Whilst it is fun to laugh at the French, in the interest of fair and balanced commentary I should add that this civil servant would find numerous employment opportunities in any of the world’s government sectors.
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Nice piece in the Spectator about the contrast between shows like Sex in the City and older, “screwball” movies made in the 1930s and 1940s, such as the peerless His Girl Friday (starring Cary Grant). I found SITC quite funny at times – well, at least in the first series – but the joke wore thin. On the other hand, however many times I watch it, His Girl Friday will never pall. And as a sendup of the journalist world at its time, there’s been nothing better, arguably, than Evelyn Waugh’s novel, Scoop (the old British TV sitcom, Drop the Dead Donkey, was great, but set in a later era). July 20th, 2007 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Andrew Sullivan is a rum character. Columnists are not supposed to maintain an iron consistency in their views and I do not hold it against Sullivan that he has switched from being a rather embarrassingly full-on cheerleader for George W. Bush, for example, to an equally full-on despiser of said. I actually believe Sullivan when he claims that his anger at some of Bush’s policies is not primarily motivated by Bush’s stance on gay marriage, but more by Bush’s very un-conservative heavy public spending, abuse of certain powers, and above all, the bungling in Iraq. But Sullivan likes to act as a sort of arbiter of what a true “conservative” is, but I wonder about his credentials on this score. This post leaves a nasty taste, even though Sullivan does his utmost, quite rightly, to divorce himself from condoning acts of violence:
“We have to create a social stigma”. That is really nice, Andrew. Several decades ago, certain people thought that it was right to “create a social stigma”, involving lots of nasty expressions and social ostracism, against people who wanted to have sex with people of their own gender. People once thought about sexual morality in much the same way that some people think about those who delight in driving gas guzzling cars. I do not know: maybe driving a large car is morally worse than two men bonking one another, but many people might take a different view. Sullivan is a man who has benefited from the liberties afforded to him by the United States, and has written eloquently about the plight of gay people and their struggle to be accepted as normal. It is particularly disappointing to see him joining what amounts to the moral bullying tactics of the Greens and their hysterical invocations of global doom. Perhaps Dubya has unhinged the man. I wish Sullivan would cheer up: he used to be a great writer. Perhaps he should come back home to Britain for a few years and rediscover his English sense of humour. July 19th, 2007 | 31 comments - (Comments are closed)
ZDNet opinion leader uses an excellent metaphor for the Conservatives’s attitude to things digital and online.
I have heard George Osborne pontificating on open source and its use in public sector. It was a politician’s speech, after all he is one so no surprises there. I was not as impressed by it as others in the audience but agree that it was a Good Thing that a member of the opposition front bench was talking about open source positively. But as usual for political parties, the left hand does not know what the right one is doing… David Cameron told the British Phonographic Industry:
Oh dear. It gets worse:
The ZDNet article sums it up perfectly:
July 19th, 2007 | 25 comments - (Comments are closed)
Joseph Rowntree, like other Victorian Giants, campaigned against social evils in the footsteps of William Wilberforce, the abolitionist. The list of evils are clear, universal, puritanically nonconformist and relevant to the twenty-first century.
Now, the Rowntree Trust has become dissatisfied with traditional social evils. They are probably too fuddy-duddy and fail to move the charitably inclined. But Julia Unwin, the Trust Director, who also deputises at the Food Standards Agency, has a list…
You can add your vote here. So, disgust with politics and choosing not to vote is now a social evil. How we can see the voluntary charity worker is now transformed into the professional disciplinarian, the whip of the public sector professional class, with all three mainstream parties as their political wing. July 19th, 2007 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
Simon Heffer is one of those occasionally convincing but also maddening right-wing commentators who talks the free market talk, but is as prone as any Fabian socialist to the idea of preventing the market from operating if it suits. His latest tirade is against the UK government’s aim to build more housing and hence meet skyrocketing demand. Heffer is of course correct to lambast what might be a state-driven process, but I get the impression that he is pretty much deaf to the idea that high house prices reflect a serious scarcity of supply, which needs to be met if people who are not as rich as Croesus have a chance of buying a home. The old bogeyman of “concreting over southeast England” is brought up; yes, the southeast is densely populated, but not as densely, say, as Holland or some other parts of the world. And one possible consequence of our planning laws is that it may have unwittingly encouraged people to build on floodplains, which clearly has borne bitter fruit for some householders this year due to the torrential rains of the English “summer”. July 18th, 2007 | 34 comments - (Comments are closed)
Hosting the Oscars is much like making love to a woman. It’s something I only get to do when Billy Crystal is out of town. Steve Martin. (My favourite Martin film is Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, with Michael Caine.) July 18th, 2007 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I would like to emphasise that we by no means strive to seize full power and to dominate the Afghan policy. Our aim is not to have the upper hand in Afghanistan. No at all! What we struggle for is something else: there should be Afghanistan where every Afghan finds himself or herself – irrespective of sex – happy. I am deeply convinced that this can only be ensured by democracy and a democratically elected government, based on consensus. It is only then that we can indeed solve a number of problems that have been besetting Afghan people. The true solution lies only in such a political and social situation and only with such a type of administration when all the tribes, all the ethnic groups and all people will see themselves fairly represented. – Ahmed Shah Masoud, the ‘Lion of the Panjshir’, one of the greatest guerilla leaders and in my view the most admirable one since the American Revolution, from an interview shortly before his assassination by Islamofascists. July 17th, 2007 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
