianity is a faith that may become a powerful and fulfilling part of one's life, Islam insists on running one's life, holding sway over the mind and dominion over the body. It is therefore inevitable that reactions to plain and simple satire would be so grossly, so pathetically out of proportion as they have been. Tocqueville went on, "This alone, besides a thousand other reasons, would suffice to prove that the former of these religions will never long predominate in a cultivated and democratic age, whilst the latter is destined to retain its sway at these as at all other periods." If this is how Islam meets Western liberalism, that can only, unfortunately, be an encouraging thought.

And may God strike me down were it to be other-- Aaaagh!!

2006-02-02T19:31:00.000Z

"In the near future, Allah willing, we will put you to trial in courts established by the peoples."

I was struck by the illogic of this remark from the deeply unhinged Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in response to George W. Bush's State of the Union address of Tuesday night. In it, Bush described Iran as "a nation now held hostage by a small clerical elite that is isolating and repressing its people", went on to point out that the Iranian regime sponsors terrorism throughout the Middle East and concluded with a veiled incitement to uprising of the Iranian people. In response, Ahmadinejad dismissed the US Administration as "people whose arms are submerged up to the elbows in the blood of other nations" and went on to prophesy Bush's imminent trial.

OK, first of all, the metaphor could have been stronger. I mean, "up to the elbows" really isn't much blood at all. Surely the Islamic gift for sanguinary imagery can do better than a washing-up bowl of blood? Secondly, given that Ahmadinejad was addressing crowds in a town where the Russians are building Iran a nuclear "power station", the contrast couldn't be clearer: if it comes down to either being up to the elbows in the blood of other nations that systematically yet indiscrimintely murdered their own people, or being up to the elbows in the blood of my own people, then I know whose bloody forearms I'd rather have.

Anyway, to the point. "Allah willing", Bush will soon be put on trial by the Iranian people. Yes, and Allah willing, I will soon be swinging naked on a trapeze with Eliza Dushku on one side and that girl from Waterstone's on the other. The sheer, staggering unlikelihood of Bush ever standing trial before an Iranian peoples' court must surely betray the foolishness of invoking the deity in such remarks. It is presumably the belief of the drooling Ahmadinejad that Allah does indeed will it that Bush stand trial before an Iranian peoples' court. And when, twenty, thirty, forty years from now, Bush dies a rich, free (although not necessarily guilt-free) man, as he inevitably will, what will be Ahmadinejad's conclusions? Will he conclude that evidently Allah did not will it that Bush stand trial before an Iranian peoples' court? Will he take it as a refutation from on high of his rabid fundamentalism? I doubt it, sadly.