November 19, 2009
Both are remarkably free from talent; both incite opponents to bewildering rage*; both inspire vapid smugness in supporters, and both are largely irrelevant because, depressing as they undoubtably are, the industries they inhabit were already squalid and miserable, and aren’t much more so for their existence. Merry Christmas.
[*] Including, around the time of the elections, muggins here.
November 17, 2009
Last evening I had the pleasure of attending a talk by Professor David Nutt and Evan Harris MP (in the fine company of D-Notice and the Imperious Quail). The subject – expounded in a room so cramped and airless that I half-expected a mosh to break out – was evidence based policy, and – unsurprisingly, given the context – it was pretty damning of the Government’s record.
That, in my view, was fair. On the issue of drugs, for example, our Government has ignored a mass of evidence, while in other cases – Iraq, or anti-terrorism – they’ve scrabbled for the dregs that might support their policies and rhetoric.
Iraq
The famously voluptuous September Dossier was supposedly intended to analyse Iraq’s existing weapons and weapon construction programmes. Especially considering the context, one should have been able to expect a high level of rigour and objectivity. In the event, spin doctors were deployed, and yer actual evidence was absurdly embellished, and bolstered by fabrications. Blair announced the sorry lot as having “established beyond doubt” that Saddam had, and was busily continuing to produce, WMDs, and a pre-conceived policy was given flesh.
Drugs
With cheery disregard for the evidence presented to them, Labour has kept a staunchly authoritarian position on cannabis. Without much justification for that policy, they’ve been bluntly populist, aggressive and anti-scientific.
Professor David Nutt was, on more than one occasion, the target of the government’s mendacity. This February, when Jacqui Smith faced criticism over expenses claims, she played the part of The Sun’s bitch and neatly deflected the fire by baselessly haranguing Professor Nutt. Then, last month, the new Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, dealt with a report his adviser had authored, and a lecture that he’d given – both of which sent a couple of sacred cows towards the abattoir – by sacking him. There was no scientific response. None. Zip. Nada.
Sex Trafficking
Senior Labour MPs repeatedly quoted bogus, scaremongering figures. When confronted, Denis MacShane appealed to the authority of an organisation that’s published no work, and has, in fact, shown remarkably few signs of existence. Conveniently, though, they share his view. Whoever the hell they are.
Terrorism
Since September 11th, the Government has blown up anything (excuse the pun) that carries the slightest threat of terrorism: the ricin “terror cell”, for example, even after the fevered nightmares surrounding it had been debunked. When twelve men were arrested earlier this year, the PM boasted that “a very big terrorist plot” had suffered a blow to the essentials. Most of the suspects were quietly released soon after.
November 16, 2009
Newspapers – for lack of inclination, money or cajones – don’t bother to do much investigation nowadays (no, Sun, scouring the lives of unknown youths doesn’t count). Rather, they head for the interwebs, get groovy with copy and paste, and mesh quotes together into aimless summations. The Mirror, pondering the whereabouts of Osama bL, doesn’t even bother to do that…
“Military officials and terror experts believe he is still alive and the figurehead for a global holy war“; “Many experts think he is hiding in the tribal areas of Pakistan which border Afghanistan“; “Many intelligence experts believe the terror chief is now likely to be hiding in Chitral“.
Either the Experts family gets about a bit or the Mirror isn’t fond of quoting sources directly. All we have is bare, unattributed opinions; apparently substantial, but essentially worthless. That, in fact, is the case for just about all of the commentary on OBL.
The only people who boldly assert that Osama’s alive and kicking, US officials, have ignored multiple requests to “present valid proof” – requests from their own supposed allies, no less. With the media seemingly unwilling to chase the story, it looks like this hazy spectre will continue to hang in the fuggy mess of our politics.
November 16, 2009
Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed writes, in the New Internationalist…
Once upon a time, the CIA trained, financed and supported Osama bin Laden and his mujahidin networks in Afghanistan to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After the end of the Cold War, bin Laden turned against the West and we no longer had any use for him. His persistent terrorist attacks against us for more than a decade, culminating in 9/11, provoked our own response, in the form of the ‘War on Terror’. This is the official narrative. And it’s false. Not only did Western intelligence services continue to foster Islamist extremist and terrorist groups connected to al-Qaeda after the Cold War; they continued to do so even after 9/11.
Read on (or else…).
November 13, 2009
Henry Kissinger and Margaret Thatcher met in London recently, to speak to some visiting Knesset members. One wonders if they had the chance to recall their mutual friends.
***
A disproportionate amount of Question Time was spent discussing a disproportionate reaction. This doesn’t just diss proportion, it presents a demented parody of it: an absurd spiral of vapid disproportion. As an audience member put it, after bringing in the otherwise discreetly ignored spectre of the, y’know, Afghans, “You seem to completely forget about those people, and only focus on what’s right in front of you, on the front page of the Sun newspaper“. As Will Self put it, “The real issues are never discussed“. These were just moments of jarring static, though, quickly drowned in the journalistic equivalent of lounge music.
***
The Quilliam Foundation is suing Craig Murray for alleging that they haven’t filed accounts since coming into being. I can understand deploying the flying legal monkeys if lies cause you harm, and you have no way to correct them, but crashing down on a minor blog whose proprietor has a lot less power and influence than you do, well – that makes you look like an arse.
***
Quentin Letts’s long, rambling preview to his latest book – titled, with camp grouchiness, Bog-Standard Britain – certainly had me longing for the good old days. Specifically, it had me longing for a time when British conservatism boasted writers like Bernard Levin and Auberon Waugh, rather than this tired rot.
November 12, 2009
This is a guest-post by Edgar the Dolphin
We were shocked to read this story on the BBC website. Shocked and stunned, of course, because the picture of the unfortunate “Mr Akaz” was originally subtitled “Mr Okaz”. Here is a man who has been through a terrible ordeal, and our major broadcaster does not have the decency, the care, the time, the courage to spell his name correctly! Of course, they have since corrected the error – but there has been no apology. Decent folk like you and I and the editor of the Mail will be, naturally, outraged. Write to your MP at once! This sort of shameful act cannot, and should not, be allowed to continue.
UPDATE: With a little more thought it occured to me ….. perhaps the real shock news was not the misspelling of the name, but the woeful, brutal and entirely unnecessary death of his wife. Funny how easy it is to get these things out of proportion.
November 12, 2009
Jeremy Greenstock, former UK ambassador to Iraq, is rather good at sly admissions. In an interview with Charlie Rose (starting at around 4.40), he claimed that the Coalition were perfectly aware that Hussein had no nuclear capacities. Thus, he heavily – if reluctantly – implied, Bush’s government must have been lying.
He was at it again in the Times last month, penning this meticulously sanitised paragraph…
The US and the UK famously came to grief when they tried too hard, when lacking proof, to be convincing about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction. Those of us closely involved on the UK side believed we were illustrating a case that was bound to turn out to be true when the final evidence was collected. But it never was; and we had to take the rap for anticipating the facts.
“Anticipating the facts“, i.e. asserting something one thinks is true as if one knows it’s true, i.e. pulling things from one’s behind, i.e. lying.
The claim that “the UK side“, en masse, “believed [they] were illustrating a case that was bound to turn out to be true” is a dodgy one. There’s a hefty moral difference between lying for a case one believes to be correct, and lying for a case that one isn’t convinced by. Greenstock’s assertion, thus, should not go unchallenged, and the fact that it will reflects upon the hour and what a bloody amateur I am. Another day, perhaps.
Still, let’s haul this misbehaving post towards some kind of a purpose. It’s been thoroughly documented that “evidence” of the WMDs was fabricated and embellished, asserted with an utterly bogus assurance and defended with a series of naked deceits. Indeed, the decision to invade hadn’t been in any particular doubt. Now, when a respected figure of the establishment blithely discusses it in one of the press’s most upstanding organs, how in the heck is Lord Chilcot going to miss the stonking great elephant?
[H/t - Steven Poole, at Unspeak]
November 10, 2009
Some Pakistani papers are reporting that Gulbudin Hekmatyar, leader of the Hezb-e-Islami Gulbuddin, “has said that Osama Bin Laden is still alive“. Well, the only reliable way of knowing would be actually meeting the guy. Thing is, Hekmatyar also claims that he “do[esn't] have any kind of link with al-Qaeda“, so if I he did assert that they’d met – and I don’t know, I haven’t seen yer his acshul statement – he’d be telling porkies, one way or another. Unreliable, in duller words.
November 10, 2009
People who label themselves “pro-choice” hold that women have the right to decide what happens to their own bodies. There’s an assumption here, of course: that the foetus is a part of the woman’s body. What makes it so? Well, it’s attached to it, lives in it and lives off it, right up to birth. If I’ve put that fairly – and I think I have – someone who supports abortion rights on the basis of a “right to choose” seems to have an obligation to support them at any stage of the pregnancy.
If that doesn’t appeal, one must, I suppose, argue that at some point the prospect of the foetus’s independence supersedes that of the woman. For opponents of abortion, of course, that would be at any stage, while for others it might be, say, at a time when the foetus could survive in the big, bad world. Personally, I’m not sure of where I stand, though I’m not enamoured with the choice between forcing a painful and potentially degrading procedure on women, or supporting the legal destruction of a life, which, if carried out after a single operation, I’d consider to be monstrous.
November 7, 2009
This post, in a slightly expanded form, has kindly been published on Liberal Conspiracy. It is, the first commenter informs me, “radical left/commie in nature”; I suppose I must admit to the influence of Marx’s The German Ideology, And Why Kissinger Is Such A Cock.
So, on Tuesday, Liam Fox, who’s likely to be our next Defence Secretary, will step onto a platform somewhere in London and celebrate one of the 20th Century’s most notorious war criminals: Henry Kissinger, a man whose bloody footprints trail through Laos, Vietnam, Cambodia and East Timor. He even had a hand in Iraq, talking to Cheney “probably…more than just about anybody else“.
It’s depressing, isn’t it, that the man can’t even step foot in some countries for fear of arrest, and yet here he’ll be feted – given the “Margaret Thatcher Medal of Freedom” – by some of the men who, in all probability, will make up our government next year.
The location remains a secret, presumably to stave off the protestors that have dogged his steps in recent years. It’s “invitation only“, but if you’d like to witness this noxious spectacle, you can email infoATtheatlanticbridgeDOTcom.
