Via Hendrik Hertzberg, here's Charles Dickens reflecting upon the spirit of American politics: If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger’s seat, the gentleman who accompanies her gives him notice of the fact, and he immediately vacates it with great politeness. Politics are much discussed, so are banks, so is cotton.
So NATO will now "lead" the Libyan intervention. That makes everything fine and dandy, right? Well, no. There's no need for anyone unpersuaded by the wisdom of this operation to make a case against it. Not when its supporters do such a good job pointing out its shortcomings. Take my friend Brother Korski, for instance. Yesterday he wrote: The Libya intervention goes on, with as many question marks hanging over the operation as airplanes in the sky. What is the aim? Who will run it? Can the United States, Britain and France keep allies such as Turkey on board? Good questions! There's more too: Realistically, the UK should in the first instance work towards establishing a stalemate between loyalists and rebels.
There's nothing wrong with being offended by an argument but everything wrong with asserting a "right" not to be so offended. When this notional right is combined with the suggestion that the offending writer be punished or blackballed or, as seems to be possible these days, reported to the police we find ourselves in a place in which freedom of speech is honoured as an abstract, even hypothetical, concept but severely circumscribed in reality. That's one consequence of the modern mania for asserting victimhood. If political correctness - surely as redundant a term these days as multiculturalism - means anything it asks that we honour the spirit of the good book's invocation to do unto others as we would have done unto us.
There's no successor to Elizabeth Taylor. No contemporary actress possesses anything like her fame. That's a consequence of the changing nature of celebrity and the fragmentation of popular culture. The movies got small and so did the stars. But the sensational aspects of the Taylor-Burton saga makes it easy to forget that their celebrity was initially founded upon their brilliance as actors. The work fed a celebrity which would help undermine the validity of the work, and did so right from the beginning in the overblown mess that was Cleopatra. But Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, stagey and overdone itself, remains an extraordinary piece of work: a harrowing, almost grotesque, public-private feud in which real-life and fiction merge in dizzying counterpoint.
MPs are pretty out of touch, of course, clueless about the way "ordinary people" live. That's what we're supposed to think of course. We're not supposed to remember that MPs probably regularly encounter a much broader range of public opinion and circumstance than highly paid columnists and political editors. Here, for instance, is Ben Brogan committing the sin of assuming (I presume) that everyone is just like the people he meets: If the higher rate threshold stays the same, and yet more thousands of the ’squeezed middle’ are brought into higher rate tax, at what point do we review terms, and rename the 20p rate the lower rate, the 40p rate the basic rate, and the 50p rate the higher rate?
Not from Libya, obviously, since the situation there plainly has the potential to damage the American President but from a source closer to home. Dick Morris says Obama is finished: Will Obama get reelected? No way! In the teeth of the economic catastrophe that is shaping up, his chances are doomed. True, even Dick Morris must get something right eventually and true too that the economic waters remain choppy but this declaration must still be the best news the White House has heard in some time. Then again, the consequences of the Japanese earthquake and the Libyan excursion may yet change matters and perceptions. But of course the Republicans need to find a credible opponent who can actually win. Not impossible by any means but far from certain. On either count.
Fair play to George Monbiot: You will not be surprised to hear that the events in Japan have changed my view of nuclear power. You will be surprised to hear how they have changed it. As a result of the disaster at Fukushima, I am no longer nuclear-neutral. I now support the technology. A crappy old plant with inadequate safety features was hit by a monster earthquake and a vast tsunami. The electricity supply failed, knocking out the cooling system. The reactors began to explode and melt down. The disaster exposed a familiar legacy of poor design and corner-cutting. Yet, as far as we know, no one has yet received a lethal dose of radiation. Some greens have wildly exaggerated the dangers of radioactive pollution. For a clearer view, look at the graphic published by xkcd.com.
Come the revolution, you're supposed to hang the lawyers first. Which is fine. But it might be better to start with the judges. Specifically those that are happy to grant injunctions that prevent members of the public from raising matters of concern with their local MP. I ken that commonsense need not be compatible with jurisprudence but this oversteps the mark by some considerable distance. It is outrageous and so outlandish that one wonders how it can actually happen. But happen it does and, it turns out, more frequently than you might think and certainly more often than you're supposed to know. So three cheers for John Hemming*, MP for Birmingham Yardley, for his speech to a Westminster Hall debate last week. The whole debate is worth your time and the transcript can be found here.
Whatever you think of Prince William and Kate Middleton - good luck to 'em says I - and the coverage of their wedding, console yourself witht the thought that it's unlikely the British coverage, extensive and often absurd as it may be, can be anything like as ghastly or over-the-top as that provided by American television. The cousins appear to be losing their minds. CNN, for instance, is sending 400 people to London to "cover" the nuptials. This Wall Street Journal story lays out the detail of the nonsense in all its splendid gruesomeness. It is, naturally, all unintentionally amusing: [...] TV wedding specialists—there are a surprising number—are over the moon.
I know it's tedious to bang on and on about this but it does seem quite important that we have some idea of what we're actually trying to achieve in Libya. Until we have a goal it seems most unlikely that we can have a coherent strategy. At present no-one seems to know what the goal is and the Americans are busy contradicting one another. For instance, here's Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff insisting, again, that the operation is strictly limited: "The goals are limited. It's not about seeing him go." And here's National Journal's Marc Ambinder, quoting an administration official who says "We have multiple scenarios but none of them end with Qadaffi in power.
Ben Goldacre deplores the reluctance of newspapers to link to original sources and then demonstrates why they don't: Professor Anna Ahn published a paper recently, showing that people with shorter heels have larger calves. For the Telegraph this became “Why stilletos are the secret to shapely legs”, for the Mail “Stilletos give women shapelier legs than flats”, for the Express “Stilletos tone up your legs”. But anybody who read even the press release, which is a readable piece of popular science itself, would immediately see that this study had nothing whatsoever to do with shoes. It didn’t look at shoe heel height, it looked at anatomical heel length, the distance from the back of your ankle joint to the insertion of the Achilles tendon.
He's only been singing about how Loving Her Was Easier for 40 years now, but here's Kris Kristofferson with an early version of the song from the Old Grey Whistle Test way back in 1972:.
Further to this item noting the differences between what David Cameron and Barack Obama are saying, a White House spokesman emails Ben Smith to say there's no contradiction between the American insistence that this is not about regime change and Cameron's suspicion that it's hard to see how Gaddafi can remain in power: This is very easily explained. We still believe that Qaddafi has lost his legitimacy to lead and must go. However the goal of this resolution is not regime change. Rather it authorizes the use of force with an explicit commitment to pursue all necessary measures to stop the killing. Those two things aren’t contradictory. Fine, the resolution may not authorise regime change but the logic of the policy surely insists upon it?
It's the combination of the stories heralded by these Brighton Argus bills that makes you wonder. Brighton must be quite a piece of work. Perhaps your local paper can do better than this, however? [Thanks to Damian Counsell.
This afternoon in Washington, Barack Obama was at pains to stress the limited nature of the planned action against Colonel Gaddafi. To wit: "We are not going to use force to go beyond a well-defined goal, specifically the protection of civilians in Libya," On the other side of the Atlantic, answering questions in the House of Commons, David Cameron said: The aim is clear: to put in place what has been required by the UN Security Council, which is a cessation of hostilities. It is the protection of lives and the protection of people. It is the prevention of a bloodbath in Benghazi. It is to make sure that arms do not get to Libya, that assets are frozen and that travel bans are imposed. It is all those things. Those are the aims, and they are what we must now pursue.
Freddy Gray is right: Hillary Clinton is more hawkish, and always has been so, than her boss Barack Obama. This part of his argument, however, is less persuasive: It is becoming increasingly obvious that Clinton has been using Obama's indecision over Libya to promote herself. Contrary to her expressed desire to be a grandmother, the former first lady is making another play for the presidency. Hillary recognises that Obama's unwillingness to bomb Gaddafi is a political misstep. She long ago realised that the way to impress Americans who might otherwise oppose her was to sound aggressive about US foreign policy. Why is it less persuasive?
Among the many odd things about the Libyan "debate" is the argument that Germany's decision to abstain during the Security Council vote is somehow disgraceful and proof that Germany still isn't ready to play its part on the international stage. (Obviously some of these objections come from the kind of rightists who fear or dislike German influence in other, more peaceful, areas of international politics and business. But never mind.) But Germany's vote seems qualitatively different from the BRIC-blog of abstentions. Brazil, India, China and Russia each have reasons to be wary of this kind of resolution and, indeed, this kind of precedent. Deep down, I suspect some of them would have liked to vote against the resolution.
So we're going to war again. This may be David Cameron's first conflict but it's the seventh time in just 21 years that a British Prime Minister has committed Her Majesty's forces to military action. Are we doing the right thing? I don't know and I'm mildly suspicious of those who seem too certain about anything Libyan right now, rehardless of which side of the argument their certainties lie. Now that it is beginning, however, let it at least be done properly and let us hope that, somehow or other, Gaddafi capitulates. But if he does not do not be fooled into thinking that this will be over soon. Like it or not we are now in it for the long-haul. The history of UN-mandated missions does not support the notion that this will be a quick or easy campaign.
Taken last week actually but you get the idea and is posted for the especial interest of exiled Selkirk folk everywhere. People, rightly, go on about the Highlands but Southern Scotland can often be just as lovely and is, I think, comparatively under-rated. The same might be said of Northumberland. Note to the Scottish government: this landscape would not be improved by plonking a socking great wind farm atop these hills.
That, anyway, seems to be one of the things to come out of Terry Eagleton's new book, Why Marx Was Right. It's not published until May but Tyler Cowen reports that it contains these winning arguments: But the so-called socialist system had its achievements, too. China and the Soviet Union dragged their citizens out of economic backwardness into the modern industrial world, at however horrific a human cost; and the cost was so steep partly because of the hostility of the capitalist West. [...] Building up an economy from very low levels is a backbreaking, dispiriting task. It is unlikely that men and women will freely submit to the hardships it involves. [...