I just want to say that I am already very tired indeed of listening to US Democrats and British broadcasters drone on about how President Bush must now reach out to various people, and in particular to his defeated opponents. By this they do not merely mean that he should be polite and dignified in his moment of victory, as he has been, and as John Kerry has been in his moment of defeat. They mean that President Bush should now do what John Kerry proposed should be done (which lost Kerry the Election), instead of what he, Bush, proposed should be done (which was what won). This is a very stupid idea.
|
|||||
|
Unlike David I actually got some sleep. But this morning, I was woken by some loud bang-bang-bang pop music. But as the thuds thudded through my building and my brain, the thought gradually formed in the latter that there might now be a result in that… that… election… thing. Stagger into kitchen. On with TV. Bush winning. And Tony Blair losing. The Labour Party hates Bush, and hates hates hates that their leader has been cosying up to him these last three years. Another four years of Bush gazing out across the world, apparently not even knowing let alone caring that they hate him – well, it is just frightful. This could break Blair, by breaking the through-gritted-teeth support of his party for Blair’s vile vile policy of not hating Bush. But ‘could’ is not ‘will’. Labour will suffer yes, but they will probably carry on suffering. Today as yesterday, the big questions in British party politics are: How long will Blair last? and: How will his successor conduct himself? For as long as Blair carries on the Conservatives are unelectable. If Blair’s successor gets how Blair has done this, then the crucifixion by opposition of the Conservatives will continue indefinitely, just as the crucifixion of Labour by the horror of having to share the planet with President George W. Bush will continue. The ITV news is now saying that it is essential that Blair tells Bush that he must do what Kerry would have done. Retreat in his various wars, sign the Kyoto Treaty, blah blah blah. But we all know, and more to the point Bush and his cronies know, that you can only do well in a war if you show no sign of wanting to duck out of it. And America is not convinced about Kyoto. Dream on British media. As for the USA, here is how it looks to me. The big story that I now see, for whatever that may be worth, is that Bush won despite a much increased turnout. When I went to bed, Kerry stroke British media optimism was based on the notion that all these New Voters who were even then queueing in their millions to actually vote in a Presidential Election for the very first time, would obviously help Kerry. Only settled old farts support Bush. Young people, bright eyed and (if you will part the expression) bushy tailed, will obviously back Kerry, on account of him being obviously nicer, better, wiser, better at talking, not so Christian, etc. etc. Ditto all those gypsies, tramps and thieves who last time around were too befuddled and too unregistered to vote. All these folks were now voting. Democrats, all of them. Got to be. Kerry camp happy. Bush camp ‘subdued’. What actually happened was that the New Voters turned out in strength, yet Bush still won. Had Bush won with the kind of low and falling turnout that happened last time around, with the Settled Old Farts again voting for Bush but the New Voters again not actually voting, this result would have had a far less definite feel to it. Democrat fundamentalists would have spent another four years saying that they had won really, and that next time around this blip would be corrected. But this was more than a blip. Either those New Voters are not as pro-Democrat as they were supposed to be, or a whole bunch of Settled Old Farts who had not voted last time around because they were too busy trying to work out how to set their new digital video whatchamacallit machines and forgot, managed to totter out to the polls this time around and vote for George W. Bush. Either way, that is a Bush win, and more of a win than last time. Apparently Bush got more votes than anyone has ever got before in one of these things. November 3rd, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
 If you want to read about the truly extraordinary and deeply depressing paroxysm of anti-Americanism that has swept like a firestorm through the British media over the last few days and weeks (having merely smouldered for years), you can read about it here. Of a particularly fatuous TV guide blurb (“Jonathan Dimbleby takes a critical look at the Anglo-US war on terror…”), Mark Holland has this to say:
For me the most depressing British anti-American exhibit of the last few days was a rant by Peter Oborne in yesterday’s Mail on Sunday. Having ignored the Mail, Sunday or of any other sort, for years, I had no idea it was capable of sinking to these depthsm and I only spotted it because I shared some coffee with Michael Jennings in my local Café Nero yesterday. This picture, of the front cover of the Review section, sums it up well:  Click to get it bigger and more legible. If you really want that. This is absolutely not mere anti-Bushism, for Oborne is vitriolically nasty about both Democrats and Republicans. Maybe this piece is available to read on the internet, but I cannot myself find it. I am actually rather pleased about that. → Continue reading: British Anti-Americanism gone mad November 1st, 2004 | 49 comments - (Comments are closed)
