Chris Bertram

In comments to Kieran’s last post Daniel has catalogued “some”:http://www.pardonmyenglish.com/archives/2003/08/yeah_so.html “of”:http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110003888 “the”:http://timblair.spleenville.com/archives/004000.php “things”:http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=9574 that the right-wing blogosphere said about the French heatwave of 2003. We could add op-eds like Denis Prager’s “Socialism Kills”:http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=34372 to the roster, but pride of place should surely go to — who else? — Mark Steyn. Steyn makes the following observation in his “‘Events’ don’t just happen”:http://www.middleeastinfo.org/article3822.html :

bq. One of the most tediously over-venerated bits of political wisdom comes from the late British prime minister Harold MacMillan. It was his characteristically laconic Edwardian response as to what he feared most in the months ahead: “Events, dear boy, events.” It turns up in a gazillion books of quotations and 1,000 Fleet Street columns as if it’s some brilliant insight. It’s not. It’s an urbane banality. Even events come, so to speak, politically predetermined. If, for example, you have powerful public sector unions, you will be at the mercy of potentially crippling strikes. The quasi-Eastern European Britain of the 1970s was brought to a halt by a miners’ strike in a way that would have been impossible in the United States. A strike, of course, is man-made. But the best test of the political character of “events” is supposedly natural phenomena.

He draws the following conclusion about earthquakes in Iran, SARS in China, and the French heatwave (having paused to kick the Canadian welfare state along the way) :

bq. By the standards of the world, Iran, China and France are all wealthy societies. They’re vulnerable to “events” because of their organizational principles – a primitive theocracy which disdains modernity; a modified totalitarianism which thinks you can reap the benefits of capitalism without the institutions of liberty; and a cradle-to-grave welfare state that has so enfeebled its citizens’ ability to act as responsible adults that even your dead mum is just one more inconvenience the government should do something about.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Wow! Just had my first “Google Talk”:http://www.google.com/talk/ conversation. I’m sure most of you are old hands at this voice-over-internet stuff but it was my first time. Set it up, invited some friends and then up pops a mate from Novosibirsk (equipped with headset) for a chat, as if he was just down the road. It works, it’s simple and easy to use. Fantastic.

The NYT has a great story on “how Western-style reality tv is spreading to Iraq”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/28/international/middleeast/28television.html?ex=1282881600&en=b3af8927364796d4&ei=5090&partner=rssuserland&emc=rss .

bq. Reality TV could turn out to be the most durable Western import in Iraq. It has taken root with considerably greater ease than American-style democracy. Since spring 2004, when “Materials and Labor” made its debut, a constellation of reality shows has burst onto TV screens across Iraq. True to the genre, “Materials and Labor” has a simple conceit at its heart – Al Sharqiya, an Iraqi satellite network, offers Baghdad residents the chance to have homes that were destroyed by the war rebuilt at no cost to them.

Read the whole thing, as they say.

Don’t miss the “Guardian’s profile of evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers”:http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,1556482,00.html . A nervous breakdown after reading too much Wittgenstein, friendship with Huey Newton of the Black Panthers and the following priceless comment on Richard Dawkins: “My first wife, a wonderful woman, used to refer to Dick as the Selfish Gene, just because of the way he acts. ” Definitely worth a look.

I’m back from a few days in Munich, which I’d recommend as excellent value to visit. (I suspect there’s an oversupply of hotel rooms in advance of next summer’s world cup.) It rained nearly the whole time I was there, but that didn’t stop me from visiting some excellent art galleries: the wonderful “Alte Pinakothek”:http://www.pinakothek.de/alte-pinakothek/ , the goodish “Neue Pinakotek”:http://www.pinakothek.de/neue-pinakothek/ and the sinister and intruiging “Villa Stuck”:http://www.villastuck.de/ . Of course I also managed to consume a large number of excellent sausages and quantities of “Dunkles Weißbier”:http://www.xs4all.nl/~patto1ro/munibrew.htm ! All of which brings me on to a less flattering observation on Germany and the Germans, namely, that the Germans may well be the worst dressed of the major industrial nations. Admittedly, the competition is stiff from us British and from the Americans, but I think the Germans may win on grounds of sheer uniformity. It is possible to sit and watch a string of people of all ages and sizes walk past all dressed as follows: dark denim jeans, dark denim jacket, trainers (sneakers). The monotony is hardly broken by the occasional deviant who leaves the denim jacket behind for a regulation black leather one. Since “Jamie Oliver’s Naked Chef”:http://www.jamieoliver.com/ is now dubbed into German — so much for Chirac joking with Schroeder about British cuisine — I can’t help wondering whether the Germans aren’t in line for some British or American clothing-and-lifestlye fascism TV: “Trinny and Susannah”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/lifestyle/tv_and_radio/what_not_to_wear/index.shtml or “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0358332/ perhaps. But perhaps they already get those shows and are showing a laudable determination to resist.

