Chris Bertram

I had to travel to Oxford last Thursday and stayed overnight, so I was, thankfully, away from a keyboard during the initial reaction to the terrorist attacks in London. Catching up on the online and print commentary, there appear to be just three sorts of response. First, there are the people who point out that, though this was a most terrible day for the victims and their families, Londoners (and the British generally) have put up with terrorist bombing campaigns before, and have managed to do so without launching pogroms. I agree with this and haven’t anything to add to it. Second, there are the numerous people who write variations on the “adequacy.org 9/11 standard column”:http://www.adequacy.org/public/stories/2001.9.12.102423.271.html : Robert Fisk (an especially bad one in the Indie on Friday morning), “Nick Cohen in today’s Observer”:http://observer.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,6903,1525172,00.html , and so on. “Harry’s Place”:http://hurryupharry.bloghouse.net/ is now showering one adequacy-variant with praise for insight and brilliance whilst castigating the other. This is pointless. Finally, there are the “Eurabia”-obsessed nut-jobs who are falling over themselves to tell us that Ken Livingstone, “whose speech was excellent”:http://no-doors.blogspot.com/2005/07/full-text-of-mayor-livingstones-speech.html , has said and done things of which they disapprove in the past. The Eurabians thereby merely remind us how much they value promoting their nasty agenda above elementary concerns with compassion and solidarity (ditto the egregious “George Galloway”:http://www.respectcoalition.org/?ite=819 btw).

[I think the “excellent John B”:http://www.stalinism.com/shot-by-both-sides/ probably linked to the adequacy.org piece first]

I blogged “the other day”:https://crookedtimber.org/2005/06/16/pledgebank/ about the “PledgeBank”:http://www.pledgebank.com/ project, and, specifically in favour of “one particular pledge”:http://www.pledgebank.com/justonepercent :

bq. I will give 1% of my gross annual salary to charity but only if 400 other people will too.

Time is running out, as this pledge expires on the 23rd of July. So if you thought about it at the time, but didn’t get round to signing on, or would like to now, visit the site.

Surfing around, I found this oldish report of “some classes that Steve Earle taught at the Old Town School of Folk Music in Chicago”:http://www.insurgentcountry.net/steve_earle_at_the_old_town_school.htm . The class is about the links between traditional music — as found in Harry Smith’s American Anthology of Folk Music — and contemporary songwriting. There are classes on Woody Guthrie, Dylan, Springsteen, Townes Van Zandt, and on Earle’s own songs. There’s also much gossip and general chit-chat. Interesting stuff.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s attempted to write a poem so bad that International Library of Poetry would neither declare semifinalist in one of their bogus contests, nor offer to publish it in an anthologies. She “finally succeeded”:http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/006498.html by the device of taking a Miriam Abacha 419-scam letter and introducing line-breaks. The comments thread has now exploded, with the Abacha scam being rendered in many different poetic forms and styles: Shakespearean sonnet, haiku, limerick, Gilbert & Sullivan lyric, Allen Ginsberg ….. Check it out!

There’s been much huffing and puffing in parts of the blogosphere about how development aid always ends up in the Swiss bank accounts of dictators, etc. etc. It is good to see, therefore, that (Iraqi) money being spent by the US on the reconstruction of Iraq is being properly accounted for to make sure it isn’t pilfered by nefarious types, that there are proper audit trails, etc. Or rather not. As “Ed Harriman explains in the latest LRB”:http://lrb.co.uk/v27/n13/harr04_.html . (Hat tip to “The Virtual Stoa”:http://users.ox.ac.uk/%7Emagd1368/weblog/blogger.html .)

“The Dupe has been sounding-off again”:http://slate.msn.com/id/2121674/ , this time about the inappropriateness of anti-war people asking of pro-war people whether they’d send their kids to fight in Iraq. Like many columns of his, this one has been cited as an example of his perspicacity and genius by his blogospheric admirers. So let’s set them straight.

Correct claims by Hitchens (2)

1. The question of whether the war in Iraq is a good, moral, just, etc. cause is logically independent from the question of whether pro-war advocate X is willing to “send” his or her children to fight there.

2. Talk of whether people should “send” their kids is misplaced where we are dealing with adults whose decision to enlist or not is their own.

Commentary on those claims:

1. It is perfectly reasonable to ask of someone who advocates a policy that involves people in significant personal sacrifice whether they would be willing to incur or risk that sacrifice themselves. A person who says “I favour X, but I want to offload the cost of X onto others because I’m unwilling to bear my share of the burden of realising X” is a hypocrite. Not all pro-war types have children, and arguments for or against the war should be conducted on their merits. But a person who favours the war but would try to dissuade their children (if they had any) from enlisting or who would (if they could) try to exploit connections (family, friends, business associates, etc.) to enable their children to avoid a draft (if there was one) is a despicable hypocrite whose prattlings do not deserve the attention of reasonable people.

2. Rhetorical insistence on the voluntary nature of the choices made by those who do enlist is misleading and disingenuous if not accompanied by due acknowledgement of the circumstances in which such choices are made. No such acknowledgment is made by Hitchens (of course). Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white, whose menu of career choices is typically less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.

Here endeth the lesson.