Last Friday, on another blog, I did a link-to/short-comment-on piece, linking to and commenting on this report. It was about Chinese students lying about their qualifications in order to get into British Universities. Harry Hutton (esteemed writer of this hugely entertaining and clearly much frequented blog) added the following very interesting comment to my posting:
Cards on the table, I do not know why there is this big different either. And never having been to – or for that matter anywhere near – Hong Kong, or mainland China, I am a lot less qualified even to guess than Harry Hutton is. However, I choose to offer a guess nevertheless. Hong Kong has been a rampantly capitalistic economy for the last half century, and rampantly capitalistic economies make people more honest. → Continue reading: How capitalism grows human capital as well – the example of Hong Kong October 31st, 2004 | 11 comments - (Comments are closed)
I recommend this posting at the highly recommendable Social Affairs Unit blog, by Anthony Glees, about Christopher Hill, John Roper and Robin Pearson. (SAU Director Michael Mosbacher, who is presumably the one who recruits the writers for this blog, is doing a remarkable job with this blog, I think.) The stuff about Christopher Hill interested me particularly. What a vile man. I knew that he was a bolshevik, but I had not realised how vile a bolshevik and how much damage he did to the cause of civilisation. The vile Hill wrote many highly regarded works of academic scholarship. This little bit from Glees’ posting throws a different light on the sort of academic that he was:
While googling for more about Anthony Glees, I came across this 1999 BBC report, which included this quote, from another of the vile academics whom Glees writes about, Robin Pearson of Hull University:
I just bet you would, matey. It is a pity that Glees had to promise the vile Hill to keep quiet about what the vile Hill told him about his (the vile Hill’s) bolshevistic activities until he, the vile Hill, died. But then again, the vile Hill had to die knowing that his full vileness would in due course fully emerge. That is justice of a sort, although not nearly enough of course. Treating these people as badly as they really deserve seems difficult these days, but it is important to make them squirm a little, and to die in the knowledge that their support for barbarism has been thoroughly revealed and stands a fair chance of being the only thing about them that will be lastingly remembered. Well done Professor Glees. (And again, well done Michael Mosbacher for getting him to write for the SAU blog.) October 29th, 2004 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
Current blogger enthusiasm of mine Harry Hutton says that this is an interesting story. It is.
The Washington Times further elucidates:
Goodness, they must be short of prisoners in Hong Kong. They pay people to attend. Oh well, I suppose this is a nice, simple, market-based solution to the problem of getting udesirables off the streets. Everyone says how clever those Vietnamese were to defeat the USA in the Vietnam War. But winning was stupid. The clever thing to do would have been to lose. October 28th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
After seeing an encouraging headline on the front page of yesterday’s Daily Express (“AT LAST, A JUDGE BACKS A MAN WHO SHOT A BURGLAR”), I bought the paper, read the story, and looked for further enlightenment by googling “Judge Andrew Hamilton” “Kenneth Faulkner”. I got these headlines:
Sadly, however, there is rather less to this story than meets the eye:
Rae suffered “only pellet wounds to his lower leg”. So, although charges against Mr Faulkner had been considered, they were not brought. Had it been worse, it would also have been far worse for Mr Faulkner, is the clear implication. The final google headline that I harvested yesterday went like this: How very sporting of him. The idea that you need the moral assent of your burglar before you may counter-attack him is ridiculous, not to say contemptible. Although come to think of it, I suppose that in the debased criminal justice culture of this country just now, it probably counts as news that this particular burglar has no plans to sue his victim for the crime of resisting. As is the fact that a judge is saying this kind of thing too. → Continue reading: What is reasonable force? October 27th, 2004 | 67 comments - (Comments are closed)
I do bits for this blog about intellectual property issues, and on Monday the guy who runs it emailed me with a link to this marvellous story from the New York Times. It seems that in China, they have produced a revised version of Bill Clinton’s autobiography, entitled My Life, with his love for all things Chinese greatly exaggerated, and his occasional complaints about Chinese human rights violations deleted.