[For Alex: here’s a link to a picture of Gabriel Cornelius von Max’s “Monkeys as Judges of Art”:http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bild:Gabriel_Cornelius_von_Max%2C_1840-1915%2C_Monkeys_as_Judges_of_Art%2C_1889.jpg from the Neue Pinakothek.]

How fitting that the greatest sporting moment (so far) of the 21st century, and one of the greatest comebacks of all time, should be commemorated “thus”:http://icliverpool.icnetwork.co.uk/0500liverpoolfc/0100news/tm_objectid=15870300%26method=full%26siteid=50061%26headline=night%2dof%2dtriumph%2dcaptured%2din%2dlego%2d-name_page.html :

bq. WITH a triumphant look on his face, Steven Gerrard can be seen standing next to the Champions League Trophy flanked by his manager, Rafael Benitez.

bq. But look again. For this is not an image from the historic final between Liverpool and AC Milan in Turkey earlier this year – it is a re-creation of the scene made entirely from Lego.

bq. Artists Darren Neave and John Cake – who are known as The Little Artists – have built the work from the toy bricks and it will go on display at Liverpool’s Walker Art Gallery later this week.

So “we now know”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4157892.stm that the young Brazilian electrician gunned down by police as a suspected suicide bomber was not wearing a heavy jacket, paused to pick up a newspaper on his way to the tube, used his travelcard to pass the barrier, did not run from the police, who did not warn him, found a seat and was restrained before being shot. This, in addition to having been allowed to board a bus earlier.

What did Sir Ian Blair know when “he said that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707509,00.html the Metropolitan Police were “playing out of their socks” ? If he knew at that stage that this was an disastrous catalogue of incompetence then he surely ought to resign. And who told the papers, and with what authority “that”:http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,22989-1707779,00.html de Menezes

bq. decided to run away from police, vaulting the ticket barrier and running down to the platform. ?

They ought be identified and made to resign too.

Not being an American, I’ve followed the whole Cindy Sheehan thing from afar. I’d been noting, with growing disgust, the whole slime-and-defend operation mounted by O’Reilly, FrontPageMag, Michele Malkin and points rightwards. Now I see that Christopher Hitchens “has joined in”:http://www.slate.com/id/2124500/fr/nl/ and that his invective against Sheehan has been “endorsed by Norman Geras”:http://normblog.typepad.com/normblog/2005/08/ventriloquizing.html . I guess there are two views on this kind of thing. There’s the view that citizens, whatever their background, are fair game for personal attack as soon as they open their mouths and should be treated in the same hardball manner as any machine politican or professional pundit. And there’s the view that grieving mothers should should be shown consideration, kindness and respect. Geras and Hitchens clearly take the first of these views.

Just over a year ago “I posted”:https://crookedtimber.org/2004/06/26/katharina-blum/ about Schlondorff’s film of “The Lost Honour of Katherina Blum”:http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0073858/ and commented:

bq. What is different today, of course, is the way that the blogosphere serves as an Insta-echo-chamber for tabloid coverage of such stories. One imagines the “Heh”s and “Readthewholethings” that would accompany posts linking to a contemporary Die Zeitung’s online coverage of events.

[There’s good coverage of earlier episodes of the anti-Sheehan slime campaign at the Media Matters site: “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508100009 , “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508110002 and “here”:http://mediamatters.org/items/200508120006 . ]

Bribery is a good thing because it helps the bribed to learn what is best! So argues law & economics professor Thomas W. Hazlett “in today’s Financial Times”:http://news.ft.com/cms/s/61a388f6-0ce3-11da-ba02-00000e2511c8.html :

bq. Payola was made famous by scandals in the 1950s, when “cash, drugs and women” were traded to rock and roll disc jockeys in exchange for airtime, but the practice has a richer history. In both Britain and the US, 19th- and early 20th-century performers ­collected side-payments from music publishing houses for singing their songs.

bq. Ronald Coase, the Nobel Prize­winning economist, explained the practice in 1979. Radio stations own something valuable: songs played more tend to sell more. Competition for airtime develops, but how one conducts the best auction – given that station revenues come primarily from selling audiences to advertisers – is complicated.

bq. One view is that radio stations should be faithful to listeners and make choices based only on their DJs’ honest musical appreciation. But how do they know what gangsta rap track is top quality? Payola helps them learn, because record companies will tend to value airtime the most for releases for which they have the highest expectations of future sales.