Update: Matt Yglesias writes to say that the claim I make above that “those who fight as disproportionately drawn from the poor and the non-white” is not accurate. I’m happy to accept that correction in the light of “this”:http://www.americanprogress.org/site/pp.asp?c=biJRJ8OVF&b=700477 . So let me amend that claim to read “Those who fight are disproportionately drawn from layers of the population whose members typically have a menu of career choices less appetising than that available to the children of politicians and the wealthy members of the commentariat.” That I’m fairly confident, remains true.

From Slugger O’Toole comes the news that “corporate France appears to be unaware that Ireland is an independent nation”:http://www.sluggerotoole.com/archives/2005/06/ireland_barely.php , and has been since 1922. Regular readers of CT will, of course, be aware that Ireland is indeed separate from Britain, although Irish people who achieve sporting excellence become “British” even faster than “Zola Budd”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zola_Budd .

“Well it wasn’t just the selection was it?”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4618309.stm Those debates had mainly been around the backs, but since the Lions never got near the ball, Henson probably wouldn’t have made much difference. O’Driscoll knackered within 90 seconds was a blow, but the real difference was the ability of the All Blacks both to get the ball and to handle it even in the torrential rain. Will Woodward change the selection? Comments open.

Roger Scruton has an “immensely enjoyable”:http://www.spectator.co.uk/article.php?id=6290&page=4 , sometimes insightful, occasionally brutally stupid, and often deleriously silly article on Jean-Paul Sartre in the latest Spectator (registration required). After reading it you could always revisit Paul Jennings’s splendid “Report on Resistentialism”:http://www31.brinkster.com/yewtree/resources/resistentialism.htm .

I suppose I shouldn’t be shocked by any of the garbage that appears on TechCentralStation. Nevertheless, the shameless gall of some of their writers continues to astonish. One of their latest offerings is “My Grandfather and the Gulag”:http://www.techcentralstation.com/062405.html by Ariel Cohen, which – surprise, surprise – is an attack on Amnesty and Senator Durbin for the Guantanamo/Gulag comparison. Cohen’s article can stand as an exemplar of a whole genre of Amnesty-bashing that has been flourishing recently. Since the whole point of the piece is to insist on the virtues of truth and accuracy and to rubbish Amnesty and Durbin for the alleged betrayal of those standards, one might expect Cohen to exhibit at least a minimal level of concern for the correctness of his own claims. But such expectations would be misplaced.

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Over at “Urbandriftuk”:http://urbandriftuk.blogspot.com/2005/06/soz-been-away-for-while.html , Mizmillie has been pondering the recent explosion in commercial operations by the British public sector, so, for example, the “North Wales police have been running a massive driving school for profit”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/newsnight/4563161.stm . She writes that “insidious blurring of the public and private is likely to be one of the current [British] government’s enduring legacies” .

She asks:

bq. Are there any principled moral reasons against public bodies carrying out private business?

bq. Or are they mainly consequential concerns, e.g. leads to two-tierism?

bq. If they trade should they be treated as private businesses and have their profits taxed in the same way? Or should they be exempt from tax since the monies get ploughed back into public coffers?

Part of my reaction to this is to look at things in historical perspective. After all, there have been many commercial operations, such as docks and airports, that have, up until recently, been run by local authorities in Britain. But on the matter of tax, I guess there has to be an question of equity. After all if the police are allowed to open an driving school next door to mine but can do so on more favourable terms, I’m going to go out of business pretty quick.

We haven’t had a sports thread here on CT for a while, but since we have representatives of at least three of the four nations making up the Lions, and some no-doubt-interested antipodeans, comments are open. Personally, I’m “astonished at the selection”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/rugby_union/international/4118436.stm : overwhelmingly English. Henson, Shane Williams and Geordan Murphy miss out, and players who’ve done nothing for a while (Robinson, Wilkinson) are included. England, despite being World Cup winners, flopped badly in the Six Nations, and are currently ranked 6th in the world, behind Wales. Stand by for a massacre by the All Blacks on Saturday morning (or later on, depending on your timezone …)

According to “a report in Libération”:http://www.liberation.fr/page.php?Article=305543 , French blogger Christophe Grébert ( “MonPuteaux.com”:http://www.monputeaux.com/ )is being pursued through the courts for defamation by his local authority. His crime? To have set up a blog which centred around the domination of local government in Puteaux (at the edge of Paris) by a single family and their hangers-on and which documented anomalies such as the approval of the budget for a small garden at a cost of 600,000 euros. Grébert seems to have withstood a campaign of personal harrassment, but legal action seems to be the latest means of silencing him. It will be interesting to see how this goes. Grébert appears to have decided (almost certainly correctly) that blogging is a more effective method of pursuing political change than attending section meetings of local Socialist Party. His opponents seem to think he has been all too effective. An interesting case, and one that may set precedents for political blogging in France at least.

Around a million dollars donated in the wake of the Tsunami is being “stolen by the government of Sri Lanka”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/south_asia/4103054.stm , reports the BBC:

bq. British charity Oxfam has had to pay the Sri Lankan government $1m in import duty for vehicles used in tsunami reconstruction work.

bq. Paperwork had kept the 25 four-wheel drive vehicles idle in the capital, Colombo, for a month.

bq. The Sri Lankan government told the BBC News website the aid had been duty-free until the end of April but was now needed to prevent “market distortions”.