My Intellectual Property Editor would not, however, want me to regard this as a wholly amusing matter. China is being very naughty.
This is true. I mean, it is true that China’s Intellectual Property misbehaviour is a big issue these days. If you google, as I often now do, “Intellectual Property”, you get lots and lots of hit, of two kinds. First, there are reports of how China is now going to really, really enforce Intellectual Property rights, hold a conference at which enforcing Intellectual Property rights will be intensively discussed, and generally jolly well do something about it, this time it will be different, etc.. And second, you get a chorus of complaints that this is all hot air and window dressing. Oh, and third, you get American law firms saying they can sort it all out for you: hire us and get rich, shun us and be ruined. To be a bit more serious about the rewritten Clinton memoirs, I cannot feel very sorry for Clinton, but in any case there are other victims here. All those Chinese readers who genuinely want to read what Clinton has genuinely written (or signed) about China are getting swindled. And I would like to know if these (re)publishers rewrote the book in order to pander to Chinese readers, or to the Chinese Government. Either way, it shows the way what an enormous cultural impact, for good and for bad, China seems likely to make upon the world during the next few decades. (India also, of course.) I wonder if this story will get really noticed, that is, noticed some more. I suspect that it might. Media scribblers are notoriously indifferent when it is merely industrialists or industrial designers having their ideas nicked, their profits stolen or their businesses regulated out of business. But when a writer has his sacred words stolen, and then worse, far worse, changed, well, that they can all really understand and get angry about. Kudos to Alex Beels of Harper’s Magazine for translating this rewritten Clinton book back into English and thereby getting the story seriously started, although I can find no reference to this story here. October 26th, 2004 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
This list is getting quite a bit of attention. It is a report of some of the many things that Jay Rosen talked about when being interviewed by a guy from the BBC:
I think that there is one huge thought missing from this list, so huge, and so completely in the faces of both the people having this conversation that they both missed it. Jay Rosen did anyway. This is: that these two people were talking to each other from opposite sides of an ocean. The internet has taken politics global. The row about the Guardian trying to influence the US election by getting Guardian-readers to send pontificatory emails to the voters of Ohio is only so visible because it was so funny, but in a quieter way, the Guardian is now influencing US elections, by the simple fact of it publishing its stuff online, and Americans (and everyone else) being able to read it all, quickly and cheaply. Another version of this same fact is the way that the Bush supporters in the USA took great heart from, and accused their local mainstream media of downplaying, the result of the recent Australian election. → Continue reading: New realities – separate realities October 25th, 2004 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Portable phones are wonderful things, but not, it is widely agreed, wholly wonderful. Have you ever been at something like a church service or a classical music concert, and found your attention diverted by portable phones ringing? Help is at hand.
Jamming other people’s portable phones is one of many practices where you need strong property rights in place to enable disputes about the rights and wrongs of it to be easily decided. But even in an age of weakened property rights, this device will surely prove to be a great boon in protecting the rest of us from compulsive communicators and their irritating noises. Human problems are hard to fix. So instead, fix the machines they are using to cause the problem. October 25th, 2004 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
This being Sunday, let us turn our minds towards matters otherworldly. Today’s Telegraph contains this devilishly diverting story:
My immediate reaction was, of course: What the hell is the world coming to? But thinking about it some more, I reckon that a Satanist would be able to throw himself into a battle at least as enthusiastically as your average Christian. A spokesman for the Royal Navy – echoing that Rowan Atkinson Church of England Bishop, who noted the forces of good, and of evil, and who said that the role of the Church of England is to strike a balance between the two – assures us that all is well:
The report ends with this further quote from the same source:
Perish the thought. October 24th, 2004 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
If Moses had turned right instead of left, the Jews could have had the oil, and the Arabs would have got the oranges. October 24th, 2004 | 4 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||