I’d love to read commentary on this over at “Marginal Revolution”:http://www.marginalrevolution.com/ . Tyler?

The Flop Eared Mule (who is becoming a daily stop for me) has “a fine post on Townes Van Zandt”:http://flopearedmule.blogspot.com/2005_08_01_flopearedmule_archive.html#112365680440804113 , Philip Larkin, and how life-embracing depressing lyrics can be (complete with link to an interview with the maker of the forthcoming Townes movie).

Christopher Hitchens in Slate “asks”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2124157/ :

bq. Isn’t there a single drop of solidarity and compassion left over for the people of Iraq, after three decades of tyranny, war, and sanctions and now an assault from the vilest movement on the face of the planet?

Needless to say there isn’t a mention of the fact that they wouldn’t be under assault from “the vilest movement on the face of the planet”, nor would that movement be as strong as it presently is, but for the policy that Hitchens and his co-thinkers promoted in the first place. Oh, sorry, I didn’t notice at first, but Hitchens doesn’t believe that since he claims:

bq. Bad as Iraq may look now, it is nothing to what it would have become without the steadying influence of coalition forces. None of the many blunders in postwar planning make any essential difference to that conclusion. Indeed, by drawing attention to the ruined condition of the Iraqi society and its infrastructure, they serve to reinforce the point.

The “steadying influence of coalition forces” …..

I posted before about “PledgeBank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ and, specifically, about Nicola’s pledge (see also “accompanying blog”:http://justonepercent.blogspot.com/ ) for people to donate 1 per cent of their income to charity. Sadly, the first version of that pledge failed to attract the 400 pledgers needed. So she “relaunched it with a target of 100”:http://www.pledgebank.com/onepercent . With just under a couple a weeks to got she is 32 short, so come on CT readers, get pledging and help Nicola to succeed this time!

Nick Cohen has a column today entitled “I still fight oppression”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1544111,00.html . The theme is the familiar one of the moral failure of “the left”.

What to say? If, by Cohen’s lights, supporting the war in Iraq counts as “fighting oppression”, we can say that Cohen got round to it “eventually”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/Columnists/Column/0,5673,665073,00.html . On the other hand, thanks to that reckless war, there’s a great deal more oppression around, whether it is of “ordinary Iraqis slaughtered by Al Zarqawi and his friends”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4714601.stm , or of the “women who are to be subjected to the new Iraqi constitution”:http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,3604,1537387,00.html . And, of course, Cohen actually opposed the overthrow of the Taliban. So maybe that “still” in the headline is a tiny bit misleading.

“Matthew Turner”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/ has been doing a sterling job of digging up past Nick Cohen columns. Some of them are, in the light of recent scribblings, simply priceless. So, for example, “this one”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,587483,00.html , which contains the line:

bq. He [Blair] has – and there’s no point being prissy about this – pinned a large target sign on this country.

As “Matthew writes”:http://www.matthewturner.co.uk/Blog/2005/07/nick-cohen-in-2001.html :

bq. Cohen is within his rights to change his mind. What he’s not within his rights is to attack [in his “UAT statement”:http://www.unite-against-terror.com/whysigned/archives/000028.html ] as “morons”, and call their views “sinister”, people who didn’t make such cack-handed predictions (and get taken in by conmen) but who still believe some of what he used to.

Robin Cook, former Labour Foreign Secretary and prominent critic of the Blair government over Iraq, “has died suddenly at the age of 59”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/4127654.stm . His “resignation speech”:http://www.robincook.org.uk/cook/rc_press.asp#article8 over the war will be remembered for a very long time. From that speech delivered on the eve of war:

bq. For four years as Foreign Secretary I was partly responsible for the western strategy of containment. Over the past decade that strategy destroyed more weapons than in the Gulf war, dismantled Iraq’s nuclear weapons programme and halted Saddam’s medium and long-range missiles programmes. Iraq’s military strength is now less than half its size than at the time of the last Gulf war. Ironically, it is only because Iraq’s military forces are so weak that we can even contemplate its invasion. Some advocates of conflict claim that Saddam’s forces are so weak, so demoralised and so badly equipped that the war will be over in a few days. We cannot base our military strategy on the assumption that Saddam is weak and at the same time justify pre-emptive action on the claim that he is a threat. Iraq probably has no weapons of mass destruction in the commonly understood sense of the term—namely a credible device capable of being delivered against a strategic city target.