Alex Massie

Alex Massie

Friday

Alex Massie

The Idiocy of Sports Nationalism

From our UK edition

Daniel Larison is correct: This lack of understanding is the crucial part in any tiresome exercise in sports nationalism: “Our manly sport has subtlety and form, and it reflects the true nature of the universe, whereas their stupid children’s game is pointless and boring.”... Europeans can make the same boredom charge against baseball (and they have), we can say it about soccer or cricket (and we have), and no doubt almost everyone outside Canada has said it about curling (but not, I think, about hockey!). As a teenage curler myself I cannot let it be said that only our Canuck friends appreciate the Roaring Game or, more seriously, that it lacks drama. But the point is well taken nonetheless.

Alex Massie

The Perils of Being an MP

From our UK edition

Tom Harris writes: There’s never a whip on Fridays; Friday sittings are reserved either for government-sponsored adjournment debates (when there’s no vote) or for Private Members’ Bills. I always enjoy the very different atmosphere that prevails on Fridays; there’s always a sense of camaraderie which cuts across party divisions, probably because everyone present is volunteering to give up a day in the constituency, often as a favour to a colleague who wants support for a particular measure. [Emphasis added.] He says this like it's a bad thing. You mean MPs want to spend more time with voters? Why? What's wrong with these people? Anyway, many of them live in places that make London seem attractive...

Thursday

Alex Massie

Traditionalists vs Reformers

From our UK edition

Ramesh Ponnuru disputes my suggestion that he is on the side of the Traditionalists in their battle with the Reformers over the future of the GOP. His view is that: The point of my column was to question the wisdom of drawing the battle lines in those terms. Those of us who think that the conservative message should be modernized will fail to do so if we proceed by insulting traditionalists rather than trying to persuade them. And yes, perhaps I was too hasty putting Ponnuru in the traditionalists' camp even if his column spends much more time arguing that the GOP needs Rush Limbaugh and not much time stressing the need for a recalibrated conservatism. (Nor, for that matter, does he suggest how the debate should be framed.)Still, his point is well-taken.

Alex Massie

Watching The Wire from the Left

From our UK edition

At the Irish Left Review there's an interesting analysis of The Wire written by Seannachie (a sometime commenter here) that views the show as, in some respects, an allegory of contemporary capitalism while also looking at how it can be seen to straddle the Bush and Obama eras. I wouldn't agree with everything he says, but it's an interesting read and a futher reminder that the show's genius lies, like that of all great art, in the range of coherent yet conflicting interpretations that may be made of it.

Alex Massie

In Defence of Twittering

From our UK edition

Unlike Clive, I thought Rachel Sylvester's article on Twitter one of the most confused pieces I've read all year. On the one hand she wanted to say smething about Twitter, on the other she bemoaned the fact that nobody trusts politicians. Unfortunately she tried to link these two things in a single column and pretend there was some kind of relationship between them. Which is a shame since this is palpable nonsense. Ms Slvester certainly failed to establish any such link. This paragraph was surely a mistake: Twitter is reality TV without the pictures. There is a combination of neurosis and narcissism involved. The psychologist Oliver James has said: “Twittering stems from a lack of identity. It's a constant update of who you are, what you are, where you are.

Alex Massie

SNP to World: Help!

From our UK edition

How would the SNP have delat with the banking crisis? The FT's Jim Pickard points out that "This is a valid question. The rescue of the Scottish banks has cost British taxpayers an estimated £2,000 per household. If Scotland was independent, the figure could have been closer to £13,000. How would it have coped?“ Mike Russell, the minister for the Constitution, External Affairs and Culture, replied: "It would have been slightly different, it would have probably been done in co-operation with other countries…we would have done it in partnership with everyone involved.” Now perhaps the ECB might have helped and perhaps the Nationalists could have rustled up some cash from elsewhere but this seems hopeful in the extreme.

Alex Massie

The First Quiet Drink of the Evening

From our UK edition

Further to this post on Dublin pubs, my father reminded me of the great, wistful moment in The Long Goodbye when Terry Lennox tells Marlowe: "I like bars just after they open for the evening. When the air inside is still cool and clean and everything is shiny and the barkeep is giving himself that last look in the mirror to see if his tie is straight and his hair is smooth. I like the neat bottles on the bar back and the lovely shining glasses and the anticipation. I like to watch the man mix the first one of the evening and put it down on a crisp mat and put the little folded napkin beside it. I like to taste it slowly. The first quiet drink of the evening in a quiet bar." Quite right.

Alex Massie

America’s Crazy War on Soccer

From our UK edition

I'm guessing that we'll know Barack Obama's plan to turn the United States of America into a european socialist hellhole will be complete when he comes out as a soccer fan. Here's Stephen H Webb in First Things: The real tragedy is that soccer is a foreign invasion, but it is not a plot to overthrow America. For those inclined toward paranoia, it would be easy to blame soccer’s success on the political left, which, after all, worked for years to bring European decadence and despair to America. The left tried to make existentialism, Marxism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism fashionable in order to weaken the clarity, pragmatism, and drive of American culture.

Wednesday

Alex Massie

Reformers vs Traditionalists

From our UK edition

Here's how Ramesh Ponnuru frames the debate: The traditionalists push for upper-income tax cuts. The reformers want to cut the payroll taxes paid by the middle class. Traditionalists often deny that global warming is real. Reformers just want to make sure that our answer to it is cost-effective. The traditionalists want to hold the line on government spending. The reformers think that it's more important for Republicans to advocate market-friendly solutions to problems such as rising health-care costs and traffic congestion. Since Ponnuru's argument ends up by siding with Limbaugh and the traditionalists, it's curious that he should define the argument in a way that does such damage to his own "team".

Alex Massie

Douthat of the Times!

From our UK edition

Good news for the New York Times; bad news for the Atlantic. Ross Douthat is going to be Bill Kristol's replacement on the op-ed page. Even better, in addition to his columns, Ross will be blogging at the NYT. This is splendid news and it's hard to think how the NYT could have made a better choice. It's also a bold one since Ross hasn't spent 20 years "earning" his spot on the op-ed page. This is a generational shift and thus, surprising. But welcome! I heartily recommend Ross's book - written in partnership with his co-conspirator and sometime Spectator contributor Reihan Salam - Grand New Party which contains lots of interesting and provocative ideas for the future of the Republican party. UPDATE: Virginia Postrel would also have been a good choice.

Alex Massie

Losing (and punishing) Bolivia

From our UK edition

President Evo Morales of Bolivia is not everyone's cup of tea. And Bolivia remains a country that has no need to search for additional problems. That said, Morales is a voice of sanity on the subject of the Drug War. Washington's reponse? Fall into line, sonny. Or else. As Jaime Deramblum explains in (where else?) the Weekly Standard: In November, Morales demanded that the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) cease its operations in Bolivia. The DEA completed its exit from Bolivia in late January. Before leaving office, President George W. Bush responded to Bolivia's lack of cooperation with anti-drug efforts by suspending its privileged trade status under the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA) and Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDEA).

Alex Massie

The Usefulness of Anonymous Sources

From our UK edition

Glenn Greenwald is, as Julian Sanchez says, back on the warpath. This time he's blasting the continued use of anyonymous sources and what he sees as their corrupting impact upon journalism. Greenwald makes some perfectly good points but I doubt that the situation will change anytime soon, even at papers that claim to disdain the usue of anonymous sources (that would be all of them) yet know they cannot kick the habit either (that too would be all of them). One thing Greenwald doesn't point out, however, is how useful anonymous sources are to journalists. That anonymity is good for the source is a given, but it works for the hack too.

Alex Massie

Caribbean Lessons

From our UK edition

In the grander scheme of matters, a West Indian series victory which left England thinking they should really have won the series 2-1 was not a bad result. England can argue that they were the better side for most the series and  only just failed to turn their superiority into victory. For the West Indies, the importance of a first series victory in five years cannot be over-stated. Caribbean cricket desperately needed this and so what if they remain just half a team and should, by rights, have been beaten by a pretty ordinary England team. In other circumstances the West Indians' decision not to even try and win the final test would have been reprehensible; as it was it became understandable if still, to my mind, regrettable and slightly contrary to the spirit of the game.

Alex Massie

The Decline of the Dublin Pub

From our UK edition

The Long Hall: photo by Flickr user inaki_naiz. Used under a Creative Commons License. An important article in the New York Times on the decline of the traditional Irish pub. This is a serious matter and one that merits pondering. If there's any upside to present economic difficulty it lies in the hope - faint but real - that it may do in property developers and hucksters before it gets the rest of us. That is, that it may reduce the number of once-great pubs vandalised by ill-considered refits designed to attract a wealthier class of punter. The sort that drinks wine. And cocktails. Temple Bar in Dublin was once a quaint little maze of record shops and independent clothes stores, speckled with interesting and honest boozers.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

When Failure is Rewritten as Success

From our UK edition

An interesting, and telling, line from Jonathan Powell's article on why we should not over-react to the latest outbreak of Republican violence in Northern Ireland: Gerry Adams and Martin McGuinness were determined to carry the Republican movement into peace as intact as possible. They moved slowly to avoid the traditional split and lost very few volunteers along the way. Unusually, the British government agreed with this approach. Instead of trying to encourage divisions, as in the past, we hoped they would carry the movement with them because we wanted to make peace once, not many times with many different groups. And we wanted to ensure that a capable and credible terrorist movement was not left behind.

Alex Massie

The Cool Black Guy and the White Nerd

From our UK edition

That's how Jon Stewart described Barack Obama and Gordon Brown. Actually, Brown comes out of it fine as Giftgate receives an airing on the Daily Show. Bonus: there's chuckling at Hillary Clinton's expense too. A trifecta then.

Alex Massie

How It All Began

From our UK edition

Way back in 1994 the Economist reported on this whole World-Wide-Web thingy: This sort of reads like ancient history now, but of course some, even many, of the problems people were wrestling with then (how to make online publishing pay!) remain largely unsolved. I think 1994 was when I got my first email address; it was also a time when the universiy ran classes called "Computing for Historians" which didn't amount to much more than "This is a computer. This is how you turn it on. It's like a typewriter but different." No-one had laptops and the university paper was still put together using scissors and glue...

Alex Massie

A brilliant, horrifying, moving article

From our UK edition

It's hard to know how to describe Gene Weingarten's piece in the Washington Post's magazine, except to say that it is one of the most heart-breaking, moving, humane, pieces of journalism I've read in years. And one of the best. In a sense, mind you, even saying that trivialises the story.  It's about how a parent can inadvertently leave their toddler in the back of their car on a hot day to swelter and, god help us, bake to death. And it's about how a parent can ever hope to come to any sort of terms with the consequences of such a desperate, fatal, mistake. Just read it.

Alex Massie

Idiosyncratic Local Communities

From our UK edition

An interesting post, as always, from Jim Manzi: I’ve written often about the need for renewing the conservative- libertarian fusion, why I think this is a natural alliance, and the terms on which I think it should be forged. The actions of an assertive liberal (in the contemporary American sense) government are starting to illustrate this to the most interesting of those writers often termed crunchy cons, who often think of themselves in direct opposition to a hyper-individualized, commercial political culture on the Right. That is, as among the least natural candidates for fusionism imaginable. The nature of this alliance is simple: crunchy cons want government to be limited to allow space for idiosyncratic local communities.

Monday

Alex Massie

The Libertarian Moral High Ground

From our UK edition

James writes: "Too often, politicians on the right, wrongly and short-sightedly, cede the moral high ground to the left. Conservatives in Britain have been particularly guilty of accepting, or at least not disputing, the left’s claims to moral superiority and merely arguing that their approach is more effective." Well that's not a problem the libertarians have is it? No shortage of moral high ground there and no small sense of moral supriority either. The libertarian problem is that not many enough people believe it...