Sounds as if agreement has been reached on a draft EU constitution. That was the easy part – now they have to steer it through referendums in the UK and elsewhere. No agreement, however on a new Commission President. More on this as proper news starts to leak out …
At “The Right Coast,” Maimon Schwarzschild cheers on the victory of the UKIP party. Apparently, it’s a heavy blow against the project of an United Europe, which, as we all know, emphasizes “anti-Americanism, and thinly veiled anti-semitism.” This is something that’s becoming increasingly common – US based conservatives (although note that Schwarzschild is a UK transplant to San Diego) finding some common ground with the European far right’s hostility to the EU. It’s a big mistake. Josh Chafetz describes the UKIP’s leadership as “a collection of racists, xenophobes, anti-Semites, Holocaust deniers, and homophobes.” Although the UKIP has tried to maintain a more respectable public profile than, say, the BNP, it has certainly had a scattering of anti-Semites and nordicists in prominent party positions in the past. The European far right doesn’t emphasize anti-Semitism as much as it used to – it has increasingly switched its attentions from Jews to Muslims and other immigrants. And the UKIP is no stranger to anti-Muslim and Arab racism; in Robert Kilroy-Silk’s own words, Muslims
are backward and evil and if it is racist to say so…. then racist I must be – and proud and happy to be so.
Far from being a setback for anti-Semitism, the success of the UKIP (and some other parts of the anti-EU right) is arguably a victory. I’m prepared to give Schwarzschild the benefit of the doubt – when he says that the success of the UKIP is “good news,” he may simply not know what he’s talking about. Still, it’s the people whom he’s cheering on, rather than Brussels Eurocrats, who are directly and materially connected with racism, anti-Semitism and the nastier aspects of Europe’s past.
Jacek Kuron, one of the heroes of the postwar eastern Europe and a man of the left , despite and against Stalinism, is dead. There are obits in the New York Times , the Guardian , the Telegraph , The Scotsman , from the BBC , and in many other places.
Dick Morris, former Clinton adviser and UKIP spin-doctor was on the BBC’s flagship discussion programme, Question Time, last night. Very many of his utterances were outright falsehoods (though plain ignorance of British and European politics was evidently a good part of the explanation). Amazingly, he explained the problem of high house prices in the UK [only some parts of which actually have high house prices!] was caused by the British government having lost control of immigration to the EU [false], with the result that people were pouring in and bidding up the price of a scarce resource! Supply and demand, QED! I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that this idiot is credited as the “genius” behind Ewekip’s recent success or that he was once employed by a Democratic American President!
UPDATE: Chris Brooke links to a Mirror hatchet job on of Ewekip’s celebrity MEP Robert Kilroy-Silk.
UPDATE UPDATE: this is a restored post from Google’s cache.
Cory Doctorow has been at Microsoft research, telling them why Digital Rights Management is a bad thing. It’s a great rant – I’ll be assigning it in my classes. Via BoingBoing.
But don’t panic! This is a sub-etha move. A behind-the-scenes move. A the-audience-noticed-nothing move. In other words, a New Host Provider move. So from your point of view, gentle readers, we are where we’ve always been. Very soon entering https://www.crookedtimber.org in your browser will bring you to our new server. In a day or two it’ll be like nothing happened, but you may have some difficulty connecting to our new server while the Domain Name transfer is happening. To get your new-server CT fix in the short term, “follow this link”:http://crookedtimber1.dreamhost.com. But as I say, in the next 12-24 hours the url https://www.crookedtimber.org will begin pointing to the new site, and everything will be as it was, only spiffier in an ineffable, new host provider sort of way.
I am sick and tired of hearing about that ticking nuclear bomb in Manhattan. You know the one. Why? Because, if you let me put my thumb on the utilitarian scales, I can get you to agree that you have an affirmative moral duty to torture a three-year-old child to death.
Steadfastly ignoring “our own good advice”:https://www.crookedtimber.org/archives/001967.html, Crooked Timber is moving to a new host provider, with all the potential headaches that entails. I’m doing the transfer now, so comments posted here from now on will not be imported to the new server. Please hold yer thoughts for a few hours.
Once the move is done, we’ll transfer the Doman Name registration to our new hosts, and https://www.crookedtimber.org will point to the new servers. The process of “DNS propagation”, where the big internet servers tell the little ones about the new location, may take a little while. Thanks for bearing with us.