I agree with Andrew Anthony, up to a point:
My book is a polemical memoir. It’s not ‘The Truth’. It’s part of a debate. I may be wrong. It could be that if the troops are withdrawn from Iraq and we turn a blind eye to Islamic extremism at home, Jihadist terrorism will disappear. I happen [...]
There is “a fair amount of rewriting of history going on”, says Martin Kettle. (This post began life on CiF. I keep meaning to give up commenting there – it’s a singularly unrewarding occupation, apart from those rare occasions when the columnist you’re responding to actually reads the comments. Commenting on most CiF posts is [...]
First, have a look at this table; it represents some highlights from the voting records of two MPs in the 2001-5 parliament. Neither of them’s particularly far to the Left or Right – they both voted for the Iraq war and for a lower age of consent for gays, for example. But there are some [...]
18 November 2006 – 10:09 pm
The incomparable Emma Brockes has turned music critic:
The orchestral arrangements for [the ballet] Chroma were commissioned last year by Richard Russell, head of the XL record label, as a gift to the White Stripes’ Jack and Meg White. Three of their songs, The Hardest Button To Button, Aluminium and Blue Orchid, were re-arranged by Joby [...]
At the risk of sounding like a bad standup -
Mark Thomas: …this – thing – that’s really tepid and bland and moulded to fit this Lego model of comedy… seventies gag, TV presenter gag, difference between cats and dogs, difference between men and women, have you ever noticed at a dinner party…
- have you ever [...]
I hate to admit it, but some of these Tories talk sense. I heard a Conservative IT guy (Richard Bacon) dissecting the proposed NHS computer system on the radio today, and there wasn’t a word I could dissent from. If you’re designing and building a huge IT system, you just don’t do it like that.
I [...]
Silvio Berlusconi has said some strange things in the current election campaign. It’s a sign of the kind of politician he is, a charismatic authoritarian populist. To some extent it’s the equivalent of having Kilroy as the leader of a major political party, or Enoch Powell, or Cyril Smith: to his opponents he’s crude and [...]
13 September 2005 – 12:20 pm
Katrina update. Back here, I wrote:
Louisiana, we now know (thanks to China at Lenin’s Tomb) was one of the areas where the ‘free market’ reforms of FEMA took effect: in 2004, a private consultancy called IEM was paid half a million tax dollars to develop a ‘Catastrophic Hurricane Disaster Plan‘. It’s not clear whether this [...]
6 September 2005 – 10:30 pm
One possible reason why the aftermath of Katrina has been so dreadful is provided by the piece by Jamie I quoted earlier. There’s something weirdly soviet about all this. We’re seeing this immensely powerful country which has somehow stopped working. Perhaps we should take this image literally: perhaps the reason why it looks as if [...]
5 September 2005 – 6:34 pm
They order these things better in Cuba; there, evacuation means that everybody leaves, down to dogs and cats:
they have family doctors in cuba (!), who evacuate together with the neighborhood, and already know who, for example, needs insulin.
…
they also have veterinarians and they evacuate animals. they begin evacuating immediately, and also evacuate TV sets and [...]
A few weeks ago I spotted a really dazzling example of stupidity – and cynical exploitation of same – in the LRB. David Runciman was writing about the American campaign to repeal death duties (‘estate tax’), which succeeded despite the fact that the change only really benefited the top 1%. Ah, but…
A poll conducted by [...]
Just to clarify, I’m not saying Johann Hari is crazy.
Language is weird – weird and treacherous. It gives thought a medium and a structure, and yet it has its own properties – both formal regularities like verb forms, and arbitrary quirks like puns – which cut across whatever it is you’re trying to say. (With [...]
Middle England says: Why can’t they just stop people doing nasty things? No, really – why not?
Under the new laws, the owners of hedges that are more than two metres tall can be fined up to £1,000 by their local authority if they refuse to cut them down.
The only problem is that some councils will [...]
This excellent post from Jarndyce brought Norman Brennan to my attention. Brennan runs the Victims of Crime Trust, who operate on the basis that our criminal justice system is currently biased against the victims of crime. Jarndyce shows just what offensive and dangerous nonsense this is. What I hadn’t taken in, though, is that Brennan [...]
I don’t think much of Johann Hari; I doubt that statement will surprise many people, and I’m not going to spend good blogging time on an anti-Hari rant. But I am going to say a few words about Johann’s column in today’s Independent – which you can read over at Hari’s Place – and its [...]