I am delighted that contrary to my early expectations they they would do nothing at all other than make an official grimace and then politely forget about the whole affair, the UK government’s action in expelling Russian diplomats is both all but openly stating the Russian government was behind the Litvinenko assassination and actually trying to impose some political cost on Putin’s regime. It is only a small step but psychologically it is a very important one. As Blair was showing signs of going soft on this horrendous issue,this is a welcome indication that the Brown government is really not going to let Putin’s regime murder people in Britain in an ostentatiously obvious manner and let it pass with a shrug. I was pleased that Downing Street is actively discouraging British companies from investing in Russia in the aftermath of the Shell Oil Sakhalin Island appropriations but more pressure over the Litvineko affair is now needed, if only to discourage more of the same. Of course I expect the Russian government to over-react at all but being called murderers and thereby help the process of de-normalising relations with that far from normal state. There is truly no upside to allowing Putin and his cronies to imagine they can do what they want in Britain without consequences. July 17th, 2007 | 43 comments - (Comments are closed)
But that wasn’t quite his intention. He was attempting to declare a failure but accidentally got his facts right. On Sunday’s Meet the Press with Tim Russert, a debate waged between Senators Jim Webb and Lindsay Graham resulted in the following statement by Senator Webb.
His statement is right on so many points, it’s more than a little heartening. First, democracy or no, Al-Qaeda is in Iraq to attack the United States. Where would the Senator rather rather have them attack us? Second, he is correct that this is a case of “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.” But in terms of Al-Qaeda, that is called aligning themselves with the United States. We share a common enemy and are fighting it together. That is all “ally” means. What is he expecting? Conversions? Third, al-Anbar is a Sunni province. al-Qaeda is a Sunni organization. Sunnis have been their support base. And now a major part of that support base is turning against al-Qaeda. The biggest sign of success is when we no longer need to count on the military solutions but rather, the support base itself turns against the terrorists. Yet he is bemoaning the absence of a military component to this accomplishment. Senator Webb has done us the favor of highlighting some outstanding signs of imminent success although it was rather ambitious of him to spin them the way he did. It is also difficult to reconcile his belief that this revolt by the support base is “redneck justice” with the following statement taken from his own website.
Senator Webb is delivering good news suggesting that resistance to terrorism may soon be strong enough for us to reduce support levels. But he sounds greatly disappointed that this resistance is at the grass roots, and not a military accomplishment. Why do I suspect that if it was a military accomplishment, he would be lamenting the absence of grass roots support? July 16th, 2007 | 58 comments - (Comments are closed)
“I like Canary Wharf. It is where Dr Who fought against the Cybermen.” A friend of mine, who as you can tell, is a Dr Who fanatic. I will never be able to think of London’s new financial district in quite the same way again. July 16th, 2007 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
In his defence of classical liberalism and critique of 20th Century state welfarism, F.A. Hayek argued that one of the dangers of socialised medicine (Michael Moore, please note) is that if health care is not rationed by price and expanded by the freely chosen actions of patients and doctors, then some other means of allocating scarce resources, and making them hopefully less scarce, will be needed. That “other” way is state coercion and control. Because healthcare is delivered in Britain free at the point of use – of course it is not free at all – the individual patient does not directly see the price of the health care he or she receives, such as in the form of an insurance premium. There is no price incentive, therefore, for a person to, say, cut out smoking, cut the beer and the beef burgers, get in shape by frequenting a gym, etc. I wrote some time ago about the scarcity of human organs such as kidneys and livers, and how much of the western world suffers from a strange form or hypocrisy: we say it is great that people volunteer to donate organs (the libertarian writer Virginia Postrel has done just that by donating a kidney to a friend) but we recoil in horror at the idea that a person might ever be persuaded to sell an organ or be paid for such a donation, even though there is, in some countries, a commercial market in the business of using such organs and the related human tissue. (There is some legitimate worry that very poor people who do not realise the health implications might undergo surgery to sell their body parts, to be fair). I thought again about such mixed attitudes when I saw the front page of the Sunday Times this morning:
But ranting away about the presumptious tendencies of a state doctor is all very well for relieving a bit of blood pressure, but there clearly is a problem with shortages of organs and how to save the lives of people in desperate need. Donation, either for no money or for a payment (with safeguards, if need be), can work only so far. We need to encourage biotechnological fixes: and a good place to see what sort of fixes might be out there is this interesting study by Ronald Bailey. The doctors are right to highlight that there is a problem, but how less depressing would it be if they could think about ways of solving it without recourse to asuming that your body belongs to the collective, just for once. July 15th, 2007 | 41 comments - (Comments are closed)